Late Thursday night, Oprah Winfrey gave a special on AI, fittingly titled "AI and the Future of Us." OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, tech influencer Marques Brownlee, and current FBI director Christopher Wray made up some of the guests.

The dominant tone was that of skepticism — and wariness.

Prepared remarks by Oprah include the words that the genie is out of the AI bottle-for better or worse-and humanity has to learn how to live with the consequences.

AI remains largely beyond our control and to a large extent. our understanding, she said. "But it is here, and we're going to be living with technology that can be our ally as well as our rival.. We are this planet's most adaptable creatures. We will adapt again. But keep your eyes on what's real. The stakes could not be higher."

Sam Altman overpromises
Altman was Oprah's first interview of the night, and made a questionable case for arguing that today's AI learns concepts within the data it's being trained on.

"We are showing the system a thousand words in a sequence and asking it to predict what comes next," he told Oprah. "The system learns to predict, and then in there, it learns the underlying concepts."

Many experts would disagree.
For example, AI systems like ChatGPT and o1, which OpenAI released Thursday, predict the likeliest next words in a sentence. After all, however, these are only statistical machines, learning patterns from data. They don't have any intentionality-they're just making an informed guess.

While Altman perhaps overstated what today's AI systems could do, he highlighted the need to determine how to safety-test the very same ones.

"One of the first things we need to do—and this is now happening—is get the government to start figuring out how to do safety testing of these systems, like we do for aircraft or new medicines," he said. "I personally, probably have a conversation with someone in the government every few days."

Altman's push for regulation may be self-serving. OpenAI spoke out against the California AI safety bill known as SB 1047, calling it a move that would "stifle innovation." But former OpenAI staffers and AI experts like Geoffrey Hinton have been vocal in their support for the bill, saying it would implement much-needed safeguards in AI development.

Oprah also questioned Altman over what role does he play as OpenAI's leader. She questioned why people should trust him and he largely dodged the question, saying that his company is trying to build trust over time.
Earlier on, Altman said very directly that people should not to trust him or any one person to make sure AI is benefiting the world.

The OpenAI CEO said later that it was strange to hear Oprah ask if he were "the most powerful and dangerous man in the world," a headline news story had suggested. He disagreed but said he felt a responsibility to nudge AI in a positive direction for humanity.

Deepfakes
As was bound to happen in a special about AI, the subject of deepfakes came up.

To demonstrate just how convincing synthetic media has gotten, Brownlee compared sample footage from Sora, the OpenAI video generator powered by AI, with AI-generated footage from a months-old AI system. The sample footage from Sora was light-years ahead — a testament to the distance traveled in what seems to be a blink of an eye.

"Now, you can still kind of look at pieces of this and tell something's not quite right," Brownlee said of the Sora footage. Oprah said it looked real to her.

That led to an interview with Wray where he shared the story of when he was made aware of AI deepfake technology for the first time.

"I was in a conference room, and a bunch of [FBI] folks got together to show me how AI-enhanced deepfakes can be created," Wray said. "And they had created a video of me saying things I had never said before and would never say."

It discussed the "growing incidence of AI-assisted sextortion." A cybersecurity company, ESET, announced a "178 per cent rise in sextortion cases over the last year-which this partly enabled by AI tech.".

"Somebody pretending to be a peer targets a teenager," Wray said, "and then uses the AI-generated compromising pictures to convince the kid to send real pictures in return. In fact it's some guy behind a keyboard in Nigeria, and once they have the images, they threaten to blackmail the kid and say, if you don't pay up, we're going to share these images that will ruin your life."

Wray also addressed misinformation surrounding the next U.S. presidential election. By stating it "wasn't time for panic," he urged that it is the responsibility of "everyone in America" to "bring an intensified sense of focus and caution" to the use of AI and remember AI "can be used by bad guys against all of us."

We're finding all too often something on social media that looks like Bill from Topeka or Mary from Dayton turns out, you know, some Russian or Chinese intelligence officer on the outskirts of Beijing or Moscow, Wray said.

Actually, more than one-third of U.S. respondents to a Statista poll reported seeing false information-or at least what they considered false-about major issues by the end of 2023. Millions of views of misleading AI-generated images of candidates VP Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump have spread through social media networks, including X.

Bill Gates on AI disruption
In a bit of techno-optimistic change of pace, Oprah has interviewed the founder of Microsoft, and he said he hopes AI will supercharge fields like education and medicine.
"AI is like a third person sitting in [a medical appointment,] doing a transcript, suggesting a prescription," Gates said. "And so instead of the doctor facing a computer screen, they're engaging with you, and the software is making sure there's a really good transcript."

Gates said nothing about bias from poor training of AI.

Recently one study showed that speech recognition systems developed by the leaders of technology were twice as likely to misrecord audio from Black speakers compared with white speakers. Other research has shown AI systems perpetuate long-held, false beliefs that there are biological differences between Black and white people-beliefs that lead clinicians astray in diagnosing health problems.

AI can be "always available" and "know how to motivate you … whatever your level of knowledge is," Gates said during a classroom speech.

Not exactly how many classrooms perceive it.

Last summer, schools and colleges rushed to ban ChatGPT over plagiarism and misinformation fears. Since then, some have reversed their bans. But not everyone is convinced that generative AI has potential for good, pointing to surveys like the U.K. Safer Internet Centre's, which found that over half of kids report having seen people their age use GenAI in a negative way — for example, creating believable false information or images used to upset someone.

Late last year, UNESCO called on governments to regulate the application of GenAI in education; it has proposed age restrictions on users as well as guardrails on data protection and user privacy.