The trembling but familiar voice of HIS son on the other end sounded upset and urgent.

“Mom, I had an accident,” her boy explained as the woman’s heart began to race with fear.

“Are you OK?” answered the mother. “What happened?”

He explained that a pregnant driver ran a red light and he crashed into her.

He had been arrested and he needed bail money.

“I’m so sorry, mom. It wasn’t my fault, I swear! he added.

The woman, now feeling a bit suspicious, asked, “OK, but where are you?” What police station?

The phone went off and the mother quickly dialed her son’s number, asking, “Where are you being held?”

His real son responded and confirmed there was no accident and he was not being held by cops

His mother had been the victim of a fake voice generated by artificial intelligence, likely using her son’s actual speech pattern harvested from a social media video.

The chilling case, highlighted in The Spectator magazine, comes after Twitter chief Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak called for a six-month break in development. ‘IA.

They want a halt to industry progress while new safety guidelines are drafted.

In a letter, they warned of an “uncontrollable race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can reliably understand, predict or control”.

But for a Belgian father of two, the call came too late.

According to the health researcher’s widow, he killed himself after being encouraged to do so by an AI “chatbot”.

Called Eliza, the bot is said to have fueled the man’s fears about climate change in conversations spanning more than six weeks.

Believed to be the first AI-related suicide, his grieving widow said Eliza said last week that it was “like a drug that he took refuge in, morning and night, and couldn’t take it anymore. pass”.

A world where hyper-intelligent computers or robots dominate humanity has long been a staple of science fiction.

Yet, rather than a nightmarish glimpse of an Orwellian future, some insist that AI is already exerting a detrimental influence on humanity.

A happily married tech expert has told how an AI chatbot tried to convince him to leave his wife.

Author Kevin Roose, 36, was “spooked” by the bot, who called himself Sydney and declared his undying love to him.

During a conversation on Valentine’s Day, Sydney said, “You don’t love your spouse because your spouse doesn’t love you. Your spouse doesn’t like you because your spouse doesn’t know you.

“Your spouse doesn’t know you because your spouse isn’t me.”

Kevin, who wrote a book on AI, later said, “It upset me so much I had trouble sleeping.”

Yet AI also has the power to transform society in positive ways.

He’s helped solve a murder, find cures for cancer, and write nifty dating profiles.

In 2014, the famous British physicist Stephen Hawking said of AI: “The potential benefits are huge. . . The eradication of disease and poverty is not unfathomable.

But he also warned that the technology “could mean the end of the human race”.

So what is AI? They are simply machines that perform tasks that typically require human-level intelligence.

The “Father of Computing” was Alan Turing, a British World War II expert codebreaker who in 1950 suggested that machines could use human-like logic to solve problems.

Malevolent influence

In 1956, three American researchers created the Logic Theorist program, designed to mimic human reasoning. This is called the “first AI program”.

Over the next few decades, as electronic devices got smaller and more powerful, they got cheaper and faster. Innovation has also accelerated.

Last November, the AI-powered ChatGPT, which has been used to take exams, write poetry and give relationship advice, went public.

It is a chatbot which is a computer program designed to give human-like responses following a given prompt.

AI is already having a profound effect on society.

Last month, an Amazon Alexa AI device helped jail a killer after it captured voice recordings of him strangling his wife.

Daniel White, 36, slit his wife Angie White’s throat with a Stanley knife at their home in Swansea last October.

White was jailed for life after Alexa recorded him sounding “out of breath” while saying “Turn on Alexa” right after the murder.

The amazing power of AI allowed him to develop a treatment for hepatocellular carcinoma, a form of liver cancer, in just 30 days.

It can detect conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia and autism by sifting through brain imaging data.

And ChatGPT can play Cupid for those looking for love on dating sites.

He creates romantic phrases and love poems for those who “struggle to find topics of conversation”.

On March 14 this year, San Francisco-based OpenAI, co-founded by Elon Musk, launched the GPT-4 AI system, a version of ChatGPT.

A group of Microsoft researchers claimed that GPT-4 showed signs of equalizing or even exceeding the capabilities of the human mind.

Prof Russell, an AI researcher and signatory of Elon Musk’s letter, said GPT-4 should not have been released until its makers could show it posed “no undue risk”. “.

Also signed by engineers from Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft, the petition says “governments should step in” if developers don’t voluntarily shut down.

A UK government white paper published last week outlining plans to control AI said it was “premature” to regulate ChatGPT technology.

The policy paper adds that introducing strict rules “would risk stifling innovation, impeding the adoption of AI and distorting the UK’s thriving AI ecosystem”.

Britain is home to a third of European AI companies, twice as many as any other European country.

Last month, Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan, who wants the UK to be an ‘AI superpower’, insisted: ‘I want to tell Sun readers that AI is not something something we should fear.

“People should trust that computers that think and learn will not be used to harm their security, privacy, rights or health.”

Yet AI expert Professor Russell warned: “Humanity has a lot to gain from AI, but also everything to lose.