Thomas Bangalter, one in every of the 2 former members of the Grammy Award-winning music duo Daft Punk, revealed he’s “terrified” of artificial intelligence — despite the pair famously performing as robots for nearly 30 years.
The 48-year-old musician paradoxically claimed that the increasing popularization of AI was not what Daft Punk actually stood for, despite the performers’ outward appearance.
“We tried to make use of these machines to specific something extremely moving that a machine cannot feel, but a human can,” he explained to the BBC on Tuesday, adding that glorifying the rise of robots was not their goal.
“We were at all times on the side of humanity and never on the side of technology,” he said of Daft Punk, which was comprised of him and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, 49, before they broke up in 2021.
“I almost consider the character of the robots like a Marina Abramović performance art installation that lasted for 20 years,” he said, referring to the eclectic Serbian artist.
The “Harder, Higher, Faster, Stronger” songster — who said the duo “blurred the road between reality and fiction” — added that his concern with AI comes when it goes beyond making music and results in “the obsolescence of man.”
“As much as I like this character, the last item I’d wish to be, on the planet we live in, in 2023, is a robot,” he boldly stated.
Computer-generated “deepfake” images have bamboozled the web twice in recent weeks: once with Pope Francis’ swaggy — and phony — white puffer jacket, and unreal photos of former President Donald Trump causing a scene as he “got arrested” by the NYPD.
Last week, it was reported that an AI chatbot allegedly convinced a Belgian man to commit suicide.
The news arrived as quite a few tech industry leaders called for an “immediate pause” on the training of advanced AI systems for no less than six months.
But AI expert Eliezer Yudkowsky argued the proposed moratorium doesn’t go far enough.
“It took greater than 60 years between when the notion of Artificial Intelligence was first proposed and studied, and for us to achieve today’s capabilities,” he said. “Solving safety of superhuman intelligence — not perfect safety, safety within the sense of ‘not killing literally everyone’ — could very reasonably take no less than half that long.”
