Google And Microsoft Employees Oppose The Development Of A Potentially Harmful New AI Chatbot

Midjourney - an application that uses artificial intelligence to produce realistic images. (photo: twitter @midjourney)

JAKARTA - Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a major topic of conversation since the emergence of ChatGPT from OpenAI and generative AI imagers such as Midjourney and DALL-E 2. However, not everyone agrees with this new technology.

A recent report from The New York Times (NYT) revealed that back in March, two Google employees tried to stop the company from launching its own AI chatbot that rivaled OpenAI's ChatGPT.

According to the NYT report, the employee's job was to review Google's AI products. The employee allegedly believed the resulting technology resulted in "inaccurate and harmful" statements.

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Microsoft employees and ethics experts expressed the same concerns months earlier, when Microsoft was planning the launch of an AI chatbot that would be integrated into its Bing browser. These concerns are related to the decline of critical thinking, disinformation, and the erosion of the "fact base of modern society".

However, Microsoft launched its Bing-integrated chatbot in February anyway, and one month later, Google released its “Bard” chatbot in late March, both of which surpassed OpenAI's ChatGPT-4 release in November 2022. Since its launch, ChatGPT has sparked great conversation around ethics and the use of chatbots and AI image generators.

Midjourney - an app that uses artificial intelligence to generate realistic images - is discontinuing its free trial to mitigate the unfortunate problem of deep fakes. Around the same time, an Australian media executive sought financial compensation from ChatGPT and AI for the news consumed.

Meanwhile, there are concerns for the future of society and the truth in a letter written by more than 1,000 researchers and think leaders in the technology space, including Elon Musk. The letter calls for slowing down the pace of development of this technology.

Governments around the world have tackled the new emerging technology in a similar vein, with Italian officials temporarily blocking ChatGPT in the country. United States President Joe Biden has also encouraged technology companies to address the risks posed by AI.