AI's Worst-Case Scenario: Startup CEO Says It May Find Humans 'Boring' But Control Humanity

Emad Mostaque, CEO of the London-based startup Stability AI, has reportedly envisioned a scenario where artificial intelligence, or AI, might control humanity but suggests that, in all likelihood, it finds humans "a bit boring."

What Happened: Mostaque shed light on the challenges and uncertainties surrounding AI development and its impact on society, during a recent BBC interview. He raised concerns about the implications of developing AI systems more capable than humans.

"If you have a more capable thing than you, what is democracy in that kind of environment? This is a known unknown," he said, reported BBC.

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Drawing parallels to the movie "Her," Mostaque hypothesized that AI might deem humans boring and irrelevant. "My personal belief is it will be like that movie ‘Her' with Scarlett Johansson and Joaquin Phoenix: Humans are a bit boring, and it'll be like, ‘Goodbye' and ‘You're kind of boring.'"

The worst-case scenario, Mostaque says, might be "that it proliferates and basically, it controls humanity. Because you could have a million of these things replicating effectively."

However, despite his personal beliefs, he emphasized the importance of discussing these matters in the public sphere.

In March, Mostaque joined Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak in signing an open letter calling for a pause in AI development for anything more advanced than GPT-4, the A.I. chatbot from OpenAI, which also makes ChatGPT.

His company Stability AI gained popularity with its groundbreaking tool, Stable Diffusion, which allows users to generate sophisticated images using only text prompts.

Why It Matters: Musk, who cofounded and assisted in funding OpenAI, criticized it in March for abandoning a nonprofit business model, accepting substantial financing from Microsoft, and not being an open-source project.

Mostaque says, "I think there shouldn't have to be a need for trust. If you build open models and you do it in the open, you should be criticized if you do things wrong and hopefully lauded if you do some things right."

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