OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Worries AI Could Be Used to Spread ‘Disinformation’

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is a “little bit scared” of AI — not for the usual, apocalyptic reasons, but for a more leftist concern: its potential to spread “disinformation.”

“We’ve got to be careful here,” Altman told ABC News. “I think people should be happy that we are a little bit scared of this.”

“I’m particularly worried that these models could be used for large-scale disinformation,” continued the OpenAI CEO. “Now that they’re getting better at writing computer code, [they] could be used for offensive cyberattacks.”

Altman’s company, Microsoft-funded OpenAI, is responsible for the creation of GPT, the technology behind the enormously successful ChatGPT.

As Breitbart News previously reported, early iterations of the technology were marked by political bias, which the company has gone some way towards correcting.

Altman’s ABC interview also touched on another source of media fear, Russian president Vladimir Putin — in particular, his 2017 comment that whichever country mastered AI first would “rule the world.”

Calling the statement “chilling,” Altman expressed his hopes for an AI future in which “we successively develop more and more powerful systems that we can all use in different ways that integrate it into our daily lives, into the economy, and become an amplifier of human will.”

Altman also touched on the concern that AI could rapidly replace human jobs.

“I think over a couple of generations, humanity has proven that it can adapt wonderfully to major technological shifts,” Altman said. “But if this happens in a single-digit number of years, some of these shifts… That is the part I worry about the most.”

The OpenAI CEO previously stated that he believed artificial general intelligence (AGI) — a hypothesized future AI with intelligence that exceeds humanity’s — had the potential to “break capitalism.”

“Of all of the bad systems the world has, [capitalism is] the best one — or the least bad one we found so far. I hope we find a way better one. And I think that if AGI really truly fully happens, I can imagine all these ways that it breaks capitalism.”

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.