dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

An AI helped us write this article

An impressive new language AI writes product reviews and news articles. Its creators are worried about misuse.

One of the coolest AI systems I’ve ever seen may also be the one that will kick me out of my job.

Earlier this week, I attended a demo with a research team at OpenAI, the San Francisco nonprofit that’s right up there with top tech companies in conducting impressive new research on the frontiers of AI. The system they showed me was a language-learning model that writes the news, answers reading comprehension problems, and is beginning to show promise at tasks like translation.

In a paper released Thursday, the OpenAI team demonstrates that we can get those results from an “unsupervised” AI — meaning the system learned from reading 8 million internet articles, not from being explicitly trained for the tasks. Their AI advances the state of the art — in some cases, by a lot…..

Is the era of fake news about to get even worse?

The team at OpenAI is making the unusual choice not to release their system publicly for everyone to interact with. That’s too bad — take it from me, it’s incredibly fun to try out — but they have a very good reason.

OpenAI has been active in trying to figure out how to limit the potential for misuse of AI, and they’ve concluded that in some cases, the right solution is limiting what they publish.

With a tool like this, for example, it’d be easy to spoof Amazon reviews and pump out fake news articles in a fraction of the time a human would need. A slightly more sophisticated version might be good enough to let students generate plagiarized essays and spammers improve their messaging to targets.

“I’m worried about trolly 4chan actors generating arbitrarily large amounts of garbage opinion content that’s sexist and racist,” OpenAI policy director Jack Clark told me. He also worries about “actors who do stuff like disinformation, who are more sophisticated,” and points out that there might be other avenues for misuse we haven’t yet thought of. So they’re keeping the tool offline, at least for now, while everyone can weigh in on how to use AIs like these safely……..