The thing about GPT-2 is that it's only a marginal improvement over a markov chain, and much worse than paying somebody on mechanical turk a quarter of a cent p

The thing about GPT-2 is that it's only a marginal improvement over a markov chain, and much worse than paying somebody on mechanical turk a quarter of a cent per hour to write lies. It doesn't actually hang together -- it only looks like it might if you are skimming rather than paying attention. The appropriate way to counteract GPT-2 having any effect on politics is to promote social norms around careful reading, and this solution also works against all other forms of grey propaganda. ("If you go home with somebody & they don't read critically, don't sleep with them" is the new "if you go home with somebody & they don't have books, don't sleep with them".) Technical solutions aren't really viable, and miss the point. Most human-generated content on the web isn't amenable to trust chains, because it's generated anonymously or pseudonymously by people who don't really have the technical chops to understand cryptography. It's trivial to write a text document and put it on a web server, & it should remain trivial to do that. The onus of epistemic hygene falls on individuals and communities. > I have family members who have sent out images that are clearly photoshopped because they not technically literate enough to understand that they're fake. Mock them mercilessly and they will quickly learn how to distinguish shooped photos from real ones. It's not a deep technical skill, but a shallow recognition of tell-tale signs -- a skill that is easily learned passively, if social pressures exist to encourage learning it.