An AI for generating fake news could also help detect it

Last month OpenAI rather dramatically withheld the release of its newest language model, GPT-2, because it feared it could be used to automate the mass production of misinformation. The decision also accelerated the AI community's ongoing discussion about how to detect this kind of fake news. In a new experiment, researchers at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and HarvardNLP considered whether the same language models that can write such convincing prose can also spot other model-generated passages. The idea behind this hypothesis is simple: language models produce sentences by predicting the next word in a sequence of text. So if they can easily predict most of the words in a given passage, it's likely it was written by one of their own.