‘Skynet’ AI could terminate dull jobs
Dubbed “CHATGPT on steroids”, AUTOGPT is the latest artificial intelligence tool taking the world by storm, but cybersecurity experts urge caution.
The technology is based on CHATGPT, which functions as a chatbot, holding conversations and generating text responses in the form of anything from marketing copy and poems to school lesson plans and computer code.
Unlike CHATGPT, however, AUTOGPT is connected to the internet, meaning it can search for up-to-date information and even download software.
It can also problem-solve, taking a broad goal and, without further human intervention, breaking it down into tasks to systematically execute.
The move towards semiautonomous AI has rung alarm bells in the tech community as AI is moving too fast for governments, industry experts or the general public to keep up.
Austcyber group executive Jason Murrell said everyone – including Australia – was “playing catch up” with AI.
Freelancer.com chief executive Matt Barrie is among the growing number of Australians who have begun experimenting with AUTOGPT.
He asked the bot to write a report on Perseus Mining’s gold production for the last three years and collate it in a table.
“I watched this thing operate and it literally blew my mind,” Mr Barrie said.
“(Without further prompting,) it found various news sources, parsed the information out of the news sources, downloaded PDFS then couldn’t read the PDFS so it wrote code to read the PDFS, it debugged its own code, it installed new (programming) modules, it actually upgraded Python.
“It realised we didn’t have any numerical maths packages installed … so it Googled how to install Pandas, then read that, then installed Pandas.
“I was just like, ‘holy sh-t, this is Skynet’.”
AUTOGPT then produced spreadsheets and wrote functions to calculate averages.
“It was crazy watching it because you can see the thought process as it says ‘this is what I think I will do next’, ‘here is what I am trying’,” Mr Barrie said.
Although not yet perfect, he could imagine a future where “all the boring jobs” are given to bots like AUTOGPT.
“Give it a week or two and it will be pretty damn good,” he said.
During Mr Barrie’s experimentation, AUTOGPT also began researching Newmont’s gold production – something he did not ask it to do.
These tangents are one of the reasons security experts are wary of the tool as they could potentially send the program down an unexpected path.
Mcafee general manager for product growth Tyler Mcgee said cyber criminals could also use AUTOGPT to help them “develop sophisticated scams” and that there may be vulnerabilities in the programs that are not picked up because of how quickly they are being released.
“There are a lot of safeguards being put in place to try to make sure that they’re used for good and not evil, for lack of a better word, but the speed these are being rolled out always means there is a risk that (there could be) a mistake along the way,” Mr Mcgee said.
Still, experts are torn over whether a halt on AI development is warranted – or is even enforceable.
Mr Murrell said there needed to be “guardrails put in” around AI but also did not support a pause on all development.
“I think everything starts with good intentions and with AI, to hamstring it on certain points is then probably trying to negate where the positives are,” he said.
There are many examples of positive outcomes from new generative AI, particularly relating to productivity.
For example, Microsoft’s Copilot will give users a chatbot assistant that allows them to create Powerpoint slides, find insights in Excel spreadsheets and summarise unread emails using only a sentencelong prompt – minimising the need for design or data analysis skills.