In a statement titled “Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter,” Musk and 1,332 other signatories called on the world's leading AI labs to stop training their advanced systems for at least six months.
The letter, which was published by the Future of Life Institute, warned that “AI systems with human-competitive intelligence” could become increasingly sophisticated and thus costly.
The signatories expressed concern that AI systems would automate human jobs, flood information channels with untruths and ultimately replace the human race.
The statement read in part, “Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks, and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones?
“Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization? Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders.”
They further argued that the development of powerful AI systems should only be considered when their creators “are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable...
ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is an AI software that mimics human speech patterns when generating text.
People can interact with the system as if they were conversing with another human being rather than a machine. The system is capable of performing many tasks, including operating like a search engine and writing computer code, among others."
Artificial Intelligence has become a hot topic in the past few months especially as tech giants like Google and Microsoft compete to improve their versions of AI systems.
In a similar vein, fake images created by artificial intelligence have become a cause for concern in recent times.
