AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio warns against giving rights to chatbots, says we may need to shut them down

AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio has warned about giving technological rights to artificial intelligence tools, noting that they are showing signs of self-preservation and that humans should be prepared to pull the plug if needed.

In an interview with Guardian, Bengio compared giving legal status to cutting-edge AIs to granting citizenship to “hostile extraterrestrials”.

Bengio, a Turing Award winner, is popularly known as the ‘Godfather of AI’ along with Yann LeCun and Geoffrey Hinton, for their contributions to the field. However, in the last few years, Bengio has grown skeptical of the technology and has previously warned that the development of hyper-intelligent machines could lead to the extinction of humanity if they are built without sufficient control.

AI is showing signs of self-preservation:

During the latest interview with Guardian, Bengio said that AI models were showing signs of self-preservation, such as attempting to disable oversight systems.

“People demanding that AIs have rights would be a huge mistake,” Bengio told Guardian. “Frontier AI models already show signs of self-preservation in experimental settings today, and eventually giving them rights would mean we’re not allowed to shut them down.”

“As their capabilities and degree of agency grow, we need to make sure we can rely on technical and societal guardrails to control them, including the ability to shut them down if needed,” he added.

On the growing debate over whether AI could develop consciousness similar to human beings, Bengio said there are “real scientific properties of consciousness” that machines could theoretically replicate, but added that human interaction with chatbots is “a different thing”.

“People wouldn’t care what kind of mechanisms are going on inside the AI,” he said. “What they care about is it feels like they’re talking to an intelligent entity that has its own personality and goals. That is why there are so many people who are becoming attached to their AIs.”

“There will be people who will always say, ‘Whatever you tell me, I am sure it is conscious,’ and then others will say the opposite. This is because consciousness is something we have a gut feeling for. The phenomenon of subjective perception of consciousness is going to drive bad decisions,” he added.

“Imagine some alien species came to the planet and at some point we realise that they have nefarious intentions for us. Do we grant them citizenship and rights or do we defend our lives?” Bengio further stated.