AI will cause ‘real damage’, warns boss at Microsoft

Economist admits chatbots could fall into wrong hands – as tech chiefs summoned to White House meeting

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) will “cause real damage” when it gets into the hands of “bad actors”, a Microsoft boss has warned.

Michael Schwarz, the US tech company’s chief economist, told the World Economic Forum: “I am confident AI will be used by bad actors, and yes it will cause real damage.”

He said in comments reported by Bloomberg: “It can do a lot of damage in the hands of spammers with elections and so on.”

His warning echoed that of Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather of AI” who quit Google this week. Mr Hinton said in a newspaper interview: “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things.”

Meanwhile, the bosses of Microsoft, Google and CHATGPT maker Openai have been summoned to the White House to meet Kamala Harris, the US vice-president, today. The meeting has been called so officials can hold a “frank discussion” with tech company leaders about the risks of AI technology.

Scientists from Microsoft and Openai claimed in March that they had seen “sparks” of human-level intelligence from the latter’s latest creation during laboratory tests. This artificial general intelligence could foreshadow the creation of autonomous robots capable of making their own decisions independently from human input.

Openai’s November release of CHATGPT took the world by storm as the AI chatbot surpassed all previous expectations of the technology.

Its unique selling point is that it is trained on petabytes of data from across the entire internet, meaning users can ask it questions on virtually any topic and receive convincing-sounding answers. Experts have warned that AI chatbots are capable of “hallucinating” answers that may be wrong.

“This kind of AI we’re talking about right now can sometimes lead to something we call hallucination,” Prabhakar Raghavan, the head of Google Search, told a German newspaper in February.

About $120bn (£96bn) was wiped from Google’s market value later that month after its CHATGPT rival, Bard, gave a wrong answer to a question.

‘Artificial intelligence can do a lot of damage in the hands of spammers with elections and so on’