Previously, Hutton was hired by Google a decade ago to help develop the company’s AI technology, and the approach he pioneered has paved the way for today’s systems like ChatGPT .
The 75 year old man now admits that he regrets his contribution to the development of this technology.
He said that until last year he still believed that Google had been a good steward of AI technology. However, that changed after Microsoft started including chatbots in its Bing search engine.
Hutton said AI chatbots are scary because they can be smarter than humans and can be exploited by criminals. Additionally, AI can also eliminate jobs, such as paralegals and personal assistants.
“It (AI) is able to generate a lot of text automatically so you can get a lot of very effective spambots. This will allow authoritarian leaders to manipulate their voters, things like that,” said Hutton, as reported by The Guardian, Wednesday ( 3/5).
“I came to the conclusion that the kind of intelligence we develop is very different from the intelligence we have,” he said. “So, it’s as if you have 10,000 people and every time one person learns something, everyone else automatically knows it. And that’s how this chatbot can know more things than just one person,” he said.
Hinton’s concerns in the short term are something that has already become a reality, as people will be unable to differentiate between the AI-generated photos, videos and text flooding the internet.
Recent improvements to image generators such as Midjourney that can produce photo-realistic images. One of them is an image of Pope Francis in a Balenciaga puffer coat that went viral in March.(Z-8)
