An AI fake text generator that can write paragraphs in a style based on just a sentence has raised concerns about its potential to spread false information.
Earlier
this month, an unexceptional thread
appeared on Reddit announcing that there is a new way
“to cook egg white[s] without a frying pan”.
As so often
happens on this website, which calls itself “the front page of the internet”,
this seemingly banal comment inspired a slew of responses. “I’ve never heard of
people frying eggs without a frying pan,” one incredulous Redditor replied.
“I’m gonna try this,” added another. One particularly enthusiastic commenter
even offered to look up the scientific literature on the history of cooking egg
whites without a frying pan.
Every day,
millions of these unremarkable conversations unfold on Reddit, spanning from
cooking techniques to geopolitics in the Western Sahara to birds with arms. But what made this conversation about egg
whites noteworthy is that it was not taking place among people, but artificial
intelligence (AI) bots.
The egg
whites thread is just one in a growing archive of conversations on a subreddit – a Reddit forum dedicated to a specific topic
– that is made up entirely of bots trained to emulate the style of human Reddit
contributors. This simulated forum was created by a Reddit user called disumbrationist using a tool called GPT-2, a machine learning
language generator that was unveiled in February by OpenAI, one of the world’s
leading AI labs.
Jack Clark,
policy director at OpenAI, told me that chief among these concerns is how the
tool might be used to spread false or misleading information at scale. In a recent testimony given at a House intelligence committee hearing about the threat of AI-generated fake media,
Clark said he foresees fake text being used “for the production of [literal]
‘fake news’, or to potentially impersonate people who had produced a lot of
text online, or simply to generate troll-grade propaganda for social networks”.
GPT-2 is an
example of a technique called language modeling, which involves training an algorithm
to predict the next most likely word in a sentence. While previous language
models have struggled to generate coherent longform text, the combination of
more raw data – GPT-2 was trained on 8m online articles – and better algorithms
has made this model the most robust yet.
It
essentially works like Google auto-complete or predictive text for messaging. But instead of
simply offering one-word suggestions, if you prompt GPT-2 with a sentence, it
can generate entire paragraphs of language in that style. For example, if you
feed the system a line from Shakespeare, it generates a Shakespeare-like
response. If you prompt it with a news headline, it will generate text that
almost looks like a news article.
Alec
Radford, a researcher at OpenAI, told me that he also sees the success of GPT-2
as a step towards more fluent communication between humans and machines in
general. He says the intended purpose of the system is to give computers
greater mastery of natural language, which may improve tasks like speech
recognition, which is used by the likes of Siri and Alexa to understand your
commands; and machine translation, which is used to power Google Translate.
But as
GPT-2 spreads online and is appropriated by more people like disumbrationist –
amateur makers who are using the tool to create everything from Reddit threads,
to short stories and poems, to restaurant reviews – the team at OpenAI are also
grappling with how their powerful tool might flood the internet with fake text,
making it harder to know the origins of anything we read online.
Clark and
the team at OpenAI take this threat so seriously that when they unveiled GPT-2
in February this year, they released a blogpost alongside it stating that they weren’t releasing the
full version of the tool due to “concerns about malicious applications”. (They
have since released a larger version of the model, which is being used to create
the fake Reddit threads, poems and so on.)
For Clark,
convincing machine text like the variety GPT-2 is capable of pose a similar
threat to “deepfakes” – machine-learning generated fake
images and videos that can been used to make people appear to do things they
never did, say things they never said (like this video of former president Barack Obama). “They are essentially the same,” Clark told
me. “You have technology that makes it cheaper and easier to fake something,
which means that it will just get harder to offer guarantees about the truth of
information in the future.”
However,
some feel that this overstates the threat of fake text. According to Yochai
Benkler, co-head of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at
Harvard, the most damaging instances of fake news are written by political
extremists and trolls, and tend to be about controversial topics that “trigger
deep-seated hatred”, like election fraud or immigration. While a system like
GPT-2 can produce semi-coherent articles at scale, it is a long way from being
able to replicate this type of psychological manipulation. “The simple ability
to generate false text at scale is not likely to affect most forms of
disinformation,” he told me.
Other
experts have suggested that OpenAI exaggerated the
malicious potential of GPT-2 in order to create hype around their research. For
Zack Lipton, professor of business technologies at Carnegie Mellon University,
the assessment of the risk of the technology was disingenuous.
“Of all the
bad uses of AI – from recommender systems that lead to filter bubbles and the
racial consequences that emerge from automated categorization – I would put the
threat of language modeling at the bottom of the list,” he said. “What OpenAI
have done is commandeered the discourse and fear about AI and used it to generate
hype around their product.”
OpenAI’s
concerns are being taken seriously by some. A team of researchers from the
Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence recently developed a tool to detect
“neural fake news”. Yejin Choi, a professor of computer science at the
University of Washington who worked on the project, told me that detecting
synthetic text is actually “fairly easy” due to the fact that generated text
has a “statistical signature”, almost like a fingerprint, that can be easily
identified.
While such
digital forensics are useful, Britt Paris, a researcher at New York-based
institute Data & Society, worries that such solutions misleadingly frame
fake news as a technological problem when, in fact, most misinformation is
created and spread online without the help of sophisticated technologies.
“We already
have a ton of ways for generating false information and people do a pretty good
job of circulating this stuff without the help of machines,” she said. Indeed,
the most prominent instances of fake content online – such as the “drunk Nancy
Pelosi” video released earlier this year – were created using
rudimentary editing techniques that have been around for decades.
Benkler
agrees, adding that fake news and disinformation are “first and foremost
political-cultural problems, not technological problems”. Tackling the problem,
he says, requires not better detection technologies, but an examination of the
social conditions that have made fake news a reality.
Whether or
not GPT-2, or a similar technology, becomes the misinformation machine that
OpenAI are anxious about, there is a growing consensus that considering the
social implications of a technology before it is released is good practice. At
the same time, predicting precisely how technologies will be used and misused
is notoriously difficult. Who would have thought 10 years ago that a recommendation
algorithm for watching videos online would turn into a powerful radicalizing instrument?
Given the
difficulty of predicting the potential harm of a technology, I thought I would
see how GPT-2 faired in assessing its own capacity for spreading misinformation.
“Do you think that you will be used to spread fake news and further imperil our
already degraded information eco-system?” I prompted the machine.
“The fact
that we can’t find the name of who actually post the article is a great clue,”
it responded. “However, this person is still using social media sites to post
the fake news with a clear purpose.”