OpenAI boss reveals what ‘scares him most’ about AI
Sam Altman says revenge porn created by generative artificial intelligence is of ‘great concern’
Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.The boss of OpenAI has revealed what he finds most scary about the rapid emergence of advanced artificial intelligence.
Sam Altman, whose company launched the ChatGPT chatbot last November, said that the ability of generative AI to create revenge porn was of “great concern” to him.
Generative AI allows people to create content like audio, text or video through simple commands, with recent breakthroughs like ChatGPT demonstrating an ability to generate human-like and hyper-realistic responses.
Speaking in an interview with Forbes, Mr Altman gave examples of things he found “cool” about the technology, as well as things that scared him.
“I definitely have been watching with great concern the revenge porn generation that’s been happening with the open source image generators,” he said.
“I think that’s causing huge and predictable harm.”
The tech CEO said preventing such harmful outcomes will be the responsibility of both the companies building the AI, as well as the people using the tools.
“It’d be great if we could just point to those companies and say, ‘hey, you can’t do these things’,” he said. “But I think people are going to open source models regardless, and it’s mostly going to be great, but there will be some bad things that happen.”
Since launching late last year, ChatGPT has already attracted millions of users, as well as billions of dollars worth of investment from companies including Microsoft.
People have used it to create poetry, fix computer code, pass university exams and write essays, though the tool Mr Altman said was most useful for him was its summarisation feature.
“The fact that I can just have full articles or long email threads summarised has been way more useful than I would have thought,” he told Forbes.
“Also, the ability to ask esoteric programming questions or help debug code in a way that feels like I’ve got a super brilliant programmer that I can talk to.”
OpenAI is planning to launch the successor to ChatGPT, named GPT-4, later this year, which Mr Altman claims will be a significant improvement on its predecessor.
Mr Altman has previously said that the ultimate goal of OpenAI is to create artificial general intelligence (AGI) that can match or surpass the intellect of a human.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments