Elon Musk, recently busying himself with calling people "pedo" on Twitter and potentially violating US securities law with what was perhaps just a joke about weed – both perfectly normal activities – is now involved in a move to terrify us all. The non-profit he backs, OpenAI, has developed an AI system so good it had me quaking in my trainers when it was fed an article of mine and wrote an extension of it that was a perfect act of journalistic ventriloquism. As my colleague Alex Hern wrote yesterday: "The system [GPT2] is pushing the boundaries of what was thought possible, both in terms of the quality of the output, and the wide variety of potential uses." GPT2 is so efficient that the full research is not being released publicly yet because of the risk of misuse. And that's the thing – this AI has the potential to absolutely devastate.