Tech titan Elon Musk on Monday warned that waiting for a mishap before regulating artificial intelligence might be “too late” because, by that point, the technology could be “in control” of society.
“If we only put in regulations after something terrible has happened, it may be too late. . . . The AI may be in control at that point,” Musk said in an interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson. “That’s definitely where things are headed. For sure.”
Just as there are bureaucratic agencies overseeing drugs and food and air-traffic control, “there should be government oversight” of AI, he added, “because it’s a danger to the public.”
“AI is perhaps more dangerous than mismanaged aircraft design . . . or bad car production,” he said. “It has the potential, nontrivial, of civilizational destruction.”
AI, whose capacity for communication has already been demonstrated by the language model ChatGPT, will be particularly perilous once it starts replicating opinion, he said. Many users have noted that the progressive political bias of ChatGPT, which was developed by research lab OpenAI. Musk helped found the nonprofit organization, he said, before it launched a for-profit arm and mutated into focusing on making AI politically correct.
“They’re training AI to lie . . . to either comment on some things, not comment on other things, but not say what the data demands that it say,” he said. “The path to AI dystopia is AI trained to be deceptive.”
Musk said that he originally invested a lot of money and energy into making OpenAI a “counterweight” to Google, which has taken a more aggressive approach towards unleashing AI. However, OpenAI is now closely aligned with Microsoft, he said.
Google founder Larry Page told Musk that he wanted to build a “digital god” as soon as possible, the new Twitter CEO claimed, and derided him as a “speciesist” when Musk said that AI must reflect a care for humanity.
“I agree with him that there’s great potential for good, but there’s also great potential for bad,” Musk said of his peer. To bring balance to the market, Musk said he will “create a third option” for AI development. The project, he said, would be an AI that is “truth-seeking” and “cares about understanding the universe.”
“It is unlikely to annihilate humans because we are an interesting part of the universe,” he added. The question behind AI, he said, must be: “Will humanity control its destiny or not?”
Musk also addressed his new gig as head of Twitter, admitting that the company is not currently financially flourishing.
“My timing was terrible for when the offer was made because it was right before advertising plummeted. But some things are priceless,” he said of his decision to acquire the social-media platform in October 2022. “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy.”
Asked to explain his reasoning for firing 80 percent of employees, Musk defended that many left voluntarily, and many were involved in censorship and in making Twitter an “activist organization.”
The remaining, lean staff is dedicated to increasing the “responsiveness of the system,” he said. “We want to make twitter the most trustworthy place on the internet.”