Twenty minutes into the future with OpenAI's Deep Fake Text AI

In 1985, the TV film Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future presented a science fictional cyberpunk world where an evil media company tried to create an artificial intelligence based on a reporter's brain to generate content to fill airtime. There were somewhat unintended results. Replace "reporter" with "redditors," "evil media company" with "well meaning artificial intelligence researchers," and "airtime" with "a very concerned blog post," and you've got what Ars reported about last week: Generative Pre-trained Transformer-2 (GPT-2), a Franken-creation from researchers at the non-profit research organization OpenAI. Unlike some earlier text-generation systems based on a statistical analysis of text (like those using Markov chains), GPT-2 is a text-generating bot based on a model with 1.5 billion parameters. With or without guidance, GPT-2 can create blocks of text that look like they were written by humans.