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from the that's-just-what-the-bot-wants-you-to-believe! dept.
New AI fake text generator may be too dangerous to release, say creators
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.
More like ClosedAI or OpenAIEEEEEE.
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(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday February 15 2019, @03:54PM (6 children)
I was writing "fake text generators" in BASIC language back in 1984... they would read a comment thread, pick out commonly used words, rehash them into pattern-based randomly populated sentences and auto-post reply comments to open BBS forums. Some of the generated word salad was genuinely funny, some of it disturbingly indistinguishable from human generated posts, but most of it was garbage.
I would sincerely hope that with 35 years of development and 250,000X the compute power, fake text generators have gotten significantly better. Kudos to this particular lab for not unleashing their daemon on the net, but others will inevitably follow - and some will be citing real sources, driving agendas, and otherwise doing their best to fool readers into believing that they are real, trustworthy sources of information.
When they start passing the Turing test with near 100% reliability, we are truly screwed.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday February 15 2019, @03:59PM (5 children)
Fuck progress! NO legit uses! Suck Musky! Die on Mars!
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday February 15 2019, @04:04PM (2 children)
Oh, there are plenty of legitimate uses. Auto-generation of school announcements to parents with distribution to voice phone, text, e-mail and paper channels as appropriate - e.g. "Dear Parents, this coming Tuesday, February 19th, school will be in session as a make-up day for the snow day which was taken on December 14th. Please have your children attend according to their regular schedules."
Then, there are many, many more distasteful uses such as automated constant contact functionality for sales, and I suppose product support might be a more legitimate side of that face.
But, yeah, mostly it's going to be Homer Simpson robo-dialing the whole town in a lame attempt to make a few bucks for himself.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by lentilla on Saturday February 16 2019, @02:50AM (1 child)
Bizarre choice for an example of legitimate use. If I am responsible for writing a missive that will be relayed to hundreds or thousands of people, I am going to write it by hand and have someone else check it before hitting send. I am certainly not going to outsource that task to a bot.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday February 16 2019, @01:14PM
You are different from most School board employees around here, bots already would do a better job.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday February 15 2019, @04:49PM (1 child)
What do you mean no legitimate uses?
Train it on Russian text and unleash it on the appropriate parts of the net.
The people who rely on government handouts and refuse to work should be kicked out of congress.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by captain normal on Friday February 15 2019, @07:16PM
Maybe the Ruskies are way ahead of us on this. Would explain a lot of the stuff on social media and why reddit has become such a cesspool.
When life isn't going right, go left.