- Warren Buffett issued a grave warning about artificial intelligence.
- The Berkshire Hathaway CEO predicted it would supercharge fraud by making scams far more convincing.
- The investor likened AI to the atom bomb, saying the world has let the “genie out of the bottle.”
Warren Buffett has raised the alarm on AI, warning it threatens to supercharge fraud by making scams more convincing than ever.
“Scamming has always been part of the American scene,” the famed investor and Berkshire CEO said during his company’s annual shareholder meeting on Saturday.
But Buffett said that images and videos created using artificial intelligence have become so convincing that it’s virtually impossible to discern if they’re real or not.
“When you think of the potential of scamming people … if I was interested in scamming, it’s going to be the growth industry of all time,” he said.
He recalled seeing a deepfake video of himself that a fraudster was using to ask strangers for cash.
“I practically would have sent money to myself over in some crazy country,” he quipped.
Buffett also likened the advent of AI to the creation of the atom bomb, echoing comments he made at last year’s Berkshire meeting.
“We let the genie out of the bottle when we developed nuclear weapons,” he said. “That genie’s been doing some terrible things lately. The power of the genie scares the hell out of me.”
“AI is somewhat similar,” Buffett added. “We may wish we’d never seen that genie.”
The billionaire, who touted AI’s enormous potential years before ChatGPT’s release, emphasized he’s no expert in the nascent tech.
“I don’t know anything about AI, but that doesn’t mean I deny its existence or importance or anything of the sort,” he said.
