Concern about AI: Noah Harari called it “a threat to democracy”

Faced with the imminent advance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the growing trend of its use, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari expressed concern about the danger it poses to democracy and culture. Last month, the writer, along with entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk, called for a moratorium on the commercialization of AI until security systems are in place. This is an especially serious threat to democracies, rather than authoritarian regimes, because democracies depend on public conversation,” Harari said in an interview with The Telegraph. In that sense, the writer explained that “democracy is basically conversation, people talking to each other, and if AI takes over the conversation, democracy is over.” In that sense, he warned that AI “is the first technology in history that creates stories,” and then deepened his argument. “The new generation of AI doesn’t just spread the content that humans produce, it can produce the content itself. Try to imagine what it means to live in a world in which most texts and melodies, and then TV series and images, are created by a non-human intelligence. We just don’t understand what it means, what could be the consequences of AI taking over culture?” he asked. In an interview released weeks ago, Harari said that “we will soon find ourselves living within the hallucinations of non-human intelligence.” At the end of March, the historian joined the list of hundreds of experts – Musk, Steve Wozniak, among others – who called for the suspension of the use of AI until they manage to establish new security systems along with techniques that help distinguish between the real and the fictitious and the creation of institutions that can face the “dramatic economic and political disruption – especially for democracy – that it will cause. AI.” Likewise, the creator of the system, Sam Altman, acknowledged that he feels “a little fear” that his creation will be used for “large-scale disinformation or cyberattacks.”

Original source in Spanish