Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has warned that artificial intelligence could be used by “bad actors” and make it harder to spot scams and misinformation.
Wozniak, who was one of Apple’s co-founders with the late Steve Jobs and invented the company’s first computer, said AI content should be clearly labelled, and called for regulation for the sector.
The Silicon Valley entrepreneur was among more than 1,800 people who signed a letter in March, alongside the Tesla chief executive, Elon Musk, to call for a six-month pause in the development of powerful AI systems, arguing that they posed profound risks to humanity. Some signatories to the letter were later revealed to be fake, and others backed out on their support.
Wozniak, known in the tech world as Woz, talked about the benefits of AI and the dangers.
“AI is so intelligent it’s open to the bad players, the ones that want to trick you about who they are,” he told the BBC.
AI refers to computer systems that are able to do tasks that would normally require human intelligence. One of these, GPT-4, developed by OpenAI, a company co-founded by Musk and now backed by Microsoft, can hold conversation like a human, compose songs and summarise lengthy documents.
Wozniak does not believe AI will replace people because it lacks emotion, but warned that it will make bad actors more convincing, because programmes such as ChatGPT can create text that “sounds so intelligent”.
He argued that responsibility for programmes generated by AI lies with those who publish it: “A human really has to take the responsibility for what is generated by AI.”
He urged regulators to hold to account the big tech firms that “feel they can kind of get away with anything”, but was sceptical regulators would get it right. “The forces that drive for money usually win out, which is sort of sad,” he said.
Wozniak said that “we can’t stop the technology”, but added that we can educate people to spot fraud and malicious attempts to steal personal information.
The Apple chief executive, Tim Cook, sounded a note of caution when he told investors last week that it was important to be “deliberate and thoughtful” in how to approach AI. “We view AI as huge, and we’ll continue weaving it in our products on a very thoughtful basis,” he said.
Geoffrey Hinton, whose research on neural networking helped lay the foundations for the artificial intelligence revolution, has also expressed his fears that the pace of improvements could be a real risk to humans. He told the Guardian that there was a possibility that people could eventually be controlled or even wiped out by AI.
