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."

Comments

Musk Is Probably Panicked About Reverse-Use

[dryriver]

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)