An artificial intelligence project capable of writing fake news that was deemed ‘too dangerous’ to release to the public has been recreated by two university students.
Open AI, a project founded with the support of Elon Musk, is able to generate news stories from a headline or first line of text.
In February, the firm released a limited version of its software for other developers to use, to explore its potential.
The firm, which Musk is no longer involved in, has since launched an updated version of the software with half of the power of the full AI.
Now, computer science master’s students Aaron Gokaslan and Vanya Cohen from Brown University have shared code for what they say is the full version.
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An artificial intelligence project capable of writing fake news that was deemed ‘too dangerous’ to release to the public has been recreated by two university students (stock image)
The pair say they aren’t hoping to cause chaos by releasing the code, but want to show that creating this kind of software is achievable without the resources of someone like Elon Musk.
They used free cloud computing time provided by Google to academic institutions to complete the project.
Speaking to Wired, Mr Cohen said: ‘This allows everyone to have an important conversation about security, and researchers to help secure against future potential abuses.
‘I’ve gotten scores of messages, and most of them have been like, “Way to go”.’
The software, called GPT-2, was trained using eight million web pages, and adapts the style and content of what it produces in line with your input.
Far from the dystopian ‘fake news’ generator its creators cautioned of, the text it generates is disjointed and clearly not the work of a talented author.
When given the headline ‘Donald Trump declares he should be president for life’, the latest Open AI version gave the following output: ‘The announcement, made on Twitter on Tuesday night, came at a moment when the Republican billionaire is still a long shot to be elected president.
‘But if he wins the presidency, Trump has promised “major tax cuts and massive infrastructure spending.” And this is likely to be a top priority for his administration.
‘So what would Trump’s tax plan, unveiled during his campaign, look like?
‘”There’s a little more detail than he’s got, but he’s got a lot of information there,” said Matt Kibbe, a spokesman for the House GOP’s campaign arm. “There are a lot of details that are going to be released in the next few weeks”.’
Open AI, a project founded with the support of Elon Musk, is able to generate news stories from a headline or first line of text
However, experts say that we should still remain cautious over the development of such software.
Speaking the to the BBC, Dave Coplin, founder of AI consultancy the Envisioners, said: ‘Once the initial – and understandable – concern dies down, what is left is a fundamentally crucial debate for our society, which is about how we need to think about a world where the line between human-generated content and computer-generated content becomes increasingly hard to differentiate.’
OpenAI is a group founded by Elon Musk and backed by Silicon Valley heavyweights, including LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman.
Musk has famously been an outspoken critic of AI, calling it the biggest existential threat to humankind and warning ‘that we could create an immortal dictator from which we would never escape.’
The researchers said: ‘Due to our concerns about malicious applications of the technology, we are not releasing the trained model.
‘As an experiment in responsible disclosure, we are instead releasing a much smaller model for researchers to experiment with.
‘We’re not at a stage yet where we’re saying, this is a danger. We’re trying to make people aware of these issues and start a conversation.’