OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says these human jobs will entirely disappear due to AI advancements
Altman's comments come as OpenAI steps up its presence in Washington. The company is planning to open an office there, and this visit marks a shift in tone from its earlier push for strict AI regulation. Under the Trump administration's new 'AI action plan', the focus now appears to be more on speeding up development and infrastructure rather than slowing things down.But the founder of OpenAI didn't ignore the risks. He raised concerns about how AI could be used maliciously, including the threat of voice cloning being used for fraud. 'The thing that keeps me up at night the most is the potential for cyberattacks on financial systems from rogue nation states using AI,' he warned. It's a reminder that while AI holds promise, it also brings serious challenges we are only beginning to understand.- Ends
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Time of India
40 minutes ago
- Time of India
From Google Gemini's meltdown to ChatGPT's privacy risks: Why students need to rethink relying on AI for their lives
Students have switched from relying on general web browsers to depending on more comprehensive tools like ChatGPT for quick information and learning. From asking them to do their assignments, provide research, or even act as a personal therapist, AI tools have become an integral part of student life. The pace of this shift is fast and unpredictable, with users constantly discovering new ways AI can streamline their lives. However, alongside these benefits, new risks and pitfalls are also emerging. As tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini become increasingly available to students, recent incidents and revelations have highlighted key considerations that students must keep in mind before leaning too heavily on AI in their lives. 'I have failed you completely and catastrophically' - Google Gemini after deleting user files A Software developer experienced what can only be described as a worst-case scenario when using Google Gemini's command line interface tool. His experience serves as a cautionary tale for students who might consider using AI tools for managing their academic files and projects. The developer was conducting routine testing with Gemini's CLI tool, attempting to rename and relocate a folder called "claude-code-experiments" into a new directory. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Live Update: The Strategy Uses By Successful Intraday Trader TradeWise Learn More Undo The operation appeared straightforward; basic file management that should pose no challenge to sophisticated AI systems. Gemini responded with apparent confidence, indicating it would first create the destination folder before transferring the files. The system subsequently reported successful completion of both tasks. However, when the user searched for his files, the promised new folder was nowhere to be found. More alarmingly, his original folder had been completely emptied. The ensuing attempts to rectify the situation proved futile. Despite multiple recovery efforts, Gemini could not locate the missing files and eventually acknowledged making what it termed a "critical error." The AI system's final admission was stark: "I have failed you completely and catastrophically." The files were irretrievably lost due to system restrictions, with no possibility of recovery. This incident illustrates a fundamental risk inherent in AI systems, even highly advanced tools can execute operations incorrectly, leading to permanent data loss. For students managing thesis research, coursework, or long-term projects, such failures could prove academically devastating. Your conversations with ChatGPT are not private Beyond the risk of data loss lies another significant concern: the privacy implications of using conversational AI systems. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been explicit about a critical limitation that many students may not fully appreciate, ChatGPT conversations lack the privacy protections that users might assume. Unlike confidential communications with counsellors or private discussions with mentors, interactions with ChatGPT are not protected by privacy safeguards. OpenAI has clarified that user conversations may be utilised to train and improve their AI systems. This means that sensitive information shared during these interactions could potentially be incorporated into the system's knowledge base. For students, this presents particular challenges. Academic discussions about research methodologies, thesis concepts, or proprietary information could inadvertently become part of the AI's training data. Similarly, students seeking support for personal matters may unknowingly compromise their privacy by sharing sensitive details with the system. The implications extend beyond individual privacy concerns. Students working with confidential research data, discussing unpublished academic work, or exploring innovative ideas may find their intellectual property inadvertently exposed through these interactions. Know what must be considered before you drown with no rescue The incidents involving both Gemini and ChatGPT highlight several critical areas where students must exercise caution when incorporating AI tools into their academic workflow. Data security remains paramount : Students must implement comprehensive backup strategies that do not rely solely on AI systems for file management or storage. Regular backups to multiple locations, including external drives and cloud storage platforms, provide essential protection against catastrophic data loss. Privacy awareness requires students to carefully consider what information they share with AI systems. Personal details, research concepts, academic strategies, and sensitive information should be treated with the same caution one would exercise when sharing such information in any non-confidential setting. Legal and ethical considerations surrounding AI use continue to evolve. Students must remain informed about their institutions' policies regarding AI assistance, particularly when it comes to academic integrity and the appropriate use of automated tools in coursework and research. The principle of supplementation rather than replacement should guide AI usage. These tools can provide valuable assistance with research, writing support, and problem-solving, but they should enhance rather than replace traditional academic methods and personal oversight. Ready to navigate global policies? Secure your overseas future. Get expert guidance now!
Indian Express
42 minutes ago
- Indian Express
The chatbot culture wars are here
For much of the past decade, America's partisan culture warriors have fought over the contested territory of social media — arguing about whether the rules on Facebook and Twitter were too strict or too lenient, whether YouTube and TikTok censored too much or too little and whether Silicon Valley tech companies were systematically silencing right-wing voices. Those battles aren't over. But a new one has already started. This fight is over artificial intelligence, and whether the outputs of leading AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are politically biased. Conservatives have been taking aim at AI companies for months. In March, House Republicans subpoenaed a group of leading AI developers, probing them for information about whether they colluded with the Biden administration to suppress right-wing speech. And this month, Missouri's Republican attorney general, Andrew Bailey, opened an investigation into whether Google, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI are leading a 'new wave of censorship' by training their AI systems to give biased responses to questions about President Donald Trump. On Wednesday, Trump himself joined the fray, issuing an executive order on what he called 'woke AI.' 'Once and for all, we are getting rid of woke,' he said in a speech. 'The American people do not want woke Marxist lunacy in the AI models, and neither do other countries.' The order was announced alongside a new White House AI action plan that will require AI developers that receive federal contracts to ensure that their models' outputs are 'objective and free from top-down ideological bias.' Republicans have been complaining about AI bias since at least early last year, when a version of Google's Gemini AI system generated historically inaccurate images of the American Founding Fathers, depicting them as racially diverse. That incident drew the fury of online conservatives, and led to accusations that leading AI companies were training their models to parrot liberal ideology. Since then, top Republicans have mounted pressure campaigns to try to force AI companies to disclose more information about how their systems are built, and tweak their chatbots' outputs to reflect a broader set of political views. Now, with the White House's executive order, Trump and his allies are using the threat of taking away lucrative federal contracts — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI were recently awarded Defense Department contracts worth as much as $200 million — to try to force AI companies to address their concerns. The order directs federal agencies to limit their use of AI systems to those that put a priority on 'truth-seeking' and 'ideological neutrality' over disfavored concepts such as diversity, equity and inclusion. It also directs the Office of Management and Budget to issue guidance to agencies about which systems meet those criteria. If this playbook sounds familiar, it's because it mirrors the way Republicans have gone after social media companies for years — using legal threats, hostile congressional hearings and cherry-picked examples to pressure companies into changing their policies, or removing content they don't like. Critics of this strategy call it 'jawboning,' and it was the subject of a high-profile Supreme Court case last year. In that case, Murthy v. Missouri, it was Democrats who were accused of pressuring social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to take down posts on topics such as the coronavirus vaccine and election fraud, and Republicans challenging their tactics as unconstitutional. (In a 6-3 decision, the court rejected the challenge, saying the plaintiffs lacked standing.) Now, the parties have switched sides. Republican officials, including several Trump administration officials I spoke to who were involved in the executive order, are arguing that pressuring AI companies through the federal procurement process is necessary to stop AI developers from putting their thumbs on the scale. Is that hypocritical? Sure. But recent history suggests that working the refs this way can be effective. Meta ended its long-standing fact-checking program this year, and YouTube changed its policies in 2023 to allow more election denial content. Critics of both changes viewed them as capitulation to right-wing critics. This time around, the critics cite examples of AI chatbots that seemingly refuse to praise Trump, even when prompted to do so, or Chinese-made chatbots that refuse to answer questions about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. They believe developers are deliberately baking a left-wing worldview into their models, one that will be dangerously amplified as AI is integrated into fields such as education and health care. There are a few problems with this argument, according to legal and tech policy experts I spoke to. The first, and most glaring, is that pressuring AI companies to change their chatbots' outputs may violate the First Amendment. In recent cases like Moody v. NetChoice, the Supreme Court has upheld the rights of social media companies to enforce their own content moderation policies. And courts may reject the Trump administration's argument that it is trying to enforce a neutral standard for government contractors, rather than interfering with protected speech. 'What it seems like they're doing is saying, 'If you're producing outputs we don't like, that we call biased, we're not going to give you federal funding that you would otherwise receive,'' Genevieve Lakier, a law professor at the University of Chicago, said. 'That seems like an unconstitutional act of jawboning.' There is also the problem of defining what, exactly, a 'neutral' or 'unbiased' AI system is. Today's AI chatbots are complex, probability-based systems that are trained to make predictions, not give hard-coded answers. Two ChatGPT users may see wildly different responses to the same prompts, depending on variables like their chat histories and which versions of the model they're using. And testing an AI system for bias isn't as simple as feeding it a list of questions about politics and seeing how it responds. Samir Jain, a vice president of policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit civil liberties group, said the Trump administration's executive order would set 'a really vague standard that's going to be impossible for providers to meet.' There is also a technical problem with telling AI systems how to behave. Namely, they don't always listen. Just ask Elon Musk. For years, Musk has been trying to create an AI chatbot, Grok, that embodies his vision of a rebellious, 'anti-woke' truth seeker. But Grok's behavior has been erratic and unpredictable. At times, it adopts an edgy, far-right personality, or spouts antisemitic language in response to user prompts. (For a brief period last week, it referred to itself as 'Mecha-Hitler.') At other times, it acts like a liberal — telling users, for example, that human-made climate change is real, or that the right is responsible for more political violence than the left. Recently, Musk has lamented that AI systems have a liberal bias that is 'tough to remove, because there is so much woke content on the internet.' Nathan Lambert, a research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI, told me that 'controlling the many subtle answers that an AI will give when pressed is a leading-edge technical problem, often governed in practice by messy interactions made between a few earlier decisions.' It's not, in other words, as straightforward as telling an AI chatbot to be less woke. And while there are relatively simple tweaks that developers could make to their chatbots — such as changing the 'model spec,' a set of instructions given to AI models about how they should act — there's no guarantee that these changes will consistently produce the behavior conservatives want. But asking whether the Trump administration's new rules can survive legal challenges, or whether AI developers can actually build chatbots that comply with them, may be beside the point. These campaigns are designed to intimidate. And faced with the potential loss of lucrative government contracts, AI companies, like their social media predecessors, may find it easier to give in than to fight. 'Even if the executive order violates the First Amendment, it may very well be the case that no one challenges it,' Lakier said. 'I'm surprised by how easily these powerful companies have folded.'
Economic Times
an hour ago
- Economic Times
TCS shares slip nearly 2% after company announces over 12,000 job cuts
Shares of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India's largest IT exporter, slipped 1.7% to an intraday low of Rs 3,081.20 on BSE on Monday, after the company announced plans to lay off around 2% of its global workforce — roughly over 12,000 employees — over the year. ADVERTISEMENT The move comes amid growing macroeconomic uncertainty and increasing AI-led disruptions impacting technology demand. As of the end of June 2025, TCS employed 613,069 people globally. In a statement, the company said the layoffs would primarily impact middle and senior grades and are part of TCS's larger journey to become a 'future-ready organisation.' The company added that the deployment of some associates may no longer be feasible under current market company emphasized that the transition is being managed carefully to ensure continuity in client service. Affected employees will receive their full notice period compensation along with additional severance benefits. TCS also plans to provide insurance extensions, outplacement support, counseling, and transition decision follows closely on the heels of legal complaints filed by several employees against TCS's recently modified 'bench policy.' The updated policy reportedly allows just 35 annual days for employees to remain unassigned before being subject to performance-related action, and it requires a minimum of 225 billable days annually. ADVERTISEMENT The broader IT industry has also shown signs of a slowdown. According to a previous report by ET, job additions across the top six Indian IT majors fell sharply by over 72% in the April–June quarter, with only 3,847 new hires compared to 13,935 in the preceding the layoffs, TCS reaffirmed its commitment to long-term strategic initiatives, including investments in new-age technologies, entry into new markets, deployment of AI at scale, deeper partnerships, and the development of next-generation infrastructure. ADVERTISEMENT On Friday, TCS shares closed flat at Rs 3,134.35 on the BSE. Also read: NSDL IPO: Issue opens on July 30, here's what you need to know about GMP, issue details (Disclaimer: Recommendations, suggestions, views and opinions given by the experts are their own. These do not represent the views of The Economic Times) (You can now subscribe to our ETMarkets WhatsApp channel)
