OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says he doesn't believe people would want an AI to replace his job.
"I think for my job, for example, I think the world wants to know about the person that's going to be responsible for the decisions of a company, and who they're going to hold accountable if they make bad ones, and they don't really want an AI CEO," Altman said during an episode of "Invest Like The Best" published on Tuesday.
Altman's thinking on the matter may have evolved since last November, when he told the "Conversations with Tyler" podcast that it would be akin to a failure if another company beat OpenAI to replacing its CEO with an AI model.
"Shame on me if OpenAI is not the first big company run by an AI CEO," Altman said at the time.
The OpenAI CEO said that the focus on humanity is one of the reasons that AI hasn't "upended" the economy to the extent he originally expected.
"People have a great degree of trust and enjoyment in working with other people," he said on "Invest Like The Best." "And you can go hire an AI consultant right now, or talk to an AI sales rep right now, or hire an AI engineer or whatever — somehow most people seem to still really prefer interacting with a human."
Altman said he feels the same way, too.
"I definitely would much rather engage with a person than engage with an AI for almost everything," he said.
As an example, Altman said that even though AI models can create spectacular images, people still value human-made artwork.
"There's the joke about at this point, the signature on a piece of art is most of the value, but the truth of it is you want to know about the person behind it," he said. "You read a novel, you want to know about the person behind it."
Altman said this focus on preserving and valuing humanity is one of the reasons that he has shifted his views on whether the technology will lead to mass job displacement like the kind he previously theorized. He recently said that he was "delighted to be wrong" about the short-term impact on entry-level jobs after previously stating that AI would wipe out "entire classes" of jobs.
The debate between AI-created and human-created content is roiling everything from Instagram to the books on the shelves at Barnes & Noble.
Like Altman, others in the industry have said that they are putting an emphasis on human taste or judgment. Altman suggested that "taste" might not be the best word to capture what humans do better than AI, even as he expects the models to continue narrowing the number of things where AI lags behind human abilities.
"The world may need a new kind of word for the kind of judgment that people are very good at, that AIs seem to really deeply struggle with," he said.