15 quotes about artificial intelligence from world famous people

Over the past two years, artificial intelligence has become one of the main topics in the media and many famous people have expressed their thoughts on this topic. But if you start searching on the Internet for collections of quotes about AI, you will mostly find quotes from CEOs of multi-billion dollar companies, futurists and scientists conducting research in this field. Moreover, these collections are so similar to each other, which sometimes gives the impression that they were compiled by AI. In this article, I have collected quotes from world famous people who are usually not included in such collections of quotes:

Hideo Kojima

video game designer, writer, actor, “genius”

I don’t think AI would take over. I will order AI to do something and if they don’t listen I will gut that AI. Humans should be above it.

Source: GamesRadar+

Date of interview: Jun 17, 2023

Nicolas Winding Refn

film director, screenwriter, actor, “a fetish filmmaker”

If you start asking questions that are controversial or themes that are not acceptable anymore, [ChatGPT] shuts down. I very quickly ran into the problem that every time I would ask it things, it came back saying “I’m not able to comment on that” or “seek professional help” or “call this hotline,” almost. And I was like, well, maybe that’s the problem. That’s the whole reason why we’re doing it is wrong. So for me, it’s almost like if your work is approved by a chat, that’s a great alert system to rewrite. It was very interesting trying it because I thought I was going to use it creatively, but I really ran into always disagreeing with it. So I just stopped using it, and that was that.

Source: IndieWire

Date of publication: Jul 15, 2023

Robert “Uncle Bob” Martin

software engineer, writer, co-author of the Agile Manifesto

Every decade there are innovations that promise to spell the end of all programmers. First it was compilers. Then it was COBOL. Then it was OO¹. Then it was logic programming. Then it was fuzzy logic and backchaining AI, Then it was MDA. Now it’s LLM’s.

Source: X (formerly Twitter)

Date of publication: Sep 21, 2023

Richard Stallman

programmer, founder of the Free Software movement

We’ve been hearing a lot about artificial intelligence, and that term carries a terrible confusion… Because, as I see it, the term “intelligence” means something like ability to know or understand some area. If something can’t actually understand things we shouldn’t say it’s intelligent, not even a little intelligence, but people are using the term “artificial intelligence” for bullshit generators. People were talking about systems like ChatGPT, which doesn’t understand anything and doesn’t know anything. These that why I call these systems bullshit generators, because the only thing that they’re good at is making smooth-sounding output, any part of which could be bullshit. You can’t believe it ever — well, you’re dumb if you do. So I won’t call those “artificial intelligence” or anything with the word “intelligence” in it, because calling it that calling them that encourages people to think that what they are saying is not bullshit. It encourages people to believe them, and that gives them chance to do great harm.

So I distinguish those two areas there is real artificial intelligence. For instance, there are programs that can look at a photo of some magnified cells and tell you, with greater likelihood of being right than any human doctor, whether it’s cancerous. Or, for instance, there are artificial intelligence systems that can figure out what’s going to attract people’s attention very, very effectively. These are used by anti-social media platforms, and sad to say, they work very well. They’re very good at what they do, and what they do is getting users or used addicted.

Source: GNU Project

Date of speech: Sep 27, 2023

Douglas Crockford

programmer, writer, “JavaScript guru”

We also saw sort of an AI arms race. Where Microsoft buys the ChatGPT stuff and pushes it to the public. Google had stuff, which they thought clearly wasn’t ready, but now they need to be in a competitive situation with Microsoft, so they’re pushing their stuff, and they know it’s too early. Now there are other startups, who are trying to leap ahead of them. All this stuff is happening too fast. I my concern isn’t with the AI’s themselves, but about the misapplication of them. Again because they look so smart, but they really aren’t. We it’s difficult to make good judgments about them.

Source: Anywhere Club

Date of publication: Oct 16, 2023

Tetsuo Hara

artist, co-author of the manga “Fist of the North Star”

What AI cannot do is “be prepared to die.” You have to suffer, suffer, suffer, and think it through. Then, when you think “This is really dying,” there comes a point where you say, “This is what I wanted. That is what it means to have a soul.” I want to please all the readers with a picture that has that soul in it. For that reason, I put my life on the line, abandoning my own greed and killing myself. No matter how painful it is, I will do it. That’s all I can do.

Source: GOETHE (methodic_traveller’s translation was used)

Date of publication: Nov 10, 2023

Dino Esposito

software engineer, writer, “a cloud visionary”

AI is software, period. As software, it gets numbers and returns numbers. All concerns the media emphasize are the outcome of software pipelines that may be set up to make decisions. AI is a black box that returns a number – what is done with that number is the same “other” problem we still face today.

Source: ShiftMag

Date of publication: Nov 16, 2023

Alexey Pajitnov

video game designer, programmer, creator of Tetris

… level of artificial intelligence that exists now, and that will be in the foreseeable future, is very much based on human experience accumulated so far. That is, it does not give out any original solutions in any aspect. Therefore, for those epigones¹ who are now repeating someone’s games, artificial intelligence will really become a serious competitor, because it will do it much better. However, I don’t think that AI will be able to produce anything new, innovative, fresh in the next 50 years. So good designers can sleep peacefully.

Source: Radio Prague International

Date of interview: Dec 8, 2023

Jeffrey Zeldman

web designer, writer, “king of web standards”

One of the hottest jobs for non-humans is crafting and deploying website guestbook spam. This market’s on fire!

If you thought the guestbook spam of yore was impressive, you ain’t seen nothing yet. The new, AI-assisted comment spam has improved keyword stuffing, fewer grammatical mistakes, and, best of all, there’s tons more of it. Your Comment section was never so useless!

Source: Zeldman on Web and Interaction Design

Date of publication: Apr 9, 2024

Linus Torvalds

software engineer, creator of Linux and Git

… I’m one of those people who are very optimistic about AI, and I’m looking forward to the tools to actually find bugs. We have a lot of tools: tooling around [Linux] kernel and around any software projects obviously. We use them “religiously”, but making the tools smarter is not a bad thing. I to some degree compare it to writing things in assembly, which literally I started doing with the initial kernel was I think about 50% assembly language, and using a compiler. Using smarter tools is just the next inevitable step. So that’s going to happen, but I don’t think it’s necessarily the gloom and doom that some people say it is, and I definitely don’t think it’s the promised world that the people who are having their hand out for cash say it is. So you need to be a bit cynical about this whole hype cycle in the tech industry. I hope you all realize that it before AI it was crypto, before crypto it was cloud native. I mean the hype there’s always like a grain of reality behind it, but you need to be careful about all the BS³ around that grain.

Source: YouTube channel “The Linux Foundation”

Date of speech: Apr 17, 2024

Eric A. Meyer

web design consultant, writer, co-founder of the microformats movement

Every forum we ever contributed to, including the web itself, is being hoovered up as AI training sets. I guess the one bright spot of sharing most of my stuff via my own open web site instead of places like StackOverflow is that there isn’t some big cash payment I’m being cut out of, so I don’t feel doubly used.

Source: Mastodon

Date of publication: May 7, 2024

Natasha Lyonne

actress, screenwriter, film director, “innovator”

Anyone who’s been paying attention knows that AI is already ubiquitous. It seems to me that it’s better for us as artists to help shape this revolution than find ourselves at its mercy.

Source: Deadline

Date of publication: May 20, 2024

John Romero

video game designer, programmer, “father of FPS genre”

So what about at Romero Games, my company? Well, we use no generative AI in games at all, whether in art or code or audio or writing or designing, and we’re pretty firm about that. AI can sometimes be useful, obviously, as a super Google for research, for parsing thousands of links into a potentially definitive answer. But there’s still a lot of work to do, and AI has told me that I was born in Guatemala. And I wasn’t. I was raised by my Mexican grandmother. But at least she was Mexican, and that would have been pretty great, though. Evidently, I appear in music videos, which is news to me. And best of all, I’m the son of horror movie maker George Romero, if you didn’t know that. Which given the names of the games I make and the movies he makes, well, that’s kind of plausible. But the truth is that these things aren’t true, and obviously that’s a danger, …

Source: GitNation Foundation

Date of speech: Jun 15, 2024

Grady Booch

software engineer, writer, co-author of UML

AI: Alchemy Incarnate

Source: X (formerly Twitter)

Date of publication: Aug 6, 2024

Jakob Nielsen

web usability consultant, writer, “king of usability”

We’re currently living through one of the rare episodes in human history where technology changes dramatically, and you have a chance to build a new world. Take this chance! This is particularly true if you’re younger than 40, because building this new world will become your formative experience that you’ll look back to in awe and envy for the rest of your life. Building an AI project now can be the defining moment of your career. Doing exactly the same in 20 years will be a mundane everyday project, defined by drudgery rather than excitement. Similar to the difference between designing a website in 1997 and 2017.
…
Opportunity knocks. AI beckons. Pioneers wanted. Experience the revolution. Shape the future. Secure your legacy. Time is now. Act or regret.

Source: UX Tigers

Date of publication: Aug 29, 2024

¹ Most likely, he mean object-oriented programming (OOP).

² Epigone (from Greek epígonos is born after, descendant) a less distinguished follower or imitator of someone, especially an artist or philosopher.

³ Most likely, the abbreviation BS means “bullshit”. On the other hand, Linus’ interlocutor (Dirk Hohndel) believes that this abbreviation means “beautiful science”.