OpenAI creates an AI so dangerous it's refusing to release it

  • Artificial Intelligence research company OpenAI is refusing to release its latest AI breakthrough due to fears that it could be dangerous and harmful for society.

    It seems like we can't go a week without hearing about the Artificial Intelligence apocalypse, but those warnings may not be so far-fetched. AI research organisation OpenAI has announced that its created an AI system so dangerous that researchers are refusing to release it to the scientific community for fear that it could cause wide-spread harm.

    The new AI model is called GPT-2 and it's been developed using deep learning technology trained on a large dataset of over 8 million webpages. Like the previous model (GPT), its task is simply to predict the next word in a webpage when given all of the previous text. This sounds innocent enough, but training GPT-2 on ten times as much data as GPT has yielded some disturbing results.

    GPT-2 can generate entire articles, blog posts and text samples of unprecedented quality that can be indistinguishable from those created by humans. This has the potential not just to automate content creation processes for online media but also to generate human-like abusive messages on a scale never before achieved, which has broad implications for influencing popular opinion via social media and the proliferation of fake news.

    OpenAI detailed its findings in a new article and research paper, and has decided not to release the fully trained model "Due to concerns about large language models being used to generate deceptive, biased, or abusive language at scale." A smaller version of GPT-2 has been released along with sample code, but researchers seem to agree that this technology getting into the wrong hands is an inevitability. More research is needed now to defend against this emergent threat.

    Source: OpenAI

    About the author

    Brendan is a Sync NI writer with a special interest in the gaming sector, programming, emerging technology, and physics. To connect with Brendan, feel free to send him an email or follow him on Twitter.

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