Artificial Intelligence Is Getting Good at Fake News
OpenAI has written an algorithm that produces fake news stories. It's surprisingly convincing.
Not just for kids.
Photographer: ROBYN BECK/AFPAlgorithms 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.