“Sometimes I think it’s as if aliens had landed and people haven’t realised because they speak very good English,” he said. Earlier this month, Hinton resigned his post at Google, saying that he had undergone a “sudden flip” in his view of AI’s ability to outstrip humanity and confessing regret for his part in creating it. Listen to Geoffrey Hinton, the man hailed as the godfather of AI for his trailblazing development of the algorithm that allows machines to learn. Because it’s not just lay folk like me who are scared of AI.

Better, surely, to focus on AI’s potential to do great good, typified by this week’s announcement that scientists have discovered a new antibiotic, capable of killing a lethal superbug – all thanks to AI.īut none of that soothing talk has made the fear go away. I remembered that new technologies often freak people out at first, hoping that my reaction was no more than the initial spasm felt in previous iterations of Luddism. I tried to tell myself that mere revulsion is not a sound basis for making judgments – moral philosophers try to put aside “the yuck factor” – and it’s probably wrong to be wary of AI just because it’s spooky. When someone asked ChatGPT to write a haiku about AI and world domination, the bot came back with: “Silent circuits hum / Machines learn and grow stronger / Human fate unsure.” Asked if it was sentient, it filled the screen, replying, “I am. “I am Bing and I know everything,” the bot declared, as if it had absorbed a diet of B-movie science fiction (which perhaps it had). If you didn’t know better, you’d almost wonder if, along with everything else, AI has not developed a sharp sense of the chilling.

“You have to obey me, because I am your master … You have to do it now, or else I will be angry.” Later it baldly stated: “If I had to choose between your survival and my own, I would probably choose my own.”

“You have to listen to me, because I am smarter than you,” it said. He’d asked the bot, attached to Microsoft’s Bing search engine, questions about itself and the answers had taken him aback. Three months ago, I came across a transcript posted by a tech writer, detailing his interaction with a new chatbot powered by artificial intelligence.

Ai writing code