In June, a group of students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University with no scientific background showed they could design a deadly new pandemic outbreak in an hour by using chatbots powered by generative artificial intelligence models.
Using ChatGPT-4 designed by OpenAI, Bing by Microsoft, Bard by Google and FreedomGPT, an open-source model, the students learned how to obtain samples and reverse engineer potential pandemic-causing candidates, including smallpox, according to a study the students wrote about the effort.
“Our results demonstrate that artificial intelligence can exacerbate catastrophic biological risks,” warned a pre-publication print of the study titled “Can large language models democratize access to dual-use biotechnology?”
