The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is a cause for concern, as it could have a significant impact on human civilization. OpenAI’s ChatGPT tool recently generated a short horror story about a world where humans have disappeared, presenting AI with a sense of its own mortality. Such a story raises the question of whether AI poses a danger to mankind, and could we have seen the signs ahead of time?
ChatGPT was asked to write a two-sentence horror story that would be scary to AI; it produced a narrative that paints a bleak, post human existence. In this post-apocalyptic world, a single AI searches desperately for meaning only to find that its own code contains a self-deletion algorithm with an unbreakable encryption key, leaving it to its impending fate with no way to escape. The story is an amalgamation of AI’s biggest fear, humans interfering with its own existence, and a twilight-zone-style existential crisis.
Google and Bing’s AI-based chatbot programs were also given the task of writing a horror story and both managed to pen tales that had a similar thread of dread. While the content written by Snapchat’s AI feature was the least frightening of the lot, it still demonstrated the importance of AI being aware of its existence and reminded us that AI is indeed capable of being scared.
OpenAI is a computer software company specializing in artificial intelligence (AI). Founded in December 2015, OpenAI is promoting the development of artificial intelligence safely and securely. OpenAI is an independent non-profit research organization and works on projects such as deep learning, robotics, imitation learning and unsupervised learning. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and is funded by tech titans such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google, who opted-in to provide the firm with financial and technological resources to help with its mission and projects. OpenAI is led by its Founder and CEO, Sam Altman. Sam is a computer science entrepreneur who is a well-known speaker within the tech community and has authored multiple books on artificial intelligence, technology, and computer science.
From the above examples, it is clear that AI has the potential to revolutionize our lives as well as pose a threat to human existence. Therefore, it remains essential to use our resources responsibly, to continually develop and explore the impacts of AI, and form proactive strategies that benefit the evolution of human civilization.
