Before revision: The threat of deepfakes, synthetic, or manipulated media, is becoming increasingly alarming, especially for social media platforms that have already been accused of manipulating public opinion. Even the cheapest text generation techniques (e. g. the search-and-replace method) can deceive humans, as the Net Neutrality scandal proved in 2017. Meanwhile, more powerful generative models have been released, from RNN-based methods to the GPT-2 language model.
After revision: The recent advances in language modeling significantly improved the generative capabilities of deep neural models: in 2019 OpenAI released GPT-2, a pre-trained language model that can autonomously generate coherent, non-trivial and human-like text samples. Since then, ever more powerful text generative models have been released, from RNN-based methods to the GPT-2 language model.