Elon Musk tweets dire warning on AI and social media
Tesla founder Elon Musk warned that advanced artificial intelligence will be used to manipulate social media, if it hasn't been already.
"If advanced AI (beyond basic bots) hasn’t been applied to manipulate social media, it won’t be long before it is," Musk tweeted early Thursday.
Musk, whose automaking company has invested heavily in self-driving vehicle technology, has long predicted the dangers of artificial intelligence, even saying that a single firm that develops "god-like super intelligence" might achieve world domination.
“At least when there is an evil dictator, that human is going to die," Musk said in the documentary "Do You Trust Your Computer?" For artificial intelligence, "there will be no death, it would live forever and then you have an immortal dictator from which we could never escape,” Musk cautioned.
"Artificial intelligence isn't necessarily bad, but it will operate outside of human control," he said in September 2018. "It's going to be very tempting to use AI as a weapon. It will be used as a weapon," Musk said. "The on ramp to serious AI will be more humans using it against each other. That will be the danger.”
Everyone who uses a big tech service is already helping to program artificial intelligence, he said at the time, whether they realize it or not.
"There’s sort of a collective AI in a Google search," Musk told the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. "We are all leaves on a big tree and we are feeding this network without questions and answers. We are all collectively programming AI. And Google, plus all the humans that connect to it, are one giant cybernetic collective. This is also true of Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and the other social networks."