He said: ‘This is the year that, for the first time, we had mass market, general purpose AI tools, by which I mean ChatGPT.’ Photo by OLIVIER MORIN / AFP
Artificial Intelligence could be turned into bosses from hell, a leading computing expert is warning.
Professor Michael Wooldridge, who will be delivering this year’s Royal Institution Christmas lectures in the UK, told The Guardian the technology could end up monitoring every email, offering continual feedback and potentially deciding who gets fired if it is embedded into businesses.
He said: “There are some prototypical examples of those tools that are available today. And I find that very, very disturbing.”
Prof Wooldridge, who is a professor of computer science at the University of Oxford, added he wanted to use Britain’s most prestigious public science lectures to shine a light on AI.
He said: “This is the year that, for the first time, we had mass market, general purpose AI tools, by which I mean ChatGPT.
“It’s the first time that we had AI that feels like the AI that we were promised – that we've seen in movies, computer games and books.
“In the (Christmas) lectures, when people see how this technology actually works, they’re going to be surprised at what’s actually going on there.
“That’s going to equip them much better to go into a world where this is another tool that they use, and so they won’t regard it any differently than a pocket calculator or a computer.”
The academic’s lectures will include the famous Turing test – first proposed by computing pioneer Alan Turing, which test whether or not a human knows they are interacting with a machine.
If they fail to identify they are communicating with a computer or robot, the test says the machine has demonstrated human-like understanding.
Prof Woolridge added: “Some of my colleagues think that, basically, we’ve passed the Turing test.
“At some point, very quietly, in the last couple of years, the technology has got to the point where it can produce text which is indistinguishable from text that a human would produce.”
He also warned about AI: “It can read your social media feed, pick up on your political leanings, and then feed you disinformation stories in order to try to get you, for example, to change your vote.”