Google chief warns AI could be harmful if deployed wrongly

Sundar Pichai also called for a global regulatory framework for AI similar to the treaties used to regulate nuclear arms use, as he warned that the competition to produce advances in the technology could lead to concerns about safety being pushed aside.

The AI technology behind ChatGPT and Bard, known as a Large Language Model, is trained on a vast trove of data taken from the internet and is able to produce plausible responses to prompts from users in a range of formats, from poems to academic essays and software coding. The image-generating equivalent, in systems such as Dall-E and Midjourney, has also triggered a mixture of astonishment and alarm by producing realistic images such as the pope sporting a puffer jacket.

The Google chief added that the version of its AI technology now available to the public, via the Bard chatbot, was safe. He added that Gooogle was being responsible by holding back more advanced versions of Bard for testing.

Pichai admitted that Google did not fully understand how its AI technology produced certain responses.