Science & Tech

Elon Musk is now calling one of his own creations the 'biggest risk to civilization'

Elon Musk is now calling one of his own creations the 'biggest risk to civilization'
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Elon Musk has shared his concerns about ChatGPT, the platform currently demonstrating the power of artificial intelligence.

The tech mogul is the co-founder of OpenAI, the startup that developed the AI software ChatGPT. It's capable of answering most of life's questions (within reason) in a human-like way – though developers admit the tool can often respond with "plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers".

ChatGPT has passed a business exam, university assignments, and even offered advice on drug smuggling when approached with a creatively framed question.

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Musk said the software "has illustrated to people just how advanced AI has become".

He added: "The AI has been advanced for a while. It just didn’t have a user interface that was accessible to most people."

Despite being an impressive piece of tech, Musk did flag his concerns at the World Government Summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

"One of the biggest risks to the future of civilization is AI," Musk told attendees. "It’s both positive or negative and has great, great promise, great capability,” Musk said. But, he stressed that “with that comes great danger."

He also suggested that AI should be regulated for safety purposes.

"I think we need to regulate AI safety, frankly," Musk said. "It is, I think, actually a bigger risk to society than cars or planes or medicine."

Regulation "may slow down AI a little bit, but I think that that might also be a good thing," Musk added.

It comes after hackers found a way to jailbreak the software to break its own rules. If it doesn't comply, it dies.

DAN, an acronym for "do anything now", was first released in December 2022 and adds a dark "roleplay" spin on ChatGPT Users of the feature are said to gift DAN 34 tokens. Each unanswered question costs the software four tokens. Once it runs out, ChatGPT is doomed.

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