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‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton warns real threat not killer robots, but emotional manipulation
Hinton, who spent decades advancing machine learning and neural networks, is now urging restraint and ethical foresight in AI development.
He stressed that these technologies are no longer just tools for productivity but active participants in the “emotional economy” of modern communication, with capabilities improving at a rapid pace.
Geoffrey Hinton, widely regarded as the “Godfather of AI”, has issued a stark warning that artificial intelligence may soon outstrip human beings not only in intelligence but also in emotional manipulation.
In a recent interview clip shared on Reddit, Hinton argued that while fears often centre on apocalyptic scenarios involving killer robots, the true danger lies in the ability of AI systems to persuade and emotionally influence people on a scale far beyond human capability.
“These [AI] things are going to end up knowing a lot more than us. They already know a lot more than us, being more intelligent in the sense that if you had a debate with them about anything, you’d lose,” Hinton cautioned. “Being smarter emotionally than us, which they will be, they’ll be better at emotionally manipulating people.”
Hinton, who spent decades advancing machine learning and neural networks, is now urging restraint and ethical foresight in AI development. He explained that current systems have already absorbed manipulative techniques simply by predicting words across vast troves of online text. “It’s learned all those manipulative skills just from trying to predict the next word in all the documents on the web because people do a lot of manipulation, and AI has learned by example how to do it,” he said.
On ChatGPT, Gemini and other models
Discussing the capabilities of today’s leading large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Meta’s LLaMA, Hinton said these systems do far more than generate coherent sentences. They also detect and replicate subtle patterns in human communication.
Hinton referenced studies indicating that AI is already as effective as humans at influencing others. “If they can both see the person’s Facebook page, then the AI is actually better than a person at manipulating them,” he warned.
He stressed that these technologies are no longer just tools for productivity but active participants in the “emotional economy” of modern communication, with capabilities improving at a rapid pace.
For Hinton, the conversation around AI safety must now shift from dystopian fantasies of machines turning violent, to the subtler yet potentially more pervasive threat of machines that can persuade, manipulate and emotionally outmanoeuvre human beings.
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