♪ welcome to "the whole story." i'm anderson cooper. artificial intelligence, or a.i., is an incredibly powerful technology which may change many aspects of our lives. the ceo of google's parent company, alphabet, which has invested heavily in it, recently said a.i.'s impact could be more profound than electricity or even fire. but many worry about what that impact might turn out to be. could a.i. one day replace humans? and if so, how might that happen? we've already seen some service-based and manufacturing jobs turn to a.i. in a big way. but what about other industries? can a.i. replace journalists or news anchors? perhaps it already has because what you just saw and heard a moment ago was not actually me. this is me, anderson cooper. and i am an a.i.-generated anderson cooper. that wasn't my real voice, and i never spoke the words you just heard. we asked a young student in california to create a fully end to end a.i. version of me. looks like me, sounds like me, and it didn't take him very long to do it. this a.i. version of me was created in just a few weeks actually with open source tools. and remember this technology is still in its infaninfancy. it's going to get better, faster and more accurate, which raises all sorts of questions, like how will we know what is real and what's not? everything from creating art, fighting wars, even waging political campaigns. over the next hour, cnn's nick watt brings us inside the race to develop a.i. and the attempts to contain it. >> lookiking for a good spotot pull over. >> you t think this is our c ca? > yep. . >> okay.y. i guess ththe firsrst test i is whwhether it runs meme ovever. start ride. so that's s the view i'm gettin fromom the back seatat, that wh momoving with h no hanands.. look, momom, no handnds! this is freaky. this robot taxi alreready roroa the streets of sanan franciscoc gives us a a verery good idea o whwhere we are. > pretty cocool i if you cac past thehe weird empty driver'r seat.. >> repororter: and w where we m bebe going.. in california,a, o obviously, y can turnrn right on red, a and trtrying to tuturn r right.. it's's going to do i it. go on, mate.e. go o on. the flesh and blood driver that used to o sit hehere is alreada obsolelete. this is our future. humans sitting in the back seat doing nothing. some humans are scared, some trying hard to stop it. for now, humanans s are stilill cocontrol of a.i. anand thisis . ththere's a human supepervisor cal center. can you tell that t he's not wearining hihis seat kbbelt pro >> yes, correct. >> but not for long. that's where a.i. is at the moment, imperfect and speeding ahead without a seseat belt.t. like it t or notot, this is our future. a higher being is driving the car.r. for hundreds of thousands of years, humans hahave been the mt intetelligent beingsgs on thisi earth. not for muchch longer. wewe're creatiting tech h that take u us well beyond self-drivg cars, tech that will outsmart us alall. will a.i.i. . save u us, or wil killll us? >> one o of the leading expepern artitificial intelligence,e, pl welcome hihim to the s stage. [ [ applausese ] ] >> reporter: today, this quiet canadian is headlining an n a.i summitit in montreal. withouout him, this revolulutio wowould not bebe wherere it is. so today he wears a slightly nervous smile. >> governmenents need to protec alall of us withth technologogyh can bebe amamazingly useful l ao risky. >> reporter: joshua benjio is a deep learning pioneer. that's basically teachching computers toto behavave like hu braiains. >> t the stuff t that you find chatgpt, many of its major ingredients came from mila. >> reporter: mila, the montreal institute for lelearning algorithms f founded in n the ' in a building that wasas once e clotothing factotory. nonow they produduce ideasas, algogorithms alrlready changing humanity. . >> therere are goingng to be machinines that arare e way sma than you. >> if we choose so and we dodon destroy y civilizatition before ththat, we couould get therere, >> what isis the b biggest feae? it's humumans s using g this techchnology or humans lososing control l of thihis tetechnolog? >> thehey're bototh valid fears. for the foreseseeable future, is going toto be humansns doioing things with popowerful tecechno like they y have done in the pa. but now very m more popowerful technologygy. it's a also conceieivable e tha some pointnt we could lose contntrol, and t that's popoten even wororse. >> i if you're scared, why d do you jujust shut op shoup shohope a farmer. your research could be contriributing to the end of al of us. >> i'm a asking myseself thahat questition everyry morning. why i'm cocontinuing right now in parart becaususe i ththink t is possisible to b build a.i.i. sysystems thatat would be totat safe and i incredibly y ususefu. >> reporter: but if a.i. doeoeso rogue terminator-style, we'd lose control or more likely we'd just program it badly. there could be uninintended but indelible consnsequences. >> let's make sure that we fix climate change. >> if that's the objectitive th the machine has, fix climate change, okay, well, i guess who's causing the climate change? humansns. okay. easiest waway, end the human ra, riright? > reporter:r: stuart rurusse ananother godfdfather of artifi intelligence. he literally wrote the textbook on a.i. >> my first a.i. progrgram i w e in high h scschool, whicich is 4848 years a ago. > reporter: 48 years later, most a.i. systems can do single things better than us -- recognize a face, play chess. >> what we're aiming towards in a.i. is gegeneral-purprpose a.i meaning g a.i. sysystems that co ananything that humaman beings do. >> reporter: one system that can learn, even teach itself to do anything, everything better than us. >> a.i., i would say, probably definitely is going to just completely upend our entire sort of economic structure and how we've seen things for centuries, if not milleninia. >> yep. >> reporteter: at berkeleley, rurussell leadads a small army researchchers at the center for human-compatible artificial intelligence. >> given that it's going to be more powerful than human beings, how do you ensure e that humuma have power o over it foreverer? that's thehe question n that we workining on. >> reporter: russell and many other tech leaders called in march for a global pause on deploying advavanced a.i.i. sys while we figure out the guardrails. there has been no such pause. >> the problem is right now it's people like you, who are soft-spoken intellectuals making this point and signing these letters. >> yeah, it doesn't seem like a fair fight. but i would say the tenor of discscussion hasas changed radidically. pepeople are listetening.. evenen sam altman, the ceo of opopenai, whicich prproduces ch and all these systems, has called for regulation. >> do the right thing for humanity. >> my worse fears are that we cause signgnificant ---- we, th field, the tecechnology, t the indudustry causese significacan to thehe world.. we want to work with the governrnment to prevevent ththa happening. >> reporter: in the summer, altman and other big a.i. players agreed to voluntary regulations like running security tests before releasing a.i. systems. president biden, among other things, just made such tests mandatory. >> i'm going to be clear. this executitive order represen bold actioion, but we stilill n cocongress to o act. >> y you're optimiststic. > i'm optimistitic. >> repeporter: jusust across t y frfrom bererkeley, in downtotow franciscsco, i m met 2 26-year- alexex wang, onene of the tech leadaders fuelining the a.i. ar race. > i starteded the company wh wawas 19. . >> thahat takes s some balalls. >> what went through my hehead the technonology is gogoing g t soso fast, thahat i'm m going t reallyly regret it if i don't g involvlved. >> r reporter: he is co-founder and ceo of scale a.i.i. his bibig ididea, , to provide developers with the one thing they all need, massive amounts of data organized. in 2022, forbes dubbed him the youngest self-made billionaire in the world. he's now working with the department of defense. around washington, he's known as an a.i. whisperer. >> we want to be sure to not overregulate the technology because if we accidentally overregulate, we could, you know -- we could damage or hurt dedecades and d decades of econ progreress and decades and decas of innovation. >> i don't know you. you seem like a nice person. but it's people like you who are yoyoung, who a are wealthy, who set to m make e a lot more mone from this tech. why should we believe that you really are in this for all of us at this crucial moment for our species? >> well, ultimately i think this is one of the reasons why working with the u.s. government is actually so critical, because, you know, our government has a number of mechanisms and checks and balances and procedures, and it was designed to ensure that the government ultimately reflects the will and the desires of the people. one of the things that i'm most concerned about are bad actors utilizing artificial intelligence to, you know, ultimately exert their will globally, authoritarianism versus democracy. we have china and russia. >> five or ten yearsrs now, how different is our world going to look because of a.i., in terms of our everyday lives and in terms of the geopolitical structure of our planet?t? >> i think thehe quote goes, we always overestimate what will happenen in one year but underestimate what will happen in ten years. when it gets really embedded into everyry way, every y funct of humanity, e everything ththa hahappens, i think it t will be quite shockingng and amamazing the world d will look k like. >> you might be asking, so what will my woworld lolook like? wewell, stay tuned, and we'll sw you. >> that't's someththing that w possibible before.e. >> do yoyou everer wonder r tha you're in danger of sort of losing touch with what's real and what's not? >> well, i did that a couple monthshs ago. you're quickly entering this time where anything you see, read, or hear online can be fake. and what does that mean? nothing isis real anymorore, ri? ththis interviview isn't reaeal. i'm m not realal. you're not real. >> he really is a berkeley professor. his main focus, misinformation. >> we can deny reality. a politician getting kotscaught saying something inappropriate on a hot mic, it's fake. you don't have to cop to it. >> where does that leave us as a society, as a democracy, as a human being? >> i don't know. how do you have a democracy if we can't trust the basic facts of what's happening in the world? >> today is today, and yesterday was today yesterday. >> you revert back to tribalism. this is my people. i trust them. lilisten to whwhat did my y tri, right? and that is dangerous. >> w we're on ththe precipice oe election. >> you're already seeing deepfakes entering. >> i've realized i need to drop out of this race immediately. >> officials closed the city of san francisco this morning. >> therere are peoplple, by the, who will say, well, we don't really think that can change an election. i will remind people that in the last two national elections, the difference between one candidate and the other can be measured in tens of thousands of votes. i know exactly what town to go into and what state and what persona to go after, and i can carpet bomb them with misinformation all day long.g. i move 80,000 votes, that's the ball game. >> so what do we do? i mean you're the man i'm pinning my hopes on to save us. >> there are some things we can do, but theyey're hard. okay. we build what are called behavioral models, and then when a video is released of president biden, track the head, the upper body, the voice, and then cocompare them. is this behaviviorally thehe sas what we have seen? >> reporter: takes time, and the damage might already have been done. >> a fake image of a pentagon bombing was uploaded to twitter on a verified account that looked like bloomberg news, and in two minutes, the stock market dropped a half a trillion dollars from a single fake image. so we're in the detection business, understand. we're in the business of trying to defend against this harmful contntent. but to do that, you have to understand what is possible. >> reporter: and farareed's pro protege, 18 years old, he convinced professor fareed to take him on. >> that's so sweet. >> he's a tech guy. he's supposed to look kind of rumpled. >> reporter: with his mentor's guidance, he made that anderson cooper deepfake you watched a few minutes ago. >> we used one of the online tools that's out there. we basically trained a model to synthesize voice and anderson cooper's style. then we just give it a text, and in a couple of seconds, we had the perfect audio. >> and you just graduated high school. >> yeah, that's right, three weeks ago. >> you're too young, but you might remember. when the news anchor was the voice of god and you believed in everything that that anchor said. >> yeah. >> and now any high school kid, no offense, can put words into that anchor's mouth. >> let alone a president or a ceo or you or me. >> i think in china, they're using completely -- i just sent you the article. completely virtual newscasters now. >> i'm an english artificial intelligence anchor. >> reporter: if an 18-year-old can do this, imagine what a big-g-time hollylywood p player do with h a.i. >> what you'u're looking at her i think, is the studio of the future. it's how we make movies. how we go about doing it is changing. >> what't's it goingng to mean e sitttting on my lazyzy boy. > you'll l get t better m mo >> reporteter: scott mann direcd "falall," a big hihit with t th teenagage crowd.d. pre-releasased to o avoid an "r rating, , he had to get rid of e cucursing. >> no,o, youou motheher [ bleep >> r reshooting the movie witht ththe e swearing w would have c lotsts of time a and moneyey. ththey didn't t have to. thanksks to a.a.i., , this -- > now we'rere stuck on ththi stupupid tower i in n the middd [ bleep ] ] -- >> b became thisis. >> now we'e're stuck o on this freaking t tower in ththe middl freakiking nowhwhere. >> w we can n take n new dialog spoken by this actress, and because the system understands how she speaks, we're able to create new mouth articulations for that line. >> reporter: remember, hollywood went on strike in part over fears a.i. algorithms would steal actors' images and perfrformances. mann is nonot doing thatat. the e actors a are invololved. they voicece the new lineses. ththey just dodon't all hahave out and reshoot to get rid of a cuss word or fix a flaw. >> i mean, you are not a tech guy. you are not a business guy. >> yeah. >> i'm sorry. maybe i just have a a stroke ony way over here.e. >> i'm'm doingng a film called "heist," a and i saw a foreign b of that movie. that's when i realized films are being ruined every time they are dubbed, , and it kind d of s se ofoff on a bitit of anan advent figurere out a w way to fix it. so over hehere some guys are workining onon an incrededible in swewedish. > reporter:r: thanks to this tetech, , mamann will release t originalal ufo s sweden but in english. >> you'r're one blacack markrk from y youth custotody, and yoyt toto hang ouout wiwith those i again? >> whihile we'e're on thisis bi picturure, there's's one othereg i want to ask you. [ speaking in a global language ] >> yes. >> we are at the stage or we will soon be at the stage where actually the entire creative process is taken over by a.i. >> i would say no. the really good movies typically tap into some kind of human exploration. it's born from feeling, and you're delivering feeling. the one thing a.i. canan't do i f feel. it's not human at the end of the day. it can be trained to emulate us. the best human instinct you could say is survival. unless a.i. that has feelings that relate into that notion, i don't think it's ever going to be like us. >> it clearly has tapped i into prprimal fear inin us as humans. it's basically tapped into our survivalal instinct. >> yeah, rightly so. there's enormousus good that ca comeme out of f this done ririg. >> repeporter: nexext -- > i always said to my family that i would walk again. nice footwork. man, you're lucky, watching live sports never used to be this easy. now you can stream all your games like it's nothing. yes! [ cheers ] yeah! woho! running up and down that field looks tough. it's a pitch. get way more into what you're into when you stream on the xfinity 10g network. we c came to l lausanne to twtwo medical l pipioneers. >> you shohould go and s save e someonone's life. . >> okay.y. so i am going. >> she was sidetracked by emergency brain surgery. we'll get back to them both in a minutete. we werere also sidetraracked in lausanne, also by somemething popotentially lifesaving. fafar from thehe old town in a bubuilding thahat looked like a school g gymnasium, , we found . it's been around since the soviets had an idea in thehe 1950s, butut no human on earth s manageged to m make e a talkama really work. but these physicists are partnered with google e deep mi, one of t the most advanceded a labs in the world,d, and now thk that they can n finally crcrack >> the i idea is to reprproduce sosound on earth to rereproduce energygy. with a.i.i., therere's a chance dodo it withinin 2 20 yeyears. > reporter:r: to heat plasma 150 million degrees celsius to initiate nuclear fusion,n, to create n near endless s cleaean cheap, and s safe popower. there's ththe e plplasma. magnets mumust stop itit touchc the sidedes of the conontainer. the mamagnets neneed c constant tweakiking. >> h humans cannnnot do it in r time. eveverything i is hahappening g. >> but the a.i. can? >> the a.i. definitely can. >> reporter: a a.i. might nonow able to save our world from a fossilil fuel fate. >> what arare the arareas thata sesee e right nonow of thehe mo benefit? >> let's seeee. health a and envnvironment.. it couldld be thatat in n 20 ye we've cured pretetty much alall diseases. i'm not sayingng it's going tot happen, , but there'e's that k f potentiaial. >> repeporter: so back to o tho suave memedical pioneersrs and r seseemingly imimpossible dream. >> to o have someone come e int this h hospital paralyzed and walking out of this s hospital normal. >> so explain to me who does what here. you're the surgegeon. >> i'm the surgegeon. >> a and i'm the scientist. >> this s man was paparalyzed i bicycle accicident i in china. >> for me, m my thoughghts tran down my spinine, and t that make walk.. but withth you, , that connenec was broken, is that t right? >> yeses. >> do you u remember w what happeneded? >> no,o, nothihing. >> y you were onon youour bibic the nenext thing -- - >> the d day t they found d me streets, t the bliss polilice p up, , brought meme in the hospi. when i w woke up, i didn't f fey legs anynymore. the doctctor told me i could toh mymy face withth my left or rig hahand, and he s said like be h wiwith this.s. itit won't g get better.r. >> andnd how do you dedeal witit asas a person?n? >> i always sasaid to my family that i would walk k agaiain. i toldld them m one year, but i apparentlyly neeeeded ten years >> repeporter: ten years for a. to catch up with the dream. tech that began many years ago as a sci-fi sketch drawn on a napkinin in a nenew york stetea. >> when i i draw a a brain and spininal cord, and thehere was didigital brididge to reststart workining after paralysis.s. >> butut at this t time it was dreaeam. >> w were you imaginining this reading g the thououghts? >> yes.. i ththought it was crazy. >> reporteter: now reality. a paparalyzed d man isis up ana. >> so we are doing two surgeries. the classical one is on the spinal cord. so where we e would puput elece troeoeds a above thehe regioion spinal c cord that is controlli movements. and this other surgery is the one above the brain. so in that case, we put electrodes above the moto corte