Consensus 2023: Edward Snowden Issues Dire Warning on AI

The former whistleblower said that AI can be "better" than humans – if we allow it.

AUSTIN, Texas – The final day of the crypto industry's longest-running conference featured former NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden issuing a dire warning about artificial intelligence (AI) and its implications for privacy and surveillance. Snowden said if AI is trained on human and machine-generated datasets, it can also be trained to be "better" than humans.

Sign up for the premium Crypto Investor newsletter today to get exclusive stories.

“People are going to be raising the red flag of 'software communism,' where we need to declare the models must be open,” Snowden told CoinDesk.

"It's a poor joke, right? [OpenAI] refused to provide public access to their trading data, their models, the weights, and so on – but they're a leader in the space. They're being rewarded. They're being rewarded for anti-social behavior."

Snowden, now the president of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, spoke remotely from Russia, and warned that the AI ecosystem needed to remain open to impede surveillance and protect freedom of speech. 

"Maybe they could stop spying on the public and start spying for the public,” Snowden said. “That'd be a net good."

At the same time, Snowden castigated the way AI companies were relying on low-quality datasets to train AI.

​​”They're training [AI] on Reddit threads,” Snowden said. “It's like the internet equivalent of YouTube comments. But you want to create something decent, good, that's creative and useful.”