[Eliezer]

It seems disingenuous that this article fails to quote examples of GPT-2’s stunning results, or give any contrasting results from BERT to support the claim that this is all normal and expected progress.

Like many, I was viscerally shocked that the results were possible, the potential to further wreck the Internet seemed obvious, and an extra six months for security actors to prepare a response seemed like normal good disclosure practice. OpenAI warned everyone of an “exploit” in which text humans can trust to be human-generated, and then announced they would hold off on publishing the exploit code for 6 months. This is normal in computer security and I’m taken aback at how little the analogy seems to be appreciated.

[pas]

> Like many, I was viscerally shocked that the results were possible.

Why? There were news about bots writing news ~5 years ago. Given a few simple facts the AI generated the regular info-scarce but fluffy news-piece.

Now OpenAI added better everything (better language models, more data, better "long-term memory" for overall text coherence), and we got better fluff.

It seems like a GAN and a simple Markov chain generator. (Even if it's not that simple of course.)

And maybe it's the equivalent of the "modern art meme" style transferred to AI/ML research. ( https://i.pinimg.com/236x/71/e1/21/71e12151f4b59d8433d32c126... )

What I'm trying to convey is that wrecking the net with auto-trolls was already possible, but for some reason Mechanical Turk was cheaper.

> OpenAI warned everyone of an “exploit” in which text humans can trust to be human-generated

Sokal already did that, and so did http://thatsmathematics.com/mathgen/ ... but of course this might be qualitatively different, because it can be targeted. (Weaponized, if you will.) But the defense/antidote is the same, but it takes a lot more than 6 months to make people better at critical thinking, but maybe you already heard about the difficulties of that :)

[pishpash]

What's so shocking about this? Why do we trust this in the hands of a few self-appointed experts than anyone else? Are they supposed to be more moral than any others? What will security experts do in six months that wouldn't benefit from more security experts looking at it? Why do you care that garbage text is machine generated, from a spammer or influencer, or a mechanical turk? If it's volume you're concerned about, should we complain when search/recommendation engines already aggregate and reweight a tiny opinion into a continuous out-of-proportion stream that can last you a lifetime to consume? What is the practical difference to have more volume existing "out there"?