Researchers, scared by their own work, hold back “deepfakes for text” AI

OpenAI, a non-profit research company investigating "the path to safe artificial intelligence," has developed a machine learning system called Generative Pre-trained Transformer-2 (GPT-2 ), capable of generating text based on brief writing prompts. The result comes so close to mimicking human writing that it could potentially be used for "deepfake" content. Built based on 40 gigabytes of text retrieved from sources on the Internet (including "all outbound links from Reddit, a social media platform, which received at least 3 karma"), GPT-2 generates plausible "news" stories and other text that match the style and content of a brief text prompt.

The performance of the system was so disconcerting, now the researchers are only releasing a reduced version of GPT-2 based on a much smaller text corpus.