New AI Fake Text Generator May Be Too Dangerous To Release, Say Creators (theguardian.com) 182
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."
Recreational use (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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"It was a dark and stormy night."
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"It was a dark and stormy night."
Not just the kind of dark and stormy night that you read about in books, but the sort of messy, murky night that ends with a body count on the 405.
Re:Recreational use (Score:5, Funny)
"It was a dark and stormy night."
Not just the kind of dark and stormy night that you read about in books, but the sort of messy, murky night that ends with a body count on the 405.
I was on my fifth dark and stormy, in fact, and though I was enjoying the ginger taste, I had to stop. After all, it was nearly time for my commute, coincidentally on the 405.
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...and it's too damn sultry in here.
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I commend you on behalf of the Edward Bulwer-Lytton fan club.
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...and I banged your mom!
I know you jest, but porn often leads the way.
Re:Recreational use (Score:5, Insightful)
... , let it finish it, edit it a bit and have it continue from there.
Actually, edit it a lot. From the snippets provided in TFA, there is no way this thing would pass a Turing Test. It is just well structured gibberish.
If OpenAI wants us to believe they are really doing edgy and dangerous stuff, they need to provide better evidence than this.
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Re: Recreational use (Score:3)
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Given enough monkeys typing, eventually one will create the complete works of Shakespeare.
The fact that they could find one coherent example is only proof of their searching ability.
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Fair point. Though, a surrealist tone in a work could make things interesting, too.
Re: Recreational use (Score:2)
If OpenAI wants us to believe they are really doing edgy and dangerous stuff, they need to provide better evidence than this.
But it only needs to fool Facebook users, no need to invoke Turing.
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Fooling Facebook users isn't a very high bar of achievement.
Re: Recreational use (Score:2)
This is actually easier to do than you think! Go out and get the leftovers of a roast or something of that nature. Parboil them for a little while. (That's what I did, if you were curious) Heat up your wok in the $medium hotish flame, drizzle in some oil, then toss the contents of the too-long messy roast for about 10 seconds or so. The wok will release steam and some surface starch which will help the stir fry singe. Spread the rice in your wok, the aromatics and proteins will absorb the undigested starch,
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Yeah... my high school teacher would complain about the overly common structure of the sentences.
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.
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Re: Recreational use (Score:2)
Could make for some interesting works of fiction.
Only interesting for it's novelty value... the stories themselves are hardly likely to be interesting, much less actually readable. Depending on your intelligence, of course.
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Uncle Tobias we kept in a bucket.
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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.
Ghost writers today already do the whole thing for you! But I see where your approach could be interesting, even if it does seem a bit like cheating - or will it simply be seen as a "smart assistant", at some point in the future?
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Remove the cliches, and most articles will disappear.
Russia Called (Score:3)
They say they don't need it. What they've been doing is working just fine.
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How is this different than literature commentary? (Score:2)
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!
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No, the curtains represent his immense depression and his lack of will to carry on.
Re: How is this different than literature commenta (Score:2)
They matched the drapes.
What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Only a Millennial using to Twitter and Facebook would think that gibberish is even coherent.
Driving from China to Seattle (Score:3)
"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 part
Re:Driving from China to Seattle (Score:4, Interesting)
What? I didn't read it like that at all.
They current work in Seattle. They are driving to work wondering what it will be like 100 years from now. As a way of explaining WHY they were wondering that, they did a quick flashback to 2046 (which was in the past...but how far back we don't know yet.) At that time the character was a school teacher in China.
I assume they'd continue saying, "It only took [10] years for me to leave China and get a job as as the mascot of the Seattle Mariners." If that much could change in 10 years...what would it be like 100 years from now.
The biggest mistake I see is the sentence fragment "A 100 years from now." That kinda messes up everything because you don't know which sentence it belongs to.
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Thank you. Came to comment same thing. People's reading comprehension is remarkably low given they think they can criticise this literature.
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Look at how many assumptions you had to make to make any sense out of that nonsense. You did find a reading that harmonizes the text, but if you're given a much longer text, it will be less and less likely to agree with itself the longer it goes on. You already had to assume whether the speaker was in Seattle or China, decide whether 2045 is the past or the future and reassign the sentence fragment based only on you knowing that rural China didn't have cars in 1045. I see no reason to assume the AI knew
Suddenly a shot rang out. (Score:2)
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 t
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You misunderstand, it's not merely telling a story, it's predicting automotive technology 25 years into the future! And getting from Seattle to China is telling us that the flying cars will finally be here!
Correction Correction (Score:3)
Tweets (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Only a Millennial using to Twitter and Facebook would think that gibberish is even coherent.
Joke's on you, James Joyce wrote that in 1922.
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their program is crap and they thought this would attract more attention.
pretty fucking simple.
kind of hilarious that it would speak of the future as if it was in the past though?
what kind of a hackjob is it anyways? are they hoping to sell it to fake news outlets or what? and the fuck does it matter as you can buy actual people to write you gibberish news articles for pennies - just look at buzzfeed.
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lol (Score:5, Insightful)
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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
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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.
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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 d
Oh, really now. (Score:2)
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Or.. DO know what they are doing, but are too lazy to actually make it work and are now trying to justify the funding because they spent it on pizza.
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Really? (Score:2)
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ROFL - a complete new level of hype (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
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Let's put that snippet into the AI and see what pops out.
"I was on my way in my Tesla to a new job in Fremont. It smelled vaguely of musk..."
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The point is not that it can write Orwell. The authors should point out that the bar for creating certain kinds of textual messages is quite low. Trolling is *already* automated to a large extent. Surely any improvements to these systems can be misused for that, if nothing else.
Oh really? (Score:3)
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Musk Is Probably Panicked About Reverse-Use (Score:2, Flamebait)
Here's a test (Score:3, Funny)
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.
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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.
To be fair it could easily pass as a -1 mod'ed drunk ac post.
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Too late, they've already been doing it for the last month and nobody noticed!
Channelling Elwood Blues (Score:2)
"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."
two brain cells too many (Score:2)
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 g
Snoopy's Novel (Score:2)
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 myst
Only one way to test it (Score:2)
Prior art (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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To be fair, it was tremendous morning wood.
Have you read BuzzFeed? (Score:2)
...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?
Are they using it on Elon's tweets yet? (Score:2)
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!
It has a bright future... (Score:1)
Better examples in the video (Score:3)
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!).
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Snoopy did it first (Score:3)
It could replace journalists (Score:2)
As long as the required bias was in place no one would notice. Maybe it's already happened.
More interesting - train it on science (Score:1)
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.
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See "Sokal Affair".
Not releasing it for other reasons (Score:2)
Specifically: because it's shit. That Orwell example is just drivel.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/... [theregister.co.uk]
AI posts in slashdot? (Score:1)
Buzz generator Nothing more (Score:2)
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.
An END to the SCOURGE of plagarism! (Score:2)
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 [wordpress.com] 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
1984 (Score:2)
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."