The era of fake writing is upon us

Until 2019, it has been the case that if you come across several paragraphs of text on a consistent topic with consistent subjects, you can assume that text was written or structured by a human being. That is no longer true. Over the past year, AI researchers designed computer programs with the ability to generate multi-paragraph stories that remain fairly coherent throughout. As we explain in the video above, these programs create passages of text that seem like they were written by someone who is fluent in the language but possibly faking their knowledge. I'm not sure we needed an automated version of that person, but here it is: Depending on how you look at it, this technology is a powerful bullshit machine or a promising tool for artists. So far, the creative uses seem to outnumber the malicious ones, but it's not difficult to imagine how text-fakes could cause harm, especially since these models have been widely shared and are now deployable by anyone with basic know-how.