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Warren Buffett rings the alarm on AI, comparing it to the atomic bomb and warning it could supercharge fraud

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Warren Buffett has raised the alarm on AI, warning that it could supercharge fraud by making scams more convincing than ever.

"Scamming has always been part of the American scene," the famed investor and Berkshire Hathaway CEO said during his company's annual shareholder meeting on Saturday.

Buffett said that images and videos created using artificial intelligence have become so convincing that it's becoming virtually impossible to discern if they're real or not.

"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 said.

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 not an expert on 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.

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