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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman fears ChatGPT could be used to create a COVID-style pandemic
Sam Altman says that while he is worried about AI potentially being used for biological threats, he has also thought about how it is shaping human behaviour.
Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, expressed his fears about how AI models like ChatGPT could be used to engineer a biological pandemic, during a recent appearance on The Tucker Carlson Show. In a conversation with Tucker Carlson lasting almost an hour, Altman discussed a range of topics, including the potential for AI to be alive, his belief in God, privacy concerns surrounding ChatGPT, the suspicious death of his former employee Sushir Balaji, the risk AI poses to jobs, and how tools like ChatGPT could alter human behaviour at large.
Altman Says AI Is Getting “Very Good At Bio (Biology)”
When asked by Carlson about the downsides of Artificial Intelligence that concern him, Altman stated his worry that these models are becoming "very good at bio (biology)" and might enable the engineering of a pandemic.
Altman said, “You know, engineer another COVID-style pandemic, I worry about that. But because we worry about it, I think we, and many others in the industry, are thinking hard about how to mitigate it.”
This is reflected in how ChatGPT is advancing, and the models behind it are tweaked accordingly. Recently, when OpenAI launched GPT-5, the company openly detailed how the model's reasoning has a built-in safety mechanism with a multi-layered defence system for biology.
Altman Discusses How ChatGPT is Altering Human Behaviour at Large
Giving an example of how human behaviour is affected by ChatGPT, Altman noted the "societal scale effect" that occurs when a large number of people interact with the same model simultaneously.
“This is like a silly example, but it's one that struck me recently. LLMs, like ours, our language model and others have a kind of certain style to them. You know, they talk in a certain rhythm and they have a little bit unusual diction and maybe they overuse em dashes and whatever. And I noticed recently that real people have picked that up,” Altman said.
He added, “Did I think that ChatGPT was going to make people use way more em dashes in real life? Certainly not. It's not a big deal, but it's an example of where there can be these unknown unknowns of this is just like, this is a brave new world.”
For the uninitiated, an em dash (—) is a punctuation mark that can be used like a comma, to mark a pause or break in a sentence, or to connect two parts. It can also replace a colon when linking clauses. Many in online communities claim that before ChatGPT, the em dash wasn’t as widely used, but since the chatbot’s rise in popularity, online writing featuring em dashes seems to have increased. In fact, some even treat frequent use of em dashes as a sure sign that a piece of text might be AI-generated.
