Machines are not our masters – but the sinister side of AI demands a smart response | Will Hutton

A new system that generates text is the latest threat to jobs... and to truth itself

Keep your heads! You are not about to surrender your life and understanding of the world to machines. That head of yours with its conscious mind, reading this column, remains in the driving seat and always will. It’s true that the capacity of machines to supplement human intelligence, monitor us, mimic us and replace routine jobs and tasks is exploding and in the wrong hands could represent a step change in creating dark forms of economic and social control. But that is the battle for democracy, with the confrontation of the worst of capitalism taking on a new dimension. It does not mean that the end of human life is nigh – it means we have to be cleverer in fashioning responses.

Last week, OpenAI, a US-based nonprofit organisation, decided that its new AI model, GPT2, is so good at generating articles from just a few words and phrases that the model could be not be released until OpenAI better understood how it might be used. GPT2’s database is so sophisticated and its algorithms so smart that it has gone far beyond text prediction to writing readable and plausible text.

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from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2GtncUZ
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