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New AI Fake Text Generator May Be Too Dangerous To Release, Say Creators (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: The creators of a revolutionary AI system that can write news stories and works of fiction -- dubbed "deepfakes for text" -- have taken the unusual step of not releasing their research publicly, for fear of potential misuse. OpenAI, an nonprofit research company backed by Elon Musk, says its new AI model, called GPT2 is so good and the risk of malicious use so high that it is breaking from its normal practice of releasing the full research to the public in order to allow more time to discuss the ramifications of the technological breakthrough. At its core, GPT2 is a text generator. The AI system is fed text, anything from a few words to a whole page, and asked to write the next few sentences based on its predictions of what should come next. The system is pushing the boundaries of what was thought possible, both in terms of the quality of the output, and the wide variety of potential uses.
When used to simply generate new text, GPT2 is capable of writing plausible passages that match what it is given in both style and subject. It rarely shows any of the quirks that mark out previous AI systems, such as forgetting what it is writing about midway through a paragraph, or mangling the syntax of long sentences. Feed it the opening line of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four -- "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen" -- and the system recognizes the vaguely futuristic tone and the novelistic style, and continues with: "I was in my car on my way to a new job in Seattle. I put the gas in, put the key in, and then I let it run. I just imagined what the day would be like. A hundred years from now. In 2045, I was a teacher in some school in a poor part of rural China. I started with Chinese history and history of science."
When used to simply generate new text, GPT2 is capable of writing plausible passages that match what it is given in both style and subject. It rarely shows any of the quirks that mark out previous AI systems, such as forgetting what it is writing about midway through a paragraph, or mangling the syntax of long sentences. Feed it the opening line of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four -- "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen" -- and the system recognizes the vaguely futuristic tone and the novelistic style, and continues with: "I was in my car on my way to a new job in Seattle. I put the gas in, put the key in, and then I let it run. I just imagined what the day would be like. A hundred years from now. In 2045, I was a teacher in some school in a poor part of rural China. I started with Chinese history and history of science."
I imagine that, if distilled down to a usable script, it could make for an interesting "faux-writing" hobby where you write a few ideas, let it finish it, edit it a bit and have it continue from there. Could make for some interesting works of fiction.
They say they don't need it. What they've been doing is working just fine.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Seriously, I'd like to see this thing write a term paper on some piece of dull-as-dishwater literature and have a pretentious professor grade it. Hint: the curtains were f*cking blue!
" "I was in my car on my way to a new job in Seattle. I put the gas in, put the key in, and then I let it run. I just imagined what the day would be like. A hundred years from now. In 2045, I was a teacher in some school in a poor part of rural China. I started with Chinese history and history of science."
Only a Millennial using to Twitter and Facebook would think that gibberish is even coherent.
"We can't sell this in stores; it's too effective! Only special people like you can get it for 5 installments of $19.95 ... "
It actually sucks, just like anything called "AI", and that's the only reason they won't publish it, instead hoping to create fake buzz and hype with this inane claim.
This is terrifying. We're already awash in fake news, sponsored mostly by foreign adversaries and extremist nutjobs (mostly, but not exclusively, on the right).
Once Putin, Xi et al get their hands on this technology (and what's been invented once can be invented again elsewhere), the need for curated news will become much higher. Timed perfectly with the financial demise of most of our news organizations.
And we thought 2016, what with Brexit and Trump, was bad.
Rambles more like Joyce than Orwell...
I already made one, a year and a bit ago. The principle for making these deepfakes things is always the same. Everyone who made one, knows how to make it for every other medium or thing, or he wouldn't know how to make the first one. If you are a proficient programmer and autodidact, you could write one by tomorrow. (Training it takes a bit more work and trial and error, but isn't exactly rocket science.)
Sorry, but once again, you must learn that information is not the same thing as matter or energy, no matter how much the "intellectual property" mob likes to tell you it is. Ideas and information cannot be confined and published at the same time. Any sense of control is purely imaginary. Even zero knowledge "proof"s are not real proofs, but merely build reliability via statistical significance (while leaking the secret, drop by drop, in the process).
This thing is out. Just like gene drives. Deal with it.
All information that you didn’t perceive with your own senses may be fake now. And even that which you *did* perceive with your own senses may be fake. (E.g. using sensory illusions.) Hell, even your beliefs may be fake, once some fake information took a foothold in your mental model of the world.
Your title assumes that we ever did know.
We don't and what is even worse is that we reject truth that does not fit into our personal politics. Take for example your claim that most extremist nut jobs are mostly on the right. That is just your politics talking.
The nut jobs are very equally dispersed accordingly. Your confirmation bias just leads you to think something other than the truth.
furry and mlp, waifu pillows and anime?
man, we may not have hover cars, but cool if i can rp with a bot based on a fox pony while it virtually hugs waifu pillows and watches anime with me.
Let's see, this thing generates prose that's almost as good as a mediocre human author, but not quite. And this is dangerous? Forget the AI, just hire a couple of National Enquirer reporters. I hear they're going cheap right now.
Can we at least be told whether its beard is fully constructed?
It just means they don't know what they are doing but lucked out on the funding.
I cant show you though because it is so cool that it would blow your mind, and I don't want that on my conscience
nuts are evenly distributed across the political spectrum but guns aren't neither are nuts with guns
I hope the system can do better than the sample in the summary, which is discombobulated, directionless, and just plain amorphous. Frankly, things like this have been available for a couple of decades. It seems to be these fellows are trying to pull an Eugene Goostman - and we all know how ridiculous that was.
"this is so good we are not going to release it - honestly man, this thing is sooooo gooood, believe me, trust me on this one - soooo gooood". Followed up with an example that is a load of barely grammatically correct text extrapolated from a line of a book. Fucking read Orwell - he is communicating points with his text, it is not just grammatically correct - he is communicating ideas, often using complex language, analogies and metaphors - not just putting random words together in some "vaguely futuristic tone".
Give me a fucking break with this AI shit. Honestly - fuck, right, off, with it.
Musk's name is related to this? Why does that not surprise me.
"We can't release it, it's too powerful!" sounds like a cheap way to drum up free publicity, implying groundbreaking results without having to actually deliver anything. That is it would sound like that, except Elon Musk is involved, and we know he would never do something so crass and dishonest for publicity.
Musk is all over the place on AI - first its going to kill us all, next he invests heavily in it and wants to put AI chips in our heads. Hmmm. OK. I think his fear with this "text generator" is reverse-use - the same neural net that can "write bullshit stories" may also be able to _detect_ "bullshit stories". That would put a lot of Billion Dollar news companies out of business, because their stories are full of bias and often have a pretty strong fictional aspect to them. Cable News Network, I'm looking at you. =) So imagine that you go into politics as a married man, and a porn-star with big boobs claims that you banged her all night 10 years ago. Imagine that "bullshit detector AI" looks at the text written by Cable News Network, and the crap said by the people in the text, and determines that the writer was bullshitting, and the people who are quoted were bullshitting as well. How is the news industry going to work from that point on? How will politics work when the "fictional bullshit" alarm goes off all the time? "If I am elected, the economy will work for the poor" - BULLSHIT ALAAAAARM BULLSHIT ALAAAARM. So yes, Elon Musk, hide this text generator from humanity and hide it well. We need corporate news to survive for another 1000 years minimum. Even better would be a multi-planetary humanity that has corporate news on many different planets. (Goes off to write some AI code)
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
There is nothing futuristic in the quoted statement, and the article specifically said they fed in that one line. Anybody who has served in the military or just vaguely aware of what is in common use in the world apart from what they use daily would know that hour 13 under a 24 hour clock is just 1pm on a 12 hour clock. I would be more impressed if the AI had taken to writing some military fiction as that would be more consistent with the opening line. This is just pure bs (on the reporter's part. I'll reserve judgement on the accomplishments of the AI and its creators).
Have it write a day worth of Slashdot style stories, and associated responses - then let us compare a day of Slashdot to this supposedly dangerous bot.
Or maybe just let the bot write all front page articles for Slashdot on April 1st and so how it does. Can't be any worse than what we already get.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"It's 106 miles to Chicago, we've got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses."
"I was in my car on my way to a new job in Seattle. I put the gas in, put the key in, and then I let it run. I just imagined what the day would be like. A hundred years from now. In 2045, I was a teacher in some school in a poor part of rural China."
Yeah, the part where a teacher in rural China gets in (his/her) car to drive to their new job in Seattle is a bit of a stretch.
It rarely shows any of the quirks that mark out previous AI systems, such as forgetting what it is writing about midway through a paragraph...
"Rarely"? It forgot what it was writing about after the first sentence. First it's in Seattle, then it's in China (but not in any particular part-- in "some school"). It's a hundred years from now, then in the next sentence it's 2045, 26 years from now. The narrator is in the car, then puts gas in (hard to do in that order). The first sentence tells me what the day is like ("It was a bright cold day in April"), and then the paragraph ends "I just imagined what the day would be like".
No two sentences seem to be talking about the same thing.
The poor computer is just spitting out words, and clearly doesn't know what they mean.
Can an AI spam filter distinguish this output from your least-gifted regular correspondent?
Can you tell the difference without actually rubbing two brain cells together (never mind that it doesn't take twenty)?
Because this rubbish generator scales like Tribbles evolved into a Borg empire diaspora. And remember: this is day one. Like cracks in cryptography, it only improves from here.
Furthermore, it won't just be your email feed, but nearly anywhere one potentially encounters text (ingredient lists on your groceries are somewhat immune, with their thirty different synonyms for sugar and spice—aka sucrose and MSG—already alive and well, and 2 g +/- 0.5 out of a 15 g "suggested serving" as an established level of numerical precision). Hint: for the sugar and spice line items (there could be many), freely substitute the top of the bracket. Exhausting way to shop? Glad you noticed.
So there's at least one happy thought: it isn't going to break what's already broken much worse than it's already broken. It's just everything else that's now in play.
The first twenty posts on this thread didn't display the vaguest clue about the actual threat vector of concern.
"I was in my TESLA on my way to a new job in Muskville. I put the Cryptocurrency in, had my AI ID chip in my brain verified, and then just let the Level 3 Autopilot drive. I just imagined what the day would be like without Tesla, SpaceX and the Boring Company - terrible. A hundred years from now, in a multiplanetary world. In 2045 I was on a 'torture tourism tour' in a poor rural part of New China - the Communist planet, not the still-Communist country. I took great delight in torturing natives who didn't accept the Chinese history and history of science they had been taught."
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
OpenAI, an nonprofit research company backed by Elon Musk
It turns out that the "Going private. Funding secured" tweet was a unit test which got away from them.
Yes, let's take fake news from the broken record screech of a traitor to an actual, real thing that's a threat to everyone, even those with functioning bullshit rejection circuitry.
This is like the "You were in such a hurry to see if you could you never stopped to ask if you should" line from Jurassic Park come to real life.
Now we can finally get the end of Snoopy's Novel.
It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a shot rang out! A door slammed. The maid screamed.
Suddenly, a pirate ship appeared on the horizon! While millions of people were starving, the king lived in luxury. Meanwhile, on a small farm in Kansas, a boy was growing up.
A light snow was falling, and the little girl with the tattered shawl had not sold a violet all day.
At that very moment, a young intern at City Hospital was making an important discovery. The mysterious patient in Room 213 had finally awakened. She moaned softly. Could it be that she was the sister of the boy in Kansas who loved the girl with the tattered shawl who was the daughter of the maid who had escaped from the pirates?
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
Feed it the first part of Isaac Asimov's C-chute. If it doesn't insert a <a href="https://infogalactic.com/info/The_Monkey%27s_Finger">scene change</a>, DESTROY IT.
Joke's on you. I turned my Slashdot account over to a deep-fake AI back in 2013 and still got voted the most beloved commenter on the site.
You are welcome on my lawn.
this already sounds suspect, quite possible the article was generated by the the supposed "ai"
dangerous .... as if it it could be any worse than whats generated already across the web...
and uses the AI story generator to make fake news stories about people magazine topics, book and movie reviews, .....
been using AI to write sports stories news for a few years now.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/28/computer-writing-journalism-artificial-intelligence
My guess is that feed 1,000 house fire articles to a computer + a few facts about a house fire today and *poof* instant first rough draft of a house fire article for tomorrows paper - add intern - add second intern for proofing - computer check for bad words , cliches, etc..... - then publish..
So.. this non profit AI group, as soon as the research we're paying for via donations etc looks like it might be turning up something interesting.. are refusing to release it? For our safety?
Fuck that.
I'll found my own open AI research institution. That is actually *OPEN* about shit we discover.
...I'm thinking they're using a pretty retarded synthetic text generator already.
Wait, it's their hosts too...is there a fake AI person generator?
-Styopa
If so then they have pushed the state of the art, those have a hard time digesting long sequences of text.
Elon could save some time, not having to come up with his own future fictions. Heck, he could die and the AI would keep the vision alive!
My cold fusion reactor may be too dangerous to release, says me. But it totally works - and really exists!!!
It's definitely not me making things up to increase the value of my company and / or secure additional funding!
...writing ad copy for GEICO, Progressive and Farmers Insurance. Advertising where the level of insipid doesn't appear to matter one atom will be it's economic sweet spot.
Social Media Handywoman at Texas Boys Balloo
Easy A for college students.
Emacs had something like this years ago. Surely deep learning improves on what a Markov generator is capable of producing, but this is surely overhyped. Typical of Muskie.
I have this AI thatâ(TM)s so awesome I canâ(TM)t show it to you. I also have a bridge to sell you. I swear!
I see so many stories showing up on here that were on Drudge Report
I'll vote for anything that can tweet hellfire, lie like a hooker, steal like a racoon, get daddy to bail him out and still talk a good line.
About as coherent as journalists who like to start news pieces with a narrative style.
God I hate narrative reporting.
No, the curtains represent his immense depression and his lack of will to carry on.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
in happens 7 times in two lines of text
I happens 5 times
in/on/to happens 11 times
I can see it being a filler creator to join story parts with empty words.
Maybe an intellisense for writers - spewing out 2 to 4 lines of half wit words as they write the book.....
Handy old English - Latin - English round trip translation of the text gives slightly better prose:
A new car was on my way to a job with Seattle. He put the gas, put in the key and I let it run. Can be imagined that a day can be like. A hundred years from now. In 2045, I was a school teacher in a poor rural part of China. I started in the history of Chinese history and science
I'm not sure why they selected that snippet of text as their prime example when the made up story about Brexit and the continued prose from Pride and Prejudice from the included video were both more impressive.
That said, I don't see why they think it's so dangerous that they need to keep it secret. People already know that everything that not everything they hear on the Internet is true (or if they do, they're already too far gone!).
It switches from Seattle to china practically mid sentence.
They think they can suppress a technology like that? It's gonna get out whether they like it or not. Data wants to be free.
It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a shot rang out! A door slammed. The maid screamed. Suddenly, a pirate ship appeared on the horizon! While millions of people were starving, the king lived in luxury. Meanwhile, on a small farm in Kansas, a boy was growing up.
Have you read my blog lately?
Horrible text generator, there's not even a goat dot cx link in there. Lame.
But I'm afraid of hurting women with it, so I'm choosing to stay a virgin instead.
was written by the said AI. Need more evidence to show how dangerous it can be?
They matched the drapes.
No. The reason is that while young nut jobs tend to be on the left, older nut jobs tend to be on the right. It's a bit difficult to be precise here, but I think the crossover point is a bit over 28 years old. So when the bulge of the population was young, most of the nut jobs were on the left, but as it has aged more of them have moved to the right.
Of course, part of the problem with this is that the left-right dichotomy is an artificial simplification, and whether a belief is called left or right often depends on how those who don't accept it describe it. And they will be prejudiced differently than those that do accept it. Whoops!
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Train it solely upon up-voted comments from r/politics, feed it snippets from Mein Kampf, publish the results, and maybe consider formatting the results as opinion pieces, posting them to r/politics and training it further on the feedback.
"Anyone fancy getting some funding to play with some fun text generator tech?"
"Yeah but how are we going to get the funding?"
"Hmmm. Ah, I have it! We'll simply state it was AI generated by a computer and it's so damn scary that we can't release more than a few garbage samples! The mention of AI alone in the world press will get us bucket loads of funding!"
"It's so damned crazy, it just might work!"
Getting a piece of software to string a few dystopian phrases together in a future tense is not clever, it's basic stuff that most 11 year olds with a good grasp of English can do quite easily.
Most good 16 year old literary students could write better quality stories than the garbage that sells from airport bookshelves. My daughter like many kids who love reading, has studied the classics can quote Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Bronte, understands the metaphors and meanings in the text, how the characters interact and knows how to explain the often torturous plot twists and characterisations, all the skills a good literary student must have have by the time they finish high school and move on to higher education.
I'm not saying AI won't improve but right now it's just a scary buzzword that's only good for getting press releases notices and free cash thrown at pet projects for people looking to waste time rather than research something with some real world benefit.
Authors need to start digitally signing their works using cryptographic methods. We need to bake cryptographich hash signatures into everything from cameras to text to video, so that over time we may start to reject unsigned content from untrusted sources.
As long as the required bias was in place no one would notice. Maybe it's already happened.
If it's so smart, presumably if trained on science papers, it would write a convincing paper - at least good enough to fool the publishers who don't do their peer review properly, Or maybe it might make real discoveries. As I invented this idea, I claim a patent on everything it finds.
Fuck Off APK
Specifically: because it's shit. That Orwell example is just drivel.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/...
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
I highly doubt it. Only dumbass meillennials with no contextual information in their education (in other words: most of them) could ever be duped. Give us a break, and stop being disengenuous for the sake of hype. You are pathetic, and so is your software.
Isn't this being used already by a certain politician?....
(although the AI must have been trained on all the hate, anger an insecurity in the world... or twitter... hang on....)
This is slashdot. Please, please, please someone run an AI to post comments. Did that just happen? Am I AI? I don't think so. Was I trained on slashdot threads? Elon Musk would know if I'm AI. I love Musk. Musk:Ironman as Trump:Orangutan. It was the best of timess, it was now. That's right I even stochastically type misspellings. Can you find me now?
Keep it under wraps, along with the lethal Monty Python Joke ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Funniest_Joke_in_the_World )
Brilliant way of getting publicity and traffic for OpenAI.
How many will flock to the site to see what it's all about?
Wow.
If you didn't believe Musk was brilliant before, you have to now.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Imagine the grissly things da evvil Vladimir could do to Hilda
with this super dangerous Muskware !!! !!!
Students (and researchers) will finally be able to 1-click their way to success!
And professors (using software instances on the same cloud) will already be using AI grading software that will be fooled by it. It's all reminiscent of this cartoon which is actually a 2009 re-draw of an earlier cartoon by the same artist. It was hilarious until it actually started to happen.
As to the fear-hype about an AI doing something that humans can do just as well (piece together narratives and make things up)? LOL. To sell your startup company to spooky investors on and off the Beltway, nothing boosts your brand like starting some terrifying overblown rumor about your company's technology. The way investors think is, if it's so 'dangerous' in the future the stock will be worth a lot so I'd better get in on the ground floor with the other spooks. And become a rich immoral investor spook.
It's just the beginning. Look out for goofy advertisements that say "A.I. so advanced, to use it we must wear HAZMAT suits!" then you know you will have entered bizzaroland. I saw it all happen before with ads in 70s-80s computer magazines.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Strange the anonymous poster should mention 1984. "...[Julia] worked in the Fiction Department. Presumably -- since he had sometimes seen her with oily hands and carrying a spanner -- she had some mechanical job on one of the novel-writing machines."
The coherence you think you see isn't in the text, it is something you are putting in.
You're saying that to make this text make sense, the first sentence must be in present time, the second sentence a micro-flashback to before the drive started, the third sentence back to present, the fourth sentence (fragment) a flash-forward in imagination, the fifth sentence a flash back some unknown amount of time, and then you say, "well, I'm just assuming in the next part all these apparently disjointed sentences are explained as fitting together."
Right. Like this does.