Artificial Intelligence Is Getting Good at Fake News Posted on : Feb 15 - 2019

Algorithms have long been able to produce basic news stories from press releases or sets of financial data; that’s not much of a threat to most humans in the news business. Now, however, artificial intelligence has taken a step further. It’s learned to perform a tougher task – to produce convincing-looking fake news.

Stringing together a few formulaic passages from a set of numbers is a mechanical job. Inventing a fake news story on a random subject requires imagination; not every human is up to it. The San Francisco-based nonprofit OpenAI, founded by Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk and Y Combinator President Sam Altman, has produced a so-called language model that can do it. The quality of the output is somewhat uneven, but the best examples resemble human writing to a frightening degree.

On the surface, GPT-2, as the model is called, works somewhat like a popular game one can play with the less advanced version of AI on any smartphone, accepting its word suggestions one after another to create sometimes surprising little stories. GPT-2, trained on a dataset of 8 million human-curated web pages, writes text by predicting the next word based on all the previous ones in it.  One needs to give GPT-2 a line or two to get it started on any subject at all, the training dataset, consisting of outbound links from the social network Reddit, is rich enough for that. “The model is chameleon-like — it adapts to the style and content of the conditioning text,” OpenAI researchers wrote in a blog post.

The sample in the post is a surprisingly coherent story about a herd of unicorns discovered by a scientist in the Andes. Given two sentences about the find and the unicorns’ ability to speak perfect English, the machine produced what could almost be a story from any mainstream news site.

It gave the scientist a name, Dr. Jorge Perez from the University of La Paz (there’s no school with that exact name), produced quotes from him and expanded on the unicorns’ appearance (“silver-white”) and language abilities (they speak a dialect of their own plus “fairly regular English”). Of course a human editor might have had trouble with the contradiction in this sentence: “some believe that perhaps the creatures were created when a human and a unicorn met each other in a time before human civilization.” View More