Photo by RetroSupply on Unsplash

These days AI advances move so fast, that it’s hard for even techy people to keep up. It’s important to spread awareness about what’s possible. Imagine if the general public didn’t know that photoshop existed. You could convince anyone that Kanye West really did come to your birthday party. It should go without saying that AI gives us tools, and any tools can be used for good or evil depending on its use. As Richard Feynman said, “To every [person] is given the key to the gates of heaven. The same key opens the gates of hell.”

Deep fakes are now getting extremely good, both with video and audio. You can believably impersonate anyone from just a photo of them, and a 5 second recording of their voice. Experts are so worried about how this could be used, that Facebook just funded a $1 million deepfake detection challenge on Kaggle. I wish more people knew about this, but there another flavor of potential online fakery that even fewer people know about. According to Jeremy Howard, the co-founder of fast.ai:

We have the technology to totally fill Twitter, email, and the web up with reasonable-sounding, context-appropriate prose, which would drown out all other speech and be impossible to filter.

This is about the infamous GPT-2. OpenAI developed it and started a controversy when they demoed it and made a statement saying it was too dangerous to release the full code. Long story short, they ended up releasing it in November of 2019. Since, then it has been improve by Hugging Face, to give us DistilGPT-2, and not only that, but they gave us a convenient web interface where anyone can easily co-write with AI! I discovered this at the same time that I happened to be invited to a short-story writing contest. Perfect timing, I thought, it will be more efficient (read: lazy) to get the AI to do most of the work for me. Here was the writing prompt:

Length: 250 Words

Genre: Adventure

Action: Being chased by [something/someone]

Keyword phrase: “look over my shoulder” (*variations on verb tense/personal pronoun okay)

Here is our human-AI collaboration. The white parts are written by me, and the blue parts are written by the AI.

I don’t know about you, but if I find that pretty hilarious and impressive at the same time. As you can see, the AI wrote the majority of the text, however I was also playing the role of editor. Every time you press tab, the AI gives you an option of 3 different next lines. I picked the ones I liked the best, and if I didn’t like any, I sometimes pressed tab again to get new set. I deleted some parts or changed a word here and there so it makes more sense (my changes show up white), but basically the AI did the heavy lifting. Here is another attempt some friends helped with.

One more just for fun by Marianna Zelichenko.

Notice how it’s pretty much always a grammatically correct sentence. Even if the meaning is sometimes non-sensical there seems to be some sort of perverse logic to it. It’s logic-adjacent. To pull this off, it needs a lot of knowledge not just about language but also the world. In the first story, I mention darkness, being afraid, and a scream, and it follows up with, “I knew I was going to get killed in the woods.” Wow! So it knows the woods are often dark, and fear and screaming is associated with getting killed.

For the last story, my favorite part is how it thinks there’s a reasonable amount of blood that can be flowing down your throat. Obviously you don’t want too much blood, but you want at least a little bit going down there at all times… I guess it still has some things to learn, but at this rate maybe it will soon be totally indistinguishable from human writing. Especially with human editing filling in the gaps.

I don’t want to end on an apocalypse-predicting note, but imagine what propagandists could do with this? The new censors won’t delete your words — they’ll drown them out. That’s why I want to spread awareness.

If you read this far, thank you and I encourage you to go play with this tool yourself and post the results in the comments. It’s super easy to use. I could use a good laugh.