AI deemed 'too dangerous to release' makes it out into the world

An AI that was deemed too dangerous to be released has now been released into the world. Researchers had feared that the model, known as "GPT-2", was so powerful that it could be maliciously misused by everyone from politicians to scammers. GPT-2 was created for a simple purpose: it can be fed a piece of text, and is able to predict the words that will come next. By doing so, it is able to create long strings of writing that are largely indistinguishable from those written by a human being. But it became clear that it was worryingly good at that job, with its text creation so powerful that it could be used to scam people and may undermine trust in the things we read.