Wooldridge did say that the proliferation of AI and its growth in intelligence does bring other risks, such as bias or misinformation.
"It can read your social media feed, pick up on your political leanings, and then feed you disinformation stories in order to try to get you for example, to change your vote," he said.
Wooldridge, however, said users should arm themselves against such risks by viewing AI through skeptical lenses and argued companies behind the tech need to be transparent with the public.
"I don’t discount existential concerns about AI, but to take them really seriously would need to see a genuinely plausible scenario for how AI might represent a threat (not just "it might be cleverer than us")," he added in comment to Fox News Digital.
The Oxford professor will lead a prestigious U.K. public science lecture series this December, the Royal Institution Christmas lectures, which has explored various scientific topics since it was launched in 1825. He will tackle explaining artificial intelligence to the public this year, highlighting that 2023 marks "the first time we had mass market, general purpose AI tools, by which I mean ChatGPT."
"It’s the first time that we had AI that feels like the AI that we were promised, the AI that we’ve seen in movies, computer games and books," he said.
The lectures will include a Turing test, which investigates whether AI demonstrates human-like intelligence. Humans will have a written conversation with a chatbot, and if they cannot tell if they are corresponding with a human or chatbot, this could show AI has matched human-like intelligence, The Guardian reported.
Wooldridge, however, pushed back that the test is not best suited to make such a determination.
"Some of my colleagues think that, basically, we’ve passed the Turing test," Wooldridge told The Guardian. "At some point, very quietly, in the last couple of years, the technology has got to the point where it can produce text which is indistinguishable from text that a human would produce."
"I think what it tells us is that the Turing test, simple and beautiful and historically important as it is, is not really a great test for artificial intelligence," he added.
The Christmas series will begin filming on Dec. 12 before it is broadcast on BBC Four between Christmas and New Years.
"I want to try to demystify AI, so that, for example, when people use ChatGPT they don’t imagine that they are talking to a conscious mind. They aren’t!" Wooldridge told Fox of the upcoming lectures. "When you understand how the technology works, it gives you a much more grounded understanding of what it can do. We should view these tools – impressive as they are – as nothing more than tools. ChatGPT is immensely more sophisticated than a pocket calculator, but it has a lot more in common with a pocket calculator than it does a human mind."