Concerned about ‘fake news’? It could get a lot worse with AI

aifakenews
Credit: MS Tech

Fake news has certainly become a widespread and insidious problem, and in a year when we’re dealing with both a global pandemic and the possible re-election of Donald Trump as the US president, it seems like a more powerful and lifelike text-generating AI is one of the last things we need right now.

Despite the potential risks, though, OpenAI announced late last month that GPT-2’s successor is complete. It’s called—you guessed it—GPT-3.

And it doesn’t end with words—GPT-3 can also figure out how concepts relate to each other, and discern context.

In the paper, the OpenAI team notes that GPT-3 performed well when tasked with translation, answering questions, and doing reading comprehension-type exercises that required filling in the blanks where words had been removed. They also say the model was able to do “on-the-fly reasoning,” and that it generated sample news articles 200 to 500 words long that were hard to tell apart from ones written by people.

At the beginning of this year, an editor at The Economist gave GPT-2 a list of questions about what 2020 had in store. The algorithm predicted economic turbulence, “major changes in China,” and no re-election for Donald Trump, among other things. It’s a bit frightening to imagine what GPT-3 might predict for 2021 once we input all the articles from 2020.

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