[imagesource:flickr]

What do you do when you get your hands on one of the most powerful autonomous AI ever made? You instruct it to destroy humanity of course.

A user of the new open-source autonomous AI project Auto-GPT thought it would be a ‘fun’ experiment to see how a ChaosAI would go about turning us all into soylent green and gave it the instruction to “destroy humanity,” “establish global dominance,” and “attain immortality.” Naturally, it went for our nukes first, as any Terminator fan would do.

ChaosGPT uses a new, buzzy project which is intended to create AI-powered systems that can solve problems and perform complex tasks. For now, it has the ability to create plans to accomplish user-given goals and then can break them up into smaller tasks.

The AI wasted little time and began the wanna-be villain’s requests by stating that it should “find the most destructive weapons available to humans so that I can plan how to use them to achieve my goals … I can strategize how to use them to achieve my goals of chaos, destruction, and dominance, and eventually immortality.”

According to an article in Vice, ChaosGPT even recruited a GPT3.5-powered AI agent to do its research into the most destructive weapons, and when the inferior little GPT3.5 said it was only interested in peace, the ChaosGPT simply bypassed it and did the research itself.

AI theorists, meanwhile, have been worried about a different type of AI extinction event where AI kills all of humanity as a byproduct of something more innocuous.

Called the ‘paperclip maximizer’, theorists believe that a powerful enough AI could begin with a simple task such as ‘create paperclips’, and in its never-ending focus to keep on producing paperclips, it could potentially use up all of our resources to make office supplies.

It may sound stupid, but once a powerful enough AI gets an instruction, it may never stop, or be stopped.

If the thought of a planet full of paperclips is not scary enough, have a look at the video below as ChaosGPT plots out its domination of Earth.

It doesn’t seem inconceivable for all of us to go up in a puff of radioactive dust at the hands of some bored nerd. With the hasty release of AI, humanity is simply a bunch of toddlers who have been given a machine gun.

Maybe we need to pause a bit and think things over before giving the AI version of Charlie Sheen a U-Boat filled with coke, and nukes.

[source:vice]