The technology thankfully has some rough edges at the moment. It frequently writes stories that are either plagiarized or are only cohesive on the surface, and only occasionally hits the jackpot. However, OpenAI's Jack Clark warned that it might take just "one or two years" before there's a system capable of reliably producing fake news that needs a thorough fact check to disprove.

And that's the core problem. While OpenAI is focused on ethical implementations and won't knowingly enable fake news, it's just one organization. There's a larger concern that an unscrupulous (or unwitting) company or a hostile government might develop a powerful AI that disseminates falsehoods on a large scale. Social networks have enjoyed some success in fighting fake news, but they might struggle if there's a flood of machine-generated misinformation.