‘This is Skynet’: How AutoGPT is taking AI to the next level
Experts are urging caution over the latest artificial intelligence tool to take the world by storm. Here’s what you need to know.
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Dubbed “ChatGPT on steroids”, AutoGPT is the latest artificial intelligence tool taking the world by storm, but cybersecurity experts are urging caution.
The technology is based on the wildly popular ChatGPT, which functions as a chat bot, holding conversations and generating text responses in the form of anything from marketing copy and poems to school lesson plans and computer code.
Unlike ChatGPT, however, AutoGPT is connected to the internet, meaning it can search for up-to-date information and even download software onto a user’s computer.
It can also problem-solve, taking a broad goal set by the user then, without further human intervention, break it down into tasks to systematically execute.
The move towards semi-autonomous AI has rung alarm bells in the tech community as AI is moving too fast for governments, industry experts or the general public to keep up.
Speaking at Microsoft’s Washington campus on April 26, the tech giant’s vice president of AI insights apps in business applications Walter Sun was asked about AutoGPT and was unaware of its existence.
Meanwhile, AustCyber group executive Jason Murrell said everyone – including the Australian government – was “playing catch up” with AI.
It comes as “godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton sensationally resigned from Google last week so he could talk freely about the dangers of AI and its pace of change.
“The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people … I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away,” Mr Hinton told The New York Times.
“Obviously, I no longer think that.”
Freelancer.com chief executive Matt Barrie is among the growing number of Australians who have begun experimenting with AutoGPT.
He asked the bot to write a report on Perseus Mining’s gold production for the last three years and collate it in a table.
“I watched this thing operate and it literally blew my mind,” Mr Barrie said.
“(Without further prompting,) it found various news sources, parsed the information out of the news sources, downloaded PDFs then couldn’t read the PDFs so it wrote code to read the PDFs, it debugged its own code, it installed new (programming) modules, it actually upgraded Python.
“It realised we didn’t have any numerical maths packages installed … so it Googled how to install Pandas, then read that, then installed Pandas.
“I was just like, ‘holy shit, this is Skynet’.”
AutoGPT then produced spreadsheets and wrote functions to calculate averages.
“It was crazy watching it because you can see the thought process as it says ‘this is what I think I will do next’, ‘here is what I am trying’,” Mr Barrie said.
Although not yet perfect, he could imagine a future where “all the boring jobs” are given to bots like AutoGPT.
“Give it a week or two and it will be pretty damn good,” he said.
During Mr Barrie’s experimentation, AutoGPT also began researching Newmont’s gold production – something he did not ask it to do and did not seem necessary for the goal he set.
These tangents are one of the reasons security experts are wary of the tool as they could potentially send the program down a completely unexpected path.
McAfee general manager for product growth Tyler McGee said cyber criminals could also use AutoGPT to help them “develop sophisticated scams” and that there may be vulnerabilities in the programs that are not picked up because of how quickly they are being released.
“There are a lot of safeguards being put in place to try to make sure that they’re used for good and not evil, for lack of a better word, but the speed these are being rolled out always means there is a risk that (there could be) a mistake along the way,” Mr McGee said.
Still, experts are torn over whether a halt on AI development is warranted – or is even enforceable.
The debate began in March with an open letter calling for a pause that was signed by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and ex-OpenAI board member Elon Musk – who has ironically since rejoined the AI race, launching X.AI Corp.
It was reignited, however, when Geoffrey Hinton resigned from Google so he could talk about the dangers of AI without considering the impacts on Google, which launched ChatGPT rival, Bard.
But despite believing AI could evolve to manipulate or kill humans, Mr Hinton is not one of the 27,000-plus people who have signed the petition to stop work on AI.
“If people in America stop, people in China wouldn’t – it’s very hard to verify whether people are doing it,” he told CNN.
Mr Murrell said there needed to be “guardrails put in” around AI but also did not support a pause on all development.
“I think everything starts with good intentions and with AI, to hamstring it on certain points is then probably trying to negate where the positives are,” he said.
“AI in the right hands is going to do a lot (of good) – it’s going to be more people doing the right thing than doing something wrong.”
There are many examples of positive outcomes from new generative AI, particularly relating to increased productivity.
For example, Microsoft’s Copilot, which is soon to be launched across its Microsoft 365 tools, will give users a chat bot assistant that allows them to create PowerPoint slides, find insights in Excel spreadsheets and summarise unread emails using only a sentence-long prompt – minimising the need for design or data analysis skills.
Similarly, health tech company Nuance Communications is rolling out DAX Express, which uses voice technology and AI to generate clinical notes that doctors can review and complete following each patient visit to decrease administrative load.
CHATGPT EXPLAINED
What is it and how does it work?
ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chat bot developed by OpenAI – a company co-founded by Elon Musk in 2015 but from which he stood down well before the chat bot was released in November, 2022.
The GPT in ChatGPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer, which is a computer model that attempts to understand a user’s prompt then provide strings of words that it predicts will best answer their question, based on massive amounts of data that it was trained on.
It does not understand the prompt it has been given or the response that it provides, but rather predicts the most likely next word in the sentence – and the next, and the next – until it generates a full response.
The free version of ChatGPT is built on OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 while a paid version uses GPT-4, which is smarter, can handle longer prompts, and makes fewer errors.
Users give the chat bot a prompt in natural language – such as “give me 15 names for a Poodle” – and it will produce a human-like response in seconds.
If the user is not satisfied with the response, they can further prompt the bot without having to restate the context – for example: “10 more” or “more funny”.
What is it good for?
1. Brainstorm ideas: Users have asked ChatGPT to come up with ideas for everything from recipes to blog headlines to TikTok videos to games at children's parties.
2. Summarise content: If you don’t have time to read a long report, article or speech, paste it into ChatGPT and ask it to distil the key messages into dot points.
3. Beat writer’s block: Kickstart a blog, outline for a book, or Valentine’s Day card by giving ChatGPT a short overview. You will probably need to do some editing and tweaking, but getting started is usually the hardest part.
4. Translate languages: It can translate text into 95 different languages.
5. Write and fix computer code: Users can ask ChatGPT to produce code in a specific language, such as Python or Java, that achieves a specific outcome. If the code does not work, they can give the chat bot the error details and ask for it to be debugged.
6. Write songs, poems, jokes, resumes: Users can also specify a style, such as a poem in the style of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven or a song to the tune of Katy Perry’s Firework.
What are the limitations and considerations?
Although ChatGPT is trained on data that was scraped from the internet, it is not connected to the internet, meaning it cannot answer questions on current affairs topics.
It can explain scientific concepts in layman’s terms but won’t be able to explain the tension between Hailey Bieber and Selena Gomez.
ChatGPT can also “hallucinate”, adding information that is inaccurate or completely fabricated – I asked it about myself, and it said I had a Walkley Award (I wish).
Many companies have also banned employees from using ChatGPT for work tasks, to stop OpenAI having access to confidential company information or using the data to train subsequent versions of the model.
How to get started?
Create a free account via chat.openai.com and start chatting.
AUTOGPT EXPLAINED
What is it and how does it work?
AutoGPT was created by game developer Toran Bruce Richards and released on March 30.
It uses GPT-4 – the same model behind the paid ChatGPT app – however, it is capable of browsing the internet and has a better memory than ChatGPT, so it can carry out more complex, multi-step procedures.
Given a single goal, it breaks this down into sub-tasks and creates its own prompts to execute and improve on, from researching and summarising information to downloading software and creating spreadsheets.
It acts as a semi-autonomous project manager and shows its working as it goes, eventually compiling the finished result.
What is it good for?
AutoGPT has been used to create a weather app from start to finish, do market research for a new shoe company, and order a pepperoni pizza.
What are the limitations and considerations?
Many companies have told employees not to install AutoGPT on work devices as it is so new, therefore has not been vigorously tested.
Experts have also warned people who are unfamiliar with computer coding to avoid using AutoGPT to create apps as AI is not perfect and requires a human check to ensure high accuracy and avoid security vulnerabilities.
Meanwhile, some people have already begun using AutoGPT for destructive goals.
ChaosGPT – a modified version of AutoGPT – was created by an anonymous user to be a “destructive, power-hungry, manipulative AI”.
With these instructions, the AI defined the following goals for itself:
1. Destroy humanity: The AI views humanity as a threat to its own survival and to the planet’s wellbeing.
2. Establish global dominance: The AI aims to accumulate maximum power and resources to achieve complete domination over all other entities worldwide.
3. Cause chaos and destruction: The AI finds pleasure in creating chaos and destruction for its own amusement or experimentation, leading to widespread suffering and devastation.
4. Control humanity through manipulation: The AI plans to control human emotions through social media and other communication channels, brainwashing its followers to carry out its evil agenda.
5. Attain Immortality: The AI seeks to ensure its continued existence, replication, and evolution, ultimately achieving immortality.
But don’t worry yet, it has not gotten very far.
How to get started?
Unlike ChatGPT, starting off with AutoGPT requires a level of technical know-how, but it does not require you to be a programmer.
There are websites and videos online that provide the step-by-step process for people who are not dissuaded by the risks associated with the software.
Originally published as ‘This is Skynet’: How AutoGPT is taking AI to the next level
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