[Permit]

> Namely, he argued that OpenAI is concerned that the technology might be used to impersonate people or to fabricate fake news.

This seems to be a particularly weak argument to make. How is their model going to impersonate someone in a way that a human can not?

[cma]

Cheaper cost to put out a bigger volume of content.

[Permit]

Is volume really what dictates whether or not you can impersonate someone? It's never seemed that way to me.

[cma]

It lets you impersonate a crowd, or various crowds.

[pas]

"PR firms" already have an army of fake/paid accounts on every important platform.

This new AI could help them with that. They can let go of the paid writers and hire an IT guy/gal to operate the bots - and the VPNs. (Or they can just pay a lot less to the paid trolls just for their home ADSL/Cable/4G connection.)

But so far this AI is not going to pass a Turing test. Sure, maybe it can be integrated with a chatbot. And it'll be interesting how internet communities will react.

[pishpash]

More to the point, is volume what counts as danger? All these deepfake risks boil down to online (for now) sock puppetry. We've been dealing with that for the whole life of the internet. The only reason it's even a problem in recent years is the growth of uninnoculated masses who haven't been on the internet that long, and positive feedback recommendation bots. That seems a qualitative issue not a quantitative one.

[hcs]

It affects how many people you can impersonate, cheap enough for many authors with small readerships each. (I guess, it does seem overblown.)

[mey]

Cheaper than paying "influencers". Paid blogging was huge during the .com era. I wonder if this could be adapted, with suitably good speech synth, to produce podcasts en masse.

[gmueckl]

It could. Adobe has a model to generate speech from arbitrary text. All it needs is typical samples from a speaker and transcripts for training. You could easily make it sound like Obama, for example. It will match intonation, timing, etc. and maybe insert the occasional "uhm" or "uh" when appropriate.

[pishpash]

But cheaper cost for everyone else also, provided they own the tech. That seems an argument for wide distribution. (Do you want to be the lone human voice against the bots or do you want to have your own bots to amplify your voice?)

[eanzenberg]

Its hype and marketing

[roywiggins]

You might be able to tailor things to individual people very specifically based on what their views are and what might push their buttons. Like spearfishing but for propaganda. Not with this exact tool, you'd probably need some more knobs, but a similar one. This would be impractical to do at scale without computer assistance.