Open AI pulled the pin from the grenade – ready for the blast?
Eerily authentic looking fake news articles – what could be the cost of this? No, we don’t mean the dollars; what cost will humanity pay for this? Can it change the history? Will the credibility of the news channels be lost? The world would be in the grips of mayhem if there were fake news articles floating around. Heard the news around Open AI?
Open AI, an artificial intelligence research group co-founded by Elon Musk, demonstrated a program which can generate fake news after being given just a few lines of information.
This Chameleon-like AI software is called GPT-2, and it writes such convincing fake stories that the company is now skittish to make the research public(obviously) fearing its potential misuse.
Imagine a headline about negative political views expressed by some country, or a company going bankrupt, or a leak in the presidential campaign? Much can go haywire with such news circulating in the internet. It is an immediate threat to national security. On the contrary, this AI software could also be used to tickle your funny bone and open a whole new world of imagination built on fantasy. For instance, try feeding it lines such as
- “scientists have discovered that animals can speak perfect English, but they are very secretive about it”
- “oh and they are the perfect fit in the corporate world”
- “it’s just that humans never realized their potential and always treated them like ‘animals’”
Get the drift? It could well become the most hilarious story ever-written.
But out in the real world, not everyone is looking at the bright side. In lieu of the currently released partial information, most critics are prodding the company to NOT disclose the complete research considering the possible threats.In the meantime, Elon Musk who has been roped into this controversy has confirmed that he has stepped down from the board a year ago.
The company is also warning government to regulate such practices otherwise; AI can pose as a danger to humans. Why to warn the government after the technology is already invented? Is it more like destruction is the best form of creativity? First you test the limits, you design something totally off-base and then destroy it, as the society can be in peril! Humans, the lengths they go to show their power.
AI software that creates Fake Faces
In the wake of this news, there’s also ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com – head over and find out a plethora of faces that don’t exist. These faces have been created using machine learning and AI. These realistic faces are the work of researchers from Nvidia. In their paper, shared publicly, they describe modifying the basic GAN architecture to create these images. Using Style Transfer, they can easily mimic the features of one face on the other!
Combine these?
The perfect recipe for misinformation and propaganda is ready! There are some clues to detecting fake faces – AI doesn’t grasp facial symmetry yet for instance. But news? Wiki would save us?
Worth a mention
In the wake of all this, we don’t know the future of this software but we know that AI is here to stay! As for Elon Musk, can you please add texting feature to the cars, it will be way more useful, perhaps :D?
