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What is the issue with fake news? Language models can now pass as human in many situations but there are already billions of humans capable of writing fake new

What is the issue with fake news? Language models can now pass as human in many situations but there are already billions of humans capable of writing fake news, this isn't a new capability. We have already created mechanisms for deciding which voices to trust and no matter how good language models get they will not be able to prevent you from visiting economist.com

texaslonghorn5 4y ago
I think the issue could be volume (and also that the vast majority of humans aren't actively exercising their ability to write fake news at present). Also that language models might be far more convincing.
Viliam1234 4y ago
> there are already billions of humans capable of writing fake news You have to pay them, and most of them are not very good at writing. Even with a big budget, you get a limited number of good articles per day. If you can make writing fake news 100x cheaper, and then just throw everything at social networks and let people sort out the most viral stuff, that can change the game. Also, computers can be faster. If something new happens today and hundred articles are written about it, a computer can quickly process them and generate hundred more articles on the same topic, than a group of humans would. (Many humans can do the writing in parallel, but each of them needs to read individually the things they want to react to.)
- Vetch 4y ago
  The vast majority of generators of fake news today are from Content Mills, Copy Paste Mills and general SEO spammers. Political misinformation is the other big generator. The economics of it and not "ethical" gate keeping is what will affect their output. Realistically, normal people don't have the ability to coordinate hordes of proxied IPs to attack social networks requiring account sign ups and custom feeds. The value of exercising critical thinking, checking trusted curated sources, information hygiene, recognizing and avoiding manipulation tactics in news and ads will have to go up. The internet is already almost entirely unreliable without requiring any fancy AI. The listed skills will be necessary regardless any increase of politically manipulative content, advertisements or product misrepresentations.
  - tonypace 4y ago
    Rich people often try to purchase political influence and respect for their opinions. Historically, this has had very mixed results, but you can't deny that it has sometimes worked. The problem is that this does not have a market mechanism. If the rich person has funds from another source, economics can go out the window, and usually does.
- nomel 4y ago
  > that can change the game. I don't think people, organizations, and government, pushing false narratives, is some new game. I think it's a game that people are dangerously unaware that they're already playing. Destroying the trust of content on the internet, resulting in having people be more diligent about what they believe, is, I think, almost certainly a net positive. But, as a counter argument to myself, people are lazy and will, instead, just go to a news source that they "trust", and listen without ever questioning. Either way, I don't see the fake news, itself, as being anything but a fleeting problem for society. The problem will continue to be people, organizations, and governments taking advantage of laziness. For an example, imagine Dall-E 2 was released for political use. For a few weeks, we would have a flood of fakes of every politician doing every imaginable act. Society would very quickly believe none, rather than believing all.
  - AlexCoventry 4y ago
    > Destroying the trust of content on the internet, resulting in having people be more diligent about what they believe, is, I think, almost certainly a net positive. That didn't seem to be how it worked with the election-theft narrative. People kept believing garbage from discredited sources.
    - tsimionescu 4y ago
      Yes, because the election-theft narrative was coming from sources they initially trusted (the President of the United States). That is not the same thing as trusting the hundreds of fake news articles that GPT-3 will be able to generate a second.
      - MichaelZuo 4y ago
        Agree, this is the same as if IEEE suddenly announced a breakthrough in cold fusion. A large chunk of even the highly educated and technical audience would tend to believe it, or at least give it the benefit of the doubt, simply because of the cachet and reputation IEEE itself has built up. At least until those are exhausted. GPT-3 can't create a second IEEE so it's not an issue to be worried about.
- brian_cloutier 4y ago
  We both agree that language models allow for the quick creation of large amounts of content. There already exists far more content than anybody can read. We have developed mechanisms for filtering out content which isn't worth our time, and language models don't have any special ability to force you to read their creations. And even if content can be placed somewhere you will read it: no matter what I put into this box you will not suddenly be susceptible to believing the unbelievable no matter whether I wrote it or whether a language model wrote it.
  - tonypace 4y ago
    Is it unbelievable that pressing a bar will bring you long term happiness? Surely it is, but primates will press the heroin bar. This has happened before with humans as well. You cannot simply dismiss the effectiveness of well - targeted propaganda.
jmathai 4y ago
Your argument holds true in theory but does not always work in practice. The issue many people have with fake news is that it's a tool that can sway public opinion without any basis on facts. I'm not sure, by your response, if you find that to be problematic or not. I think we've recently found that people haven't decided which voices to trust and can be led to believe things placed in front of them. Paired with the ability to spread that information - there is significant impact on society. That's the reason some people have issues with fake news, from my experience. Also, getting a computer to do something will always scale several orders of magnitude more than having billions of people do it.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  > I think we've recently found that people haven't decided which voices to trust and can be led to believe things placed in front of them. Paired with the ability to spread that information - there is significant impact on society. > That's the reason some people have issues with fake news, from my experience. From my experience, most people who believe Fake News is a significant problem are people who dislike WHOM some have chosen to trust. Few see fake news coming from their preferred media sources, or supporting their preferred narrative, as highly concerning, and instead usually treat it as benign (human errors happen etc etc). However, when it's coming from their political adversaries, or from sources they dislike, it suddenly is presented as some huge issue. In reality, it is all the same, and people are decently good at filtering it out when it contradicts what they want to believe, and very bad at filtering it out when it agrees with them. For an example of fake news from outlets like the NYT, the most egregious recent one has been the dismissal of the Hunter Biden laptop, calling it a Russian hoax, calling it "fake news", listing intelligence agencies (of all people) as proof of this, getting Twitter and Facebook to outright ban the New York Post article on it - when in fact everything in their article was 100% true. How many people (especially Dem voters) have taken this story as "dangerous spread of Fake News by the NYT, Washington Post etc"?
  - antonvs 4y ago
    That's quite the false equivalence. A big part of the issue is quantity. You cherry-picked one example for the NYT, but for Fox News you could find examples on a daily if not hourly basis.
numpad0 4y ago
I kind of agree - a lot of "fake" news believers seems to be actively seeking for contrarian views purely for the sake of it, with indoctrination as an incentive offered for labor of reading, rather than harm unto themselves. In that sense, the factual accuracy - the "fake" notion, don't seem to be the point, and the volume of text that NN generators enable can be less of an issue.

texaslonghorn5 4y ago

I think the issue could be volume (and also that the vast majority of humans aren't actively exercising their ability to write fake news at present). Also that language models might be far more convincing.

Viliam1234 4y ago

> there are already billions of humans capable of writing fake news You have to pay them, and most of them are not very good at writing. Even with a big budget, you get a limited number of good articles per day. If you can make writing fake news 100x cheaper, and then just throw everything at social networks and let people sort out the most viral stuff, that can change the game. Also, computers can be faster. If something new happens today and hundred articles are written about it, a computer can quickly process them and generate hundred more articles on the same topic, than a group of humans would. (Many humans can do the writing in parallel, but each of them needs to read individually the things they want to react to.)

Vetch 4y ago
The vast majority of generators of fake news today are from Content Mills, Copy Paste Mills and general SEO spammers. Political misinformation is the other big generator. The economics of it and not "ethical" gate keeping is what will affect their output. Realistically, normal people don't have the ability to coordinate hordes of proxied IPs to attack social networks requiring account sign ups and custom feeds. The value of exercising critical thinking, checking trusted curated sources, information hygiene, recognizing and avoiding manipulation tactics in news and ads will have to go up. The internet is already almost entirely unreliable without requiring any fancy AI. The listed skills will be necessary regardless any increase of politically manipulative content, advertisements or product misrepresentations.
- tonypace 4y ago
  Rich people often try to purchase political influence and respect for their opinions. Historically, this has had very mixed results, but you can't deny that it has sometimes worked. The problem is that this does not have a market mechanism. If the rich person has funds from another source, economics can go out the window, and usually does.
nomel 4y ago
> that can change the game. I don't think people, organizations, and government, pushing false narratives, is some new game. I think it's a game that people are dangerously unaware that they're already playing. Destroying the trust of content on the internet, resulting in having people be more diligent about what they believe, is, I think, almost certainly a net positive. But, as a counter argument to myself, people are lazy and will, instead, just go to a news source that they "trust", and listen without ever questioning. Either way, I don't see the fake news, itself, as being anything but a fleeting problem for society. The problem will continue to be people, organizations, and governments taking advantage of laziness. For an example, imagine Dall-E 2 was released for political use. For a few weeks, we would have a flood of fakes of every politician doing every imaginable act. Society would very quickly believe none, rather than believing all.
- AlexCoventry 4y ago
  > Destroying the trust of content on the internet, resulting in having people be more diligent about what they believe, is, I think, almost certainly a net positive. That didn't seem to be how it worked with the election-theft narrative. People kept believing garbage from discredited sources.
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    Yes, because the election-theft narrative was coming from sources they initially trusted (the President of the United States). That is not the same thing as trusting the hundreds of fake news articles that GPT-3 will be able to generate a second.
    - MichaelZuo 4y ago
      Agree, this is the same as if IEEE suddenly announced a breakthrough in cold fusion. A large chunk of even the highly educated and technical audience would tend to believe it, or at least give it the benefit of the doubt, simply because of the cachet and reputation IEEE itself has built up. At least until those are exhausted. GPT-3 can't create a second IEEE so it's not an issue to be worried about.
brian_cloutier 4y ago
We both agree that language models allow for the quick creation of large amounts of content. There already exists far more content than anybody can read. We have developed mechanisms for filtering out content which isn't worth our time, and language models don't have any special ability to force you to read their creations. And even if content can be placed somewhere you will read it: no matter what I put into this box you will not suddenly be susceptible to believing the unbelievable no matter whether I wrote it or whether a language model wrote it.
- tonypace 4y ago
  Is it unbelievable that pressing a bar will bring you long term happiness? Surely it is, but primates will press the heroin bar. This has happened before with humans as well. You cannot simply dismiss the effectiveness of well - targeted propaganda.

jmathai 4y ago

Your argument holds true in theory but does not always work in practice. The issue many people have with fake news is that it's a tool that can sway public opinion without any basis on facts. I'm not sure, by your response, if you find that to be problematic or not. I think we've recently found that people haven't decided which voices to trust and can be led to believe things placed in front of them. Paired with the ability to spread that information - there is significant impact on society. That's the reason some people have issues with fake news, from my experience. Also, getting a computer to do something will always scale several orders of magnitude more than having billions of people do it.

tsimionescu 4y ago
> I think we've recently found that people haven't decided which voices to trust and can be led to believe things placed in front of them. Paired with the ability to spread that information - there is significant impact on society. > That's the reason some people have issues with fake news, from my experience. From my experience, most people who believe Fake News is a significant problem are people who dislike WHOM some have chosen to trust. Few see fake news coming from their preferred media sources, or supporting their preferred narrative, as highly concerning, and instead usually treat it as benign (human errors happen etc etc). However, when it's coming from their political adversaries, or from sources they dislike, it suddenly is presented as some huge issue. In reality, it is all the same, and people are decently good at filtering it out when it contradicts what they want to believe, and very bad at filtering it out when it agrees with them. For an example of fake news from outlets like the NYT, the most egregious recent one has been the dismissal of the Hunter Biden laptop, calling it a Russian hoax, calling it "fake news", listing intelligence agencies (of all people) as proof of this, getting Twitter and Facebook to outright ban the New York Post article on it - when in fact everything in their article was 100% true. How many people (especially Dem voters) have taken this story as "dangerous spread of Fake News by the NYT, Washington Post etc"?
- antonvs 4y ago
  That's quite the false equivalence. A big part of the issue is quantity. You cherry-picked one example for the NYT, but for Fox News you could find examples on a daily if not hourly basis.

numpad0 4y ago

I kind of agree - a lot of "fake" news believers seems to be actively seeking for contrarian views purely for the sake of it, with indoctrination as an incentive offered for labor of reading, rather than harm unto themselves. In that sense, the factual accuracy - the "fake" notion, don't seem to be the point, and the volume of text that NN generators enable can be less of an issue.