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New AI warning from Elon Musk sparks Fox News panel debate: ‘It presumes to replace us’

April 17, 2023 | | Print Article

Twitter CEO Elon Musk sat down with Fox News host Tucker Carlson for an interview that will air Monday evening, and during it, he issued a chilling warning to the world about artificial intelligence (A.I.): “They’re training the A.I. to lie.”

The reality of a biased A.I. and the damage it could cause became the topic of debate for Fox News’ “Big Sunday Show” panel.

(Video: Fox News)

The segment began with a preview of the much-anticipated interview.

“What’s happening is they’re training the A.I. to lie. It’s bad,” Musk told Carlson. “A.I. is more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production. In the sense that it has the potential, however small one may regard that probability, but it is non-trivial, it has the potential of civilization destruction.”

That leftist programmers could infuse A.I. with an anti-conservative slant was not surprising to Fox News contributor Guy Benson.

People lie, he argued, so it’s only natural that A.I. would inherit that dishonesty for the humans who direct it.

Still, Benson wondered if all the hand-wringing over the growing technology wasn’t the result of old-fashioned hype.

“I wonder how many of the concerns being raised, I’m not saying that they’re illegitimate concerns at all, but I wonder how many of the things that people are wringing their hands about vis-a-vis A.I. are also things that people said upon the advent and then the rise of the Internet as well,” he said. “Like, ‘Oh, there’ll be an explosion of new information, some of which might not be true, and so on and so forth,'”

“I just wonder, is there a parallel there?” he asked his colleagues. “Are we maybe going too deep into the negativity on A.I. and overlooking some of the positive elements, because people made that mistake with the Internet as well? Not to say that there wasn’t a downside to the Internet, there’s a very dark side as well. But maybe we were getting ourselves a little hyped up.”

Co-host Tammy Bruce pointed out the difference between A.I. and previous emerging technology.

“The significant difference between this and any other technology is that it presumes to replace us,” she said. “That we are not looking at this as a resource that we then consume and then we use and put out there, which is information, it is that it then manages the information. It would then act on the information.”

“So that’s why we hear about the loss of jobs, the nature of what humans can do, what is our value as human beings,” she argued. “And that I think is the larger question. I think that the best question ever that you have to ask is, you know, what is the point of what we do as human beings?”

What is needed, said co-host Dr. Nicole Saphier, is a combination of A.I.’s speed in analyzing and responding to complex situations and the “human experience.”

“The human experience… can bring something else to the table,” she said. “A.I. plus the human brain need to be used in conjunction. One is not to be replaced by the other.”

Melissa Fine
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