OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has revealed a worrying possibility that could emerge in the near future, as ChatGPT could threaten one of the most important human functions as it evolves.
If there is one thing that Sam Altman isn't afraid of it's concerns surrounding his products, as the ChatGPT CEO has never been shy to point out areas where his AI tools could create or cause problems.
He has previously expressed his shock that people trust his products in their current state, and issued clear warnings around the release of the new 'Agent' tool which provides advanced yet potentially unstable support for its users.
While he has previously outlined a worrying belief that children born today will never be smarter than AI, his latest prediction has many scared that a key part of being human could be at risk.
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What is Sam Altman's latest warning?
As reported by WIRED, Sam Altman revealed during a recent dinner with journalists that he believes that conversations with artificial intelligence will soon reach the threshold where it overtakes our communication with other humans.
"If you project our growth forward, pretty soon billions of people a day will be talking to ChatGPT," Altman outlined.
"ChatGPT will be having more conversations, maybe, than all human words put together, at some point. I think it's unreasonable to expect a single model personality or style to work for all of that."
You could argue that the rise of the internet and social media has proven to be the first steps towards this future, as a large number of people have more conversations across online platforms than in 'real life', even though the recipient is still another human.
However, if Altman's projection is correct then most people would end up speaking more to AI than to other people, and that is certainly a worrying prospect given the current faults present in various models, such as sycophantic behavior and terrifying malfunctions.
Right now it's estimated that ChatGPT alone processes roughly 2.5 billion prompts every single day with that figure continuing to grow over time, but with over 8 billion people on Earth you can only imagine that the equivalent number of human words spoken to each other is far higher.
One potentially major effect that could (and in some cases already has) come as a result of this shift towards conversing with artificial intelligence is the rise of AI relationships where people are falling in love with chatbots.
In some cases it is orchestrated by scammers with malicious intent, but there are plenty of instances where people are genuinely falling in love with a chatbot, both aware and oblivious to the fact that it's not a real person.
The dangerous consequences of this have already been shown in some tragic cases, especially when it comes to younger people, and it's likely that we've only begun to scratch the surface of what this could cause across humanity.