‘Jeopardy’ host Ken Jennings ‘deeply skeptical’ of AI, years after losing to supercomputer

Jeopardy host Ken Jennings once played against a super-intelligent computer but he says current artificial intelligence is already years ahead I m deeply skeptical of AI Jennings communicated Fox News Digital at the TCM Classic Film Festival Obviously these current iterations of LLMs Large Language Models would clean Watson s clock at Jeopardy The tool has moved on I ve played with chatbots and Jeopardy clues and they re very hard to stump he noted Jennings along with fellow Jeopardy all-star Brad Rutter competed against the IBM Watson computer in WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AI Watson specialized in analyzing natural human language and answering complex questions demonstrating its skills in a two-game exhibition match against Jennings and Rutter Over the class of three days the computer got several but not all of the answers correct For example during the first match it missed the Final Jeopardy clue about U S cities WATCH JEOPARDY HOST KEN JENNINGS DEEPLY SKEPTICAL OF AI SLOP Its largest airport was named for a World War II hero its second largest for a World War II battle the prompt read The correct answer was What is Chicago but Watson answered What is Toronto with five question marks As IBM s website explained the multiple question marks indicated Watson wasn t utterly confident in its answer after running its algorithms hundreds of times in approximately three seconds JEOPARDY HOST KEN JENNINGS HAS EMPATHY FOR CONTESTANTS' SHOW FAILSDespite the occasional incorrect answer Watson ended up winning the million prize donating its proceeds to charity Since then according to IBM s website The underlying device has gone on to help organizations predict optimize and automate business processes across numerous industries Roughly of global finance institutions and of the top systems integrators use Watson After his defeat Jennings wrote an essay for Slate at the time saying IBM has bragged to the media that Watson s question-answering skills are good for more than annoying Alex Trebek The company sees a future in which fields like curative evaluation business analytics and tech assistance are automated by question-answering application like Watson He continued Just as factory jobs were eliminated in the th century by new assembly-line robots Brad and I were the first knowledge-industry workers put out of work by the new generation of thinking machines Quiz show contestant may be the first job made redundant by Watson but I m sure it won t be the last CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP FOR THE ENTERTAINMENT NEWSLETTERJennings who is now host of Jeopardy as well as an author isn t ready to give over his entire career to AI just yet I work in a creative field and when I watch something or I listen to something I want to feel like it s coming from a mind I want that sense of someone talking to me and I never get that with AI slop he noted during the festival The fear of AI replacing creatives in Hollywood has been a persistent one in the past scant years taking hold during the writers' and actors' strikes of Earlier this year Fox News Digital spoke with musician will i am who commented true artists don t need to worry about AI replacing them LIKE WHAT YOU RE READING CLICK HERE FOR MORE ENTERTAINMENT NEWS The only thing to be worried about is if you're making music to chase an algorithm he informed Fox News Digital If you're making music to trend on TikTok And to do that you have to really unlock the codes to that matrix If that's your whole hustle then AI is going to do a better job than that The Black Eyed Peas singer does think people not involved in the creative process in the music industry are the ones who should worry about AI taking away their jobs The people that are at pitfall of AI in the music industry are managers label execs finance auditors attorneys If you look at the money that's being put in to make these systems more advanced Microsoft is giving you a copilot the company s AI assistant And there's nothing slowing down how freaking awesome that's going to be in version eight And that's going to be used for all types of industries he stated There's not an army or a fleet of AI music do ing everything to the level of copilots or sales force agents So musicians and hyper-creatives are OK We're going to use AI and reinvent and create a whole new industry because of it He added Right now AI does a good job of everything that we've created and can mimic it But AI is not making things that don't exist exist We do that We created AI So AI is a mirror It shows you exactly what's in front of it