With profound regret ...

Hate to say it but yours truly has been talking about the potential dangers of AI for years with nary a positive response regarding my take until now. The problem with this well-intention plea to do a 6-month hiatus on said tech is, IMHO, moot as the horse is out of the barn, never to return as we move further into the 21st century. As Fats Waller said, No one knows, do one ...

Kevin Baragona of DeepAI (Image credit: DeepAI)

"Someone should stop the AI industry," Baragona says during our interview, which is a surprising comment from the founder of a company in the field. He launched DeepAI (opens in new tab) back in 2016, initially as an AI news portal. It now has its own text-to-image AI art generator and a bunch of AI chatbots that can respond to questions in different styles, from that of a 'drunk friend' to a 'motivational coach'. 

Baragona also joined the likes of Elon Musk in signing the recent letter that urged a pause in AI development. Asked whether this is not a little contradictory, he exclaims that DeepAI is "my only livelihood", but that he now thinks AI is developing too fast and will become "smarter than us".

"I wasn't worried about AI at all until a year ago when we started seeing exponential progress," he says. "Now I think AI is pretty scary. This is what keeps me up at night. What are we building here? Why do we need this stuff? It's really fun, it's cool, people love it. but it's almost too good, it's too disruptive."

Exactly

DeepAI's AI image generator (Image credit: DeepAI)

Like the look of DeepAI's front end. :)