“There’s an app for that” is becoming more and more applicable to all walks of life — the latest to that list, according to new research, is publishing disinformation online.
Last June, OpenAI showcased an artificial intelligence algorithm capable of writing coherent text by itself. After journalists made the obligatory ‘AI is coming for our jobs’ jokes and pretended we’re not worried, the topic of fake news also popped up. The researchers who developed this algorithm (GPT-3) warned that it could potentially be used to automatically produce huge amounts of online disinformation.
Those warnings have now proven very true, as a team of experts showed how GPT-3 could be used to mislead and manipulate the public. Although still not perfect by itself, the AI can however make some forms of online manipulation especially difficult to spot.
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