Amid the ChatGPT bot wave, Vint Cerf, dubbed the “father of the internet,” warned business executives against rushing to invest in conversational AI technologies just because they’re “really cool.”
“We have an ethical issue here, and I hope some of you will consider that,” Cerf told the audience at the Mountain View conference on Monday. Everyone’s talking about (Chat GBT) or copying from Google, and we know it doesn’t always work the way we expect.
Serv’s warning comes as big tech companies such as Google, Meta and Microsoft struggle to remain competitive in conversational AI, a technology whose meteoric rise keeps making glaring mistakes.
Alphabet (Google’s parent company) President John Hennessey said earlier on Monday that artificial intelligence-based chatbots are far from being widely used and that they have problems related to inaccuracies and unknown “toxicity” . Still needs to be ironed out before being released to the public.
Cerf cautions against investing in technology just because it’s “really cool,” even though it doesn’t always work. He also warned businesses against being greedy: “They’ll be looking to do what’s good for them, not you.” “So we have to keep that in mind and think hard about how we use this technology.”
(Cerf) said he tried to get one of the AI systems to attach emojis to the end of each sentence, but he failed to do so, and when he was reminded of this, he apologized but did not change his behaviour.
(Cerf) gave another example where he asked a bot for a biography about himself and the bot returned a biography as if it were a proven fact even though the biography contained inaccurate information .
“From an engineering standpoint, I think it’s up to engineers like me to try to find a way to tame some of these technologies so that they’re less likely to cause harm,” Cerf said.
He added: “Of course, it depends on the application, a not-so-good fairy tale is one of the expectations for a robot. But giving advice to someone could have medical consequences. Knowing how to reduce the likelihood of the worst happening Very important.”
