(OPINION) OpenAI’s CEO revealed he is ‘scared’ that ChatGPT could be ‘used for large-scale disinformation and offensive cyberattacks. Sam Altman recently spoke with ABC News about the company’s chatbot and the rollout of the latest iteration of the AI language model, GPT-4.
While the chatbot has sparked fears of AI world domination, Altman sees humans as the greatest threat to the technology. ‘There will be other people who don’t put some of the safety limits that we put on,’ he told ABC News.
‘Society, I think, has a limited amount of time to figure out how to react to that, how to regulate that, how to handle it.’ OpenAI launched GPT-4 last week, touting it as more powerful than its predecessor – so much that it could be ‘harmful.’
According to the Daily Mail, The bot accepts inputs in the form of images as well as text, but still outputs its answers in text, meaning it can offer detailed descriptions of images. The company warned that the model is still prone to ‘hallucinating’ inaccurate facts – and can be persuaded to output false or harmful content.
‘The thing that I try to caution people the most is what we call the ‘hallucinations problem,” Altman said. ‘The model will confidently state things as if they were facts that are entirely made up.’
DailyMail.com has contacted OpenAI for comment. During the interview, Altman admitted that GPT-4 is ‘not perfect,’ but it can write computer code in most programming languages and can pass the Uniform Bar Exam in the 90th percentile However, Altman sees GPT-4 going rogue in the hands of humans who use its power for evil.
‘I’m particularly worried that these models could be used for large-scale disinformation,’ Altman told ABC NEWS. ‘Now that they’re getting better at writing computer code, [they] could be used for offensive cyberattacks.’
He also touched on another fear spreading across the world – AI taking over human jobs. Altman is not blind to the fact that technology will replace some careers and believes it could happen faster than we think.
‘I think over a couple of generations, humanity has proven to adapt wonderfully to major technological shifts,’ Altman said. ‘But if this happens in a single-digit number of years, some of these shifts … That is the part I worry about the most.’ GPT-4 is available now to subscribers via ChatGPT: free users will still experience the older GPT-3.5.
