Paul Sancya/AP Elon Musk, Tesla Chairman, Product Architect and CEO, speaks at the Automotive News World Congress in Detroit last month. Depending on whom you ask, advances in artificial intelligence are either humanity's biggest threat or our best shot at curing diseases.

On one side of the debate are billionaire entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk and Bill Gates and physicist Stephen Hawking, who say AI is a potential menace to humankind with super-intelligent machines that could run amok. Some of its biggest backers include billionaires Paul Allen and Jack Ma.

With criticism on the rise, supporters - led by researchers at Allen's AI institute and Stanford University - are seeking to give their field an image makeover.

Allen's group recently began touting an AI project aimed at improving medical care. Stanford is undertaking an AI study on ethics and safety set to run for 100 years. It's all part of a deliberate push in the AI community to address growing concerns about the technology as the field expands, with venture capital funding in the area rising 20-fold since 2010 and dozens of new startups popping up.

"Someone has impugned us in very strong language saying we are unleashing the demon, and so we're answering," said Oren Etzioni, chief executive officer of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. "The conversation in the public media has been very one-sided."

The more organized effort now marks the first sustained moves by scientists and entrepreneurs to engage the public and try to quell their fears.

Max Tegmark, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology physics professor and co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, is one researcher trying to carve out common ground. Tegmark began circulating an open letter in early January in Puerto Rico at the institute's first conference, which was attended by Musk, among others. The letter, whose signers now include Musk, Etzioni and many researchers and advocates on both sides, was made public on Jan. 12.

"There had been a ridiculous amount of scaremongering," said Tegmark, who sometimes goes by "Mad Max." "And understandably a lot of AI researchers feel threatened by this."

Talking about how to imbue intelligent agents with human ethics is "common sense," said Stuart Russell, a professor at University of California at Berkeley and co-author of the textbook Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. Take the example of a household robot, he said - sort of like Rosie the maid from The Jetsons.

"It has to understand human values so it doesn't do stupid things," he said. "You don't want it to accidentally cook the cat for dinner."

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Musk's warning ignites PR war over artificial intelligence