MIT Technology Review March 12, 2019
To detect fake news researchers at MIT and Harvard based their experiments on the hypothesis that 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. They tested this idea by building an interactive tool based on OpenAI’s GPT-2 and fed it both machine and human generated text. The tool generally correctly identified the machine generated and human generated texts. When it was fed text generated by itself and other machines, more often it correctly identified text generated by itself as machine-generated…read more.
A fake news article written by OpenAI’s GPT-2. Credit: HENDRIK STROBELT AND SEBASTIAN GEHRMAN