Open AI’s Fake Text Generator: Should This Exist?
By: Rafey Iqbal Rahman
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Open Source, Elon Musk, Technology, Fake News

Photo by Johann Walter Bantz on Unsplash

Technology and its advent have continued to transform the lives of many, that too in numerous productive ways. But on the other hand, the implications of hazards have also been observed. The dilemma is that in in the conquest of the moon and space, somewhere humanity and ethics have been made oblivious.

Recently, Open AI, a non-profit AI research company, sponsored by big names like Elon Musk, Microsoft Corporation, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Y Combinator Research (YCR) and Infosys — the Indian multinational IT corporation, developed a system, which could’ve been a breakthrough only if the adverse consequences weren’t inflicted upon. GPT-2, successor of the GPT, the fake text generation AI model is ulteriorly capable of generating fake news like a piece of cake, with a hairline precision that the readers won’t be able to distinguish the real and the fake news. The ‘mischievously powerful’ AI system, was never fully released for the public, realizing the threats it poses to humanity in particular.

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

Approach

Photo by Hannah Joshua on Unsplash

Elon Musk, the Last True Innovator, widely known for his ventures like Tesla, SpaceX and The Boring Company, has also gained a global recognition “fearing the technological singularity”, with a specification to the super-intelligent AI. He resigned from the Open AI’s board since he was not on the same page with the non-profit on some of the ongoing technological developments in the company. Caterina Fake, Co-Founder Flickr — the popular image and video-hosting service later acquired by Yahoo, writes:

“Those of us who build technology — and those of us who seek out its life-changing efficiencies — none of us think of ourselves as the villain. We start out with the best of motives. We believe that when we’re confronted with evil, we’ll behave in the noblest possible manner. We’ll stand up to the bullies and defend the powerless. After all, we know ourselves to be good people. But we descend to hell by small steps, as Baudelaire wrote. We have to answer to our investors or the market. We end up hating what we loved and loving what we hated. We end up in a place we didn’t intend.”

The goal of the development of the GPT-2 was to save time and create a more highly-trained writing specialist, and not an “all-knowing being”. But it ended up being a threatening model that could add fuel to the fire in the era of fake news, yellow journalism and groundless conspiracy theories.

How might we create a system that is founded on ethical and moral principles? How might we develop a model that exhibits a transparent infrastructure to its users? Maybe, the answer to these queries lies in putting our trust in the super-intelligent AI as much as we put in a well-trained human counterpart. Or maybe, it lies in the evolution of a new practice of the user experience to deal with the hazards of AI.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by +428,678 people.

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