Warren Buffett: AI has 'enormous potential for good and enormous potential for harm'

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You're unlikely to see Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett adding artificial intelligence stocks to his vast portfolio anytime soon.

At the annual meeting of Berkshire shareholders on Saturday, Buffett fielded a question about AI's impact on traditional industries, and said he didn't know anything about the technology, but "that doesn't mean I deny its existence or importance or anything of the sort."

One of AI's applications that stuck out to the legendary investor: its potential utility for fraudsters.

"When you think about the potential for scamming people ... if I was interested in investing in scamming, it's gonna be the growth industry of all time and it's enabled, in a way," Buffett said.

Buffett would go on to compare the invention of AI to the development of the atomic bomb. Here's what he said.

No getting the 'genie back in the bottle'

Buffett relayed an experience he had where he encountered an AI-generated version of himself online.

"I saw an image in front of my eyes on the screen, and it was me, and it was my voice," he said. "And wearing the kind of clothes I wear, and my wife or my daughter wouldn't have been able to detect any difference. And it was delivering a message that no way came from me."

Buffett saw firsthand what the Federal Trade Commission and others have been warning consumers about: the enormous potential for bad actors to use deepfake and voice cloning technology to part people with their cash.

"Based on the one I saw recently, I practically would send money to myself over in some crazy country," Buffett joked.

Capitalist that he is, Buffett understands that AI could be a world-changing technology — one that could be used for good or ill.

Buffett likened AI to the development of nuclear weapons, a technology he describes as a "genie": powerful and world-changing and unable to return to the bottle from which it came.

"AI is somewhat similar. It's partway out of the bottle, and it's enormously important, and it's going to be done by somebody," he said. "We may wish we'd never seen that genie, or it may do wonderful things."

The future of AI will come down to the way that those in power use it, Buffett said.

"I don't have any advice on how the world handles it, because I don't think we know how to handle what we did with the nuclear genie," he said. "But I do think, as someone who doesn't understand a damn thing about it, that it has enormous potential for good and enormous potential for harm. And I just don't know how that plays out."

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