Google’s AI veteran calls it off, warns about misinformation crisis

The 75-year-old is particularly worried about the misinformation crisis that generative AI-based technology could create. Hinton emphasized that the internet will be filled with false photos, videos and texts and normal people might not be able to understand what is true anymore. 

Notably, many photos of eminent people have surfaced on the internet which are not real. These photos have been created using image-to-text generation softwares like DallE and MidJourney. 

Hinton was not part of earlier letters signed by artificial intelligence experts calling for a temporary halt to AI research. 

In the interview, Hinton said that he is also worried about the risk generative AI-based applications could pose to the jobs of people. Speaking to Times, Hinton added that while technologies like ChatGPT are complementing human work they could soon replace ‘drudge work’. Hinton enlisted Paralegals, personal assistants, and translators as some of the jobs that could be replaced due to AI.

Dangers of Artificial Intelligence:

Talking about the new age artificial intelligence technology to BBC, Hinton said, “The issue is now that we’ve discovered it works better than we expected a few years ago what do we do to mitigate the long term risks of things more intelligent than us taking control”

Delving deep into the capabilities of artificial intelligence systems compared to that of humans, Hinon said “I’ve come to the conclusion that the kind of intelligence we are developing is very different from the intelligence we have. We’re biological systems, and these are digital systems. “

“And the big difference is that with digital systems you have many copies of the same set of weights, the same model of world. And all these copies can learn separately, but share their knowledge ins. So it’s as if you had 10,000 people and whenever one person learns something, everybody automatically knew it. And that’s how these chat apps can know so much more than anyone posts.”  Hinton added

Hinton became engrossed with the idea of a ‘neural network’ during his graduation days at the University of Edinburgh. Soon after, neural networks became the core of his life’s work.

As per the Times, Hinton and his two students Ilya Sutskever(OpenAI’s Chief scientist) and Alex Krishevsky start a neural network that could identify common objects like flowers, dogs and cars by analyzing thousands of photos.

Reportedly, Google acquired the company for $44 million and the neural network was later used for the creation of powerful AI tools like Bard.