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An artificial intelligence system that generates realistic stories, poems and articles has been updated, with some claiming it is now almost as good as a human writer.
The text generator, built by research firm OpenAI, was originally considered “too dangerous” to make public because of the potential for abuse.
But now a new, more powerful version of the system – that could be used to create fake news or abusive spam on social media – has been released.
The BBC, along with some AI experts, decided to try it out.
The model, called GPT-2, was trained on a dataset of eight million web pages, and is able to adapt to the style and content of the initial text given to it.
It can finish a Shakespeare poem as well as write articles and epithets.
At the time, the firm said: “Due to our concerns about malicious applications of the technology, we are not releasing the trained model. As an experiment in responsible disclosure, we are instead releasing a much smaller model for researchers to experiment with.”
As a result, the released version had far fewer parameters – phrases and sentences – than used during training.
This month, OpenAI decided to expand the parameters, offering a much broader database of training data.
Tech news site The Next Web said of the update: “This one works almost good enough to use as a general artificial intelligence for text generation – almost.”
Article author Tristan Greene added: I’m terrified of GPT-2 because it represents the kind of technology that evil humans are going to use to manipulate the population – and in my opinion that makes it more dangerous than any gun.”
