Subreddit Created To Discuss About Fake News Written By AI

On June 10, “newsbyAI”, a weird new subreddit, popped up. The idea behind this is to post and discuss fake news articles which were written by artificial intelligence algorithms.

There are posts about almost everything, from business reporting to celebrity gossip. The posts demonstrate how AI can be used to spread propaganda and fake news online.

Most of the articles found in the subreddit are written by Grover, an AI system used to detect and create fake news articles. Other posts are written by GPT-2 which is an algorithm developed by OpenAI. If you wonder what it is, OpenAI is a research group on AI founded by Elon Musk.

One particular written by Grover was about how Taylor Swift hurt herself trying to through sandbags at a car. Put aside minor mistakes like writing wrong the names of celebrities like “Kardashian West” and claiming that Reputation 2 album was written by Swift, the post is surprisingly coherent.

The article reads:

Other articles seem to be a bit riskier as one of them involves an allegation of Sprint selling personal information of its customers to a Russian tech company.

In each post, there is always a disclaimer which states that the author is actually an AI system. But it never actually talks about how the articles’ content is fabricated, which demonstrates the dangers these algorithms could bring about if they got into the wrong hands.