Apple Co-founder Warns “Bad Players” Could Easily Take Advantage of A.I.

Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak. Captured from a TED Talk video in 2015

Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, warned that generative artificial intelligence (AI) like ChatGPT could make scams more convincing and called for regulations on AI.

In an interview with BBC on May 9 (local time), Wozniak said, “AI is so intelligent, it’s open to the bad players,” and explained that AI could create text which “sounds so intelligent,” making these bad players even more convincing.

Wozniak said that the production of AI technology could not be stopped, but argued that more information must be provided to help users detect malicious scams.

Wozniak co-founded Apple along with Steve Jobs in 1976. He was the one who designed Apple 1, the first personal computer by Apple. He left Apple in 1985 and in 2021 founded Privateer Space, a private space firm.

Earlier in March, Wozniak signed a public letter calling for at least a six-month pause in the development of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4, a large language model (LLM) that is the foundation of ChatGPT, along with Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque.

In the interview, Wozniak spoke about how the big tech companies developing AI technology “feel they can kind of get away with anything” and argued that these companies should be held to account. He argued that responsibility for anything generated by AI and released to the public should rest with the people who publish it and said, “A human really has to take the responsibility for what is generated by AI.”

In a recent interview with The New York Times, Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, a renowned AI expert who helped conceive the concept of deep learning, confessed that a part of him now regretted his life’s work (development of AI). Dr. Hinton argued that the big tech firms were caught in an unstoppable (AI) race and warned that the more they improved the AI system, the more danger they would cause.