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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 ... "
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.
It just means they don't know what they are doing but lucked out on the funding.
Exactly. Sounds like something Elon Musk would dream up.
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.
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.
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.
...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
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!
...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
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.
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 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?
I am a satisfied HOST FILES user. Why would I stalk apk?
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.
As long as the required bias was in place no one would notice. Maybe it's already happened.
And what does that have to do with being handicapped? They are making an AI, not a fake person. Otherwise they would teach it trashtalking.
it has quite a lot to do with it. did they give the human player a huge screen that shows all of the map at once even? no, they didn't. but they gave their ai just that - direct feed of the game data that the human player had no access to(but it would be possible to alter the human players user interface to show some of that data to even out the playing field - or have the human player have multiple minions to have click per minute speeds to match the ai).
and look, you can make a traditional ai beat human players if you disregard any such click / map awareness rules - that is not impressive in the slightest. with such you can micromanage how many zerglings you want on a map wide coordinated patterns impossible through normal game access.
furthermore if you specifically say that it's handicapped to have human like performance in giving commands, and then your "handicap" is anything but, then of course you'll be called bullshit on. if anything for it to be impressive it would need to be just watching the screen through a camera and moving the mouse around - because that's the impression the people who published it were _trying_ to give to the reader. because that sounds impressive. the real story was anything but impressive.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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.
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"
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?
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.
Remove the cliches, and most articles will disappear.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
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.