Artificial-intelligence-powered tools have quickly gone from sci-fi experiments to a big part of people’s daily lives—for better or for worse. While some people are using A.I. more to plan vacations and illustrate comic books, others have been using it to generate fake images of the pope in a puffer jacket or write fraudulent essays.

Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO and chairman, says he can hardly keep up with how quickly A.I. technology like ChatGPT is being deployed, and he thinks the tech sector must confront how to use the technology so that it does more good than bad.

“We, collectively, in our industry face a reckoning of, how do we want to make sure this stuff doesn’t harm but just helps?” Schmidt said in an interview with ABC News on Sunday. He gave the example of social media influencing election outcomes and, in some extreme cases, even leading to deaths.

“No one meant that as [the] goal, and yet it happened. How do we prevent that with this [A.I.] technology?” Schmidt told ABC News.

The former Google executive said that A.I. had the potential to address big problems that plague society. He highlighted how certain industries like health and education will benefit from the advancement of A.I. by improving access to resources.

“Imagine a world where you have an A.I. tutor that increases the educational capability of everyone in every language globally. These are remarkable,” Schmidt said.

“But, at the same time, they face extraordinary—we face extraordinary new challenges from these things, whether it’s the deepfakes that you’ve discussed, or what happens when people fall in love with their A.I. tutor?” Schmidt said. He added that he was concerned about A.I.'s “use in biology or in cyberattacks,” and said the real problem with A.I. was when it was “used to manipulate people’s day-to-day lives, literally the way they think, what they choose and so forth, it affects how democracies work.”

Although A.I. has long been a subject of discussion, it broke into the public consciousness when OpenAI’s ChatGPT was introduced last November. In a matter of two months, ChatGPT had already gained over 100 million daily active users, making history as the fastest-growing internet application ever. Since then, Google and Microsoft have introduced their A.I. chatbots.