The godfather of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has claimed killer "battle robots" are already being made as he warned AI trained by "bad people like Vladimir Putin will have a bias towards bad".

Dr Geoffrey Hinton, who pioneered some of the fundamental building blocks of modern AI, went public with warnings the tech is becoming too powerful as he stepped down from his role at Google back in May.

He revealed he is "scared" for the future of AI and believes the tech could be used by "bad actors".

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Expanding on his concerns about advancements in AI during an appearance at the Collision Conference last week, the computer scientist claimed it's possible they may "develop the goal of taking control", which he warned would mean we're "in trouble".

But discussion host Nick Thompson brought up the opposing view of fellow AI godfather Yann LeCun, who believes because AI has been built by "good humans for good purposes" it will have a "bias towards good."

Asked whether or not he agreed with this, Dr Hinton revealed it would depend on who the AI had been trained by.

"I think AI that's been trained by good people will have a bias towards good, an AI that's trained by bad people like Putin, or somebody like that, will have a bias towards bad," he said.

He went on to note another example of "bad" AI would be killer battle robots, which he claimed are already in production.

"We know they're going to make battle robots, they're busy doing it in many different defence departments. So they're not going to necessarily be good since their primary purpose is going to be to kill people," he added.

Dr Hinton said these killer robots wouldn't even need to be very intelligent for them to quickly become a dangerous problem.

"Even if the AI isn't super intelligent, if defence departments use it for making battle robots it's going to be very nasty, scary stuff," he warned.

He explained they would make it much easier for world leaders like the Russian president to invade poor countries.

He said: "Even if it's not super intelligent and even if it doesn't have its own intentions, it just does what Putin tells it to, it's going to make it much easier, for example, for rich countries to invade poor countries.

"At present there's a barrier to invading poor countries willy-nilly which is you get dead citizens coming home. If they're just dead battle robots that's just great, the military-industrial complex would love that."

It's not the first time Dr Hinton has warned Putin and other "bad actors" could use rapidly advancing AI for sinister purposes.

In an interview with the MIT Tech Review after stepping down from Google he claimed Putin "wouldn't hesitate" to make battle robots to kill Ukrainians.

He said: "We know that a lot of people who want to use these tools are bad actors like Putin or DeSantis. They want to use them for winning wars or manipulating electorates."

"Don't think for a moment that Putin wouldn't make hyper-intelligent robots with the goal of killing Ukrainians.

"He wouldn't hesitate. And if you want them to be good at it, you don't want to micromanage them—you want them to figure out how to do it."

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