Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple along with Steve Jobs, warned that generative AI will make scams much easier to pull off.
Woz called for regulation to require AI-generated content to be labeled as such.
Woz vs. generative AI
Wozniak has been involved in the tech industry since the dawn of the personal-computer revolution. He designed Apple’s earliest computers, and actually built many of them himself.
In an interview with the BBC, he said, “AI is so intelligent it’s open to the bad players, the ones that want to trick you about who they are.”
He’s referring to new artificial intelligence systems that can generate text that is very hard to distinguish from something written by a human. Scams involving Nigerian princes who need your bank account info so they can give you millions of dollars are typically easy to spot because they are written in broken sentences with poor grammar. But AI can create the text for a smooth phishing scam.
In addition to computer-created content being labeled as such, Wozniak told their BBC, “A human really has to take the responsibility for what is generated by AI.”
He was one of the tech leaders who recently signed an open letter urging a six-month pause on development of advanced artificial intelligence applications.
Apple CEO also cautious about AI
It’s not only former Apple executives that are looking warily at AI. The company’s CEO expressed cautious optimism about AI during a recent conference call with investors.
“I do think it’s very important to be deliberate and thoughtful in how you approach these things,” Tim Cook said. “And there’s a number of issues that need to be sorted, as is being talked about in a number of different places. But the potential is certainly very interesting.”
