A Tsunami of Fake News is On Its Way and Here is How

The Elon Musk funded OpenAI non-profit has created a breakthrough system for writing high-quality text. It can write text, performs basic reading comprehension, machine translation, question answering, and summarization and all without task-specific training.

The system is able to take a few sentences of sample writing and then produce a multi-paragraph article in the style and context of the sample. This capability would let AI’s to impersonate the writing style of any person from previous writing samples.

GPT-2, is a 1.5 billion parameter Transformer that achieves state of the art results on 7 out of 8 tested language modeling datasets in a zero-shot setting, yet still simplifies (or in AI term underfits) their database called WebText. Samples from the model reflect these improvements and contain coherent paragraphs of text. These findings suggest a promising path towards building language processing systems which learn to perform tasks from their naturally occurring demonstrations.

They created a new web scrape which emphasizes document quality. They only used outbound links from
Reddit which had a karma score of 3 or higher. This indicates the quality of the articles to be interesting, educational, or just funny. The resulting dataset (WebText) contains text of 45 million Reddit sourced articles.

The system can write text according to the desired style and context.

AI Ghostwriting and Better Translations and Speech Recognition

Many good applications of this system will emerge as follows:

* AI writing assistants
* More capable dialogue agents
* Unsupervised translation between languages
* Better speech recognition systems

Fake News on Steroids and Super-spam

Obvious bad applications can emerge as follows:

* Generate misleading news articles
* Impersonate others online
* Automate the production of abusive or faked content to post on social media
* Automate the production of spam/phishing content

OpenAI was worried about more fake news and spam, so they limited the release of the system. Other AI groups will still be able to replicate the work, a few groups will probably be able to copy it in the next year.

AI like this will become common leading to a ton of fake news and spam AI, to a potential widespread in 1 to 2 years.

Written By Christina Wong. www.nextbigfuture.com

3 thoughts on “A Tsunami of Fake News is On Its Way and Here is How”

  1. If the schedule for this is late 2019 … then yes.

    Glad to see the static fire was good … hopefully the test really happens in Feb and we can get closer to putting this endless sideline story behind. I like the spreadsheet … it looks like SpaceX is getting closer to the Boeing charges (vs just half) … hopefully some of that can be applied to Starship Super Heavy … given SSH has no proven market funding is going to be tough (Elon may need to put some more of his personal fortune and/or Tesla stock sales behind this effort).

  2. ULA and spacex should have a capsule meetup in space… and bezos and Branson can pop up for a 20 second selfies the same time…

  3. Yes, probably.

    Unless Elon appears on TV smoking another joint, and a Congress mandated taskforce is created to investigate SpaceX’s safety procedures, coincidentally finishing right after Boeing can launch their own capsule.

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