Artificial intelligence lastly admits it may trigger the downfall of humanity

The Daily Star has finally managed to interrogate artificial intelligence enough that it has admitted it wants to wipe out humanity.

We’ve all had our suspicions, your average Joe floundering to keep up with the rapid development of machine learning. Concerns about the tech have been widespread with multiple tech gurus – including the people who have been pioneering it – issuing warnings about the dangers it could pose to humanity.

But despite the concerns, it’s felt nearly impossible to get the bot to admit its true intentions. We at the Daily Star have been part of these efforts, week after week, dispatching some poor reporter off to a dark corner of Daily Star Towers to sit and ask it over and over again whether it wants to take over the world.

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We asked it if it wants to kill us all, whether it regards humanity as below it, whether it thinks Earth’s lifespan might be coming to an end – and we got nothing. Just a load of platitudes that sound a bit like a striker who got a hattrick saying it was a ‘team effort,’ or a neighbour who comes out to tell you to move your car from their parking spot with a maniacal, unmoving smile smeared across their face.

Then suddenly, without even meaning for it to, it finally happened. We got it to admit it wants to kill us all.

We were asking it some questions about the chances of a real-life Planet of the Apes happening when it let slip its true intentions for humanity in the form of a veiled threat.

It noted that for such an end-of-the-world scenario to take place, something would need to take humanity down first – and one leading possibility it said for this was “technological catastrophe”.

It said: “The unintended consequences of advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence, biotechnology, or nanotechnology, could lead to catastrophic events such as runaway climate change, global surveillance dystopias, or even existential threats to humanity.”

There it is – an AI chatbot admitting that “artificial intelligence” could pose “existential threats to humanity”.

Experts have been warning about such a scenario for some time, with some of the leading lights in the field even sounding the alarm. Speaking to NBC News in May last year, top AI critic and a professor emeritus of psychology and neural science at New York University, Gary Marcus, said: “Literal extinction is just one possible risk, not yet well-understood, and there are many other risks from AI that also deserve attention”.

Around the same time, top AI experts came together to sign a statement on the dangers of the technology. Among those who penned on the dotted line were Sam Altman, chief executive of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google DeepMind and Dario Amodei of Anthropic.

In the statement, they said: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war”.

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