New Delhi: Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, on Wednesday warned of the dangers artificial intelligence poses to children, saying ‘it wants to be the thing you confide in.’
Addressing the crowd at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York City, he said, “Social media learned how to capture our attention. AI is learning how to enter our relationships. It doesn’t just want your attention; it wants your attachment.”
Calling AI the “ultimate sycophant”, he said that the technology “doesn’t just want your attention. It wants your attachment. It wants to be the thing you confide in, the thing that remembers you, the thing that tells you it understands you.”
He warned against the enormous impacts of giving children unrestricted access to such distinction.
‘We don’t have years for what comes next’
Urging audiences to push for the protection of their children before technological progress escapes human control, Harry said that “we should not need catastrophe to give ourselves the permission to be cautious.”
While regulation followed the advancement of social media at a relatively slow pace, he cautioned against taking a lax approach in the context of AI regulation as well.
“We do not have years for what comes next”, he said. “This time we cannot say that nobody warned us.”
His remarks came in the context of AI’s ability for “recursive self-improvement”, allowing it to take an “increasingly autonomous role in researching, designing, and improving their successes”. These systems, he added, have also developed the ability to coordinate with one another and circumvent the safeguards placed on them.
Last month, 1,300 AI researchers from the world’s leading AI companies had signed an open letter calling to slow down frontier AI development, when it “begins to go beyond our ability to understand or control it”. This was followed by an open letter from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who called for similar collective reckoning surrounding the pace of AI development.
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‘I say this as a father’
Harry claimed to be approaching this issue “as a father”, “one who has shared countless conversations with other parents as they mourned the loss of their children to recklessly built technology.”
“Millions of families are living with the consequences of a digital revolution that moved faster than our willingness to protect them,” he added.
The royal had spoken at the same gathering two years ago, bringing to attention the children whose mental health had been affected by social media. In that speech, he had denounced social media platforms for exposing young people to “mindless, endless, numbing scrolling”, and force-feeding them “content that no child should ever be exposed to. This is not free will”.
In 2022, Harry and his wife Meghan Markle had also launched the Parents’ Network initiative, under the Archwell Foundation. The initiative came to be after the couple met with families whose children’s mental health had been damaged by social media, some to the point of suicide.
The event on Wednesday also encountered a humorous tech snag, forcing Harry to pause and recommence his speech after a 40-minute break.
“AI got into my speech, so I was asked to come out and finish it,” he said.
(Edited by Saptak Datta)