Billionaire CEO Elon Musk has given dire warnings about “woke” artificial intelligence and its implications for humanity. Musk recently joined many other leaders in the field of technology who have called for a six-month moratorium on AI development to study its risks and plan for them to be mitigated.
Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015, the company that released GPT-4 this month. Since the start of the year, artificial intelligence has been capturing national headlines over its astonishing capabilities. While the language tool undoubtedly has enormous potential to be helpful, it poses undeniable risks. The American Tribune wrote:
However, artificial intelligence can be used in more heinous ways. For example, it has become an issue in academic settings where students write entire essays at the click of a button. “Deep fake” videos and voice generations of celebrities and politicians are becoming almost indistinguishable from reality. Ultimately, artificial intelligence also has the potential to render a massive portion of the population obsolete in their jobs as they cannot compete with technology.
Another concern with AI is the political bias that it can be programmed with, which Elon Musk has been vocal about. “The danger of training AI to be woke – in other words, lie – is deadly,” Musk tweeted at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Musk has even assembled a team of experts to build an alternative to ChatGPT free from woke bias. Fox News reported:
The New York Times reported that the founder of Gab, a right-wing social media platform, is working on AI software with “the ability to generate content freely without the constraints of liberal propaganda wrapped tightly around its code.”
OpenAI’s GPT-4 is the latest deep learning model from the company that “exhibits human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks,” according to the lab. Musk has repeatedly criticized the system, including for its apparent liberal bias, such as the system writing a favorable poem about President Biden but unwilling to do the same for former President Donald Trump.
A recent letter from the Future of Life Institute called for a six-month pause on the development of AI systems for researchers to fully understand the risks of the technology and build safeguards against it. Elon Musk, among many other experts, signed the letter in support. The letter opens, “AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity, as shown by extensive research and acknowledged by top AI labs. As stated in the widely-endorsed Asilomar AI Principles, Advanced AI could represent a profound change in the history of life on Earth, and should be planned for and managed with commensurate care and resources. Unfortunately, this level of planning and management is not happening, even though recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control.”
The letter concludes, “Therefore, we call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. This pause should be public and verifiable, and include all key actors. If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium.”