STATESIDE STORIES: Artificial Intelligence, A New Kind Of Threat?

An AI-generated painting of a teenage boy giving a gift to the girl he is infatuated with. The
artwork, which was done in Deept Dream Generator, transformed
a basic art style into a style of a different artist.

by Mary Foran

First, we have to define our terms.

Artificial Intelligence is a branch of computer science that can simulate human intelligence. AI is implemented in machines to perform tasks that require human intelligence, including reasoning, learning, problem-solving and quick decision-making.

At the core of it, artificial intelligence is nothing but algorithms with certain sets of rules. AI systems have the ability to learn from the iteration of tasks where the computer data are fed into the system. This is how machine learning can actually get better at doing their specific tasks without any external interference.

Elon Musk during a live Neuralink device demonstration in 2020. Musk, who warns of AI dangers, co-founded Neuralink which aims to integrate the human brain with AI.

In an open letter, signed by the tech giant Elon Musk and over a thousand others with knowledge, power, and influence in the tech space, he called for a halt to all giant AI experiments for six months.

Musk said that anything more powerful than OpenAI’s GPT-4 is deemed too risky for society.

Musk, the owner of Twitter, said in an interview that he wanted to develop his own AI chatbox called TruthGPT which will be a “maximum truth-seeking AI with the aim of creating more good than harm.”

This AI will try to understand the nature of the universe. Musk said that “this might be the best path to safety in the sense that an AI that cares about understanding the universe is unlikely to annihilate humans because we are an interesting part of the universe.”

AI systems have been trained to be politically correct which is another way of saying they have been trained to lie.

Musk says that AI is one of the biggest risks to civilization and needs to be regulated.

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Images
Featured image/Damian Putica, CC BY-SA4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Elton Musk/Steve Jurvetson, CC BY2.0 via Wikipedia