AI news-writing system deemed too dangerous to release

OpenAI, a company backed by Elon Musk, has decided not to release an AI system that can generate news stories and fiction on the grounds that it could be dangerous in the wrong hands. OpenAI is a non-profit company that aims to finding a way to safely bring about artificial general intelligence. Normally it releases its research to the public, but its latest AI model, known as GPT-2, is reportedly so convincing that it has too much potential for misuse, generating huge volumes of misleading news stories. GPT-2 takes a sample of text (a few words of several paragraphs) and predicts the following sentences in a similar style, with surprisingly plausible results. The system was trained using a dataset of roughly 10 million news articles sourced by trawling Reddit – several times the size of those used by previous state-of-the-art systems. The sheer volume of data gave the system a much better understanding of written language, and means it's more general purpose than other systems.