One of the founding fathers of artificial intelligence fears that it induces “profound risks for society and humanity”

A pioneer in artificial intelligence is sounding the alarm about his own field of research. Geoffrey Hinton, considered one of the founding fathers of artificial intelligence (AI) has warned of the dangers of this technology as he leaves his post at the giant Google. “I left so I could talk about the dangers of AI without worrying about the possible impact on Google”said in a tweet Geoffrey Hinton, after the announcement of his departure Monday, May 1 in the New York Times.

Advances in this sector lead to “deep risks for society and humanity”believes the researcher who created a foundation dedicated to artificial intelligence systems.

“Look where we were five years ago and where we are now”he continues, judging “scary” future prospects in this area. According to him, “it is difficult to see how to prevent bad actors from using [l’IA] for bad things”. He also refuted any desire to criticize Google, despite his decision to leave the company.

Disinformation in the viewfinder

The rapid deployment of an increasingly artificial intelligence “general”endowed with cognitive capacities mimicking those of human beings and therefore likely to disrupt many professions, was symbolized by the launch in March of GPT-4 by OpenAI, a new, more powerful version of the natural language model that operates ChatGPT.

This generative artificial intelligence interface has been used by millions of people for several months to write essays, poems or even lines of computer code. Geoffret Hinton also warns, in the New York Timesagainst disinformation that could be generated by artificial intelligence.