Is There a Dark Side to AI?

In a recent article by the BBC, British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton—the aptly named “Godfather of AI” for his role in creating artificial intelligence (AI) technology—expressed his concerns about the dangers of AI to society.

While AI creations such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which will write content in only a matter of seconds, can be a godsend to businesses by eliminating workload (see the Straight Talk! episode 3 Ways to Embrace AI for a Competitive Advantage in the Cleaning Industry), Hinton, who earned his nickname thanks to decades of research on neural networks and deep learning, warned that AI could also be applied to much more sinister applications by people he called “bad actors.”

Describing AI chatbots as “quite scary,” Hinton told the BBC, “Right now, they’re not more intelligent than us, as far as I can tell. But I think they soon may be.” He believes that AI’s ability to deep learn—that is, to learn from experience as people do—could enable chatbots to reach the same level of information as that of a human brain.

“Right now, what we’re seeing is things like GPT-4 [another AI product by OpenAI] eclipses a person in the amount of general knowledge it has, and it eclipses them by a long way. In terms of reasoning, it’s not as good, but it does already do simple reasoning,” Hinton said. “And given the rate of progress, we expect things to get better quite fast. So, we need to worry about that.”

While the future of AI might be uncertain, there’s still much that can be gained by leaning on AI technology for help. For more information on AI’s positive attributes, check out The Rise of AI: What Marketers Need to Know, as well as Is AI Going to be the Death of the Salesperson?