How Robot Writers could change the Internet
Language models like GPT-2, Grover, and CTRL create text passages that seem written by someone fluent in the language, but not in the truth. That AI field, Natural Language Processing (NLP), didn’t exactly set out to create a fake news machine. Rather, it’s the byproduct of a line of research into massive pretrained language models: Machine learning programs that store vast statistical maps of how we use our language. So far, the technology’s creative uses seem to outnumber its malicious ones. But it’s not difficult to imagine how these text-fakes could cause harm, especially as these models become widely shared and deployable by anyone with basic know-how.