From pope's jacket to napalm recipes: how worrying is AI's rapid growth?

When the boss of Google admits to losing sleep over the negative potential of artificial intelligence, perhaps it is time to get worried. Sundar Pichai told the CBS programme 60 Minutes this month that AI could be "very harmful" if deployed wrongly, and was developing fast. "So does that keep me up at night? Google has launched Bard, a chatbot to rival the ChatGPT phenomenon, and its parent, Alphabet, owns the world-leading DeepMind, a UK-based AI company. He is not the only AI insider to voice concerns. Last week, Elon Musk said he had fallen out with the Google co-founder Larry Page because Page was "not taking AI safety seriously enough". Musk told Fox News that Page wanted "digital superintelligence, basically a digital god, if you will, as soon as possible". So how much of a danger is posed by unrestrained AI development? Musk is one of thousands of signatories to a letter published by the Future of Life Institute, a thinktank, that called for a six-month moratorium on the creation of "giant" AIs more powerful than GPT-4, the system that underpins ChatGPT and the chatbot integrated with Microsoft's Bing search engine. The risks cited by the letter include "loss of control of our civilization". The approach to product development shown by AI practitioners and the tech industry would not be tolerated in any other field, said Valérie Pisano, another signatory to the letter. Pisano, the chief executive of Mila – the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute – says work was being carried out to make sure that these systems were not racist or violent, in a process known as alignment (ie, making sure they "align" with human values). But then they were released into the public realm. "The technology is put out there, and as the system interacts with humankind, its developers wait to see what happens and make adjustments based on that.