For all the company’s talk of weeding out toxic content and clamping down on information warfare, Facebook has generated more than 105 million views of fake news about France’s Yellow Vest movement, a new study says. According to an analysis of 100 fake news stories conducted by global nonprofit Avaaz, Facebook’s platform is playing a critical role in diffusing propaganda and misleading information about the Yellow Vests, or “gilets jaunes.” Avaaz leads various campaigns surrounding issues such as protecting democratic institutions, corruption, and climate change. In this case, Avaaz’s team identified 100 stories that various French or international media groups had fact-checked and determined were fake. The organization called on Facebook to take even more aggressive steps to clamp down on such viral fake news. “Over 100 million views of fake news,” said Christoph Schott, campaign director at Avaaz, in a statement. “This huge … [Read more...] about Avaaz: Facebook is a festering hive of fake news about France’s Yellow Vests
Fake news article generator
Google presents its anti-fake news system in detail
Bottom line: Google has already shared many of the ways that it fights against the spread of false information, but has now put all of those methods into once easily readable document that was presented at a security conference. Google is fairly secretive about how its search results are generated in an astoundingly short amount of time. In the current climate of news and the term "fake news" being thrown around regularly, Google has come forward at the Munich Security Conference to present a white paper on how it is fighting disinformation. Drowning out disinformation in Search, News, and on YouTube is no easy feat, but 20 years of combating traditional spam certainly helps. Each of these three Google segments have their own unique fake news blocking techniques in place. Before diving into how Google manages its platforms, know that Google defines disinformation and fake news as information that is spread while known to be inaccurate by the creator, "with the hope that others believe … [Read more...] about Google presents its anti-fake news system in detail
Elon Musk-Backed AI Software Could Be Used To Spread Fake News
Feb 18, 9:07 AM EST Newsletter Signup BusinessTechnologyWorldNationalMedia & CultureOpinionSportsLuxury Science By Lorraine Lorenzo 02/18/19 AT 6:50 AM The Elon Musk-backed Artificial Intelligence group, OpenAI, recently revealed that its AI software has the capacity to create predictive texts and even produce highly-convincing fake content by incorporating words and ideas from 8 million web pages fed into its system. The language model, called GPT-2 (a successor to GPT), was trained to predict the next words in 40GB of Internet text. Compared to the GPT model, the GPT-2 has more than 10X the parameters and trained to handle the same amount of data compared to its predecessor.According to a blog post from OpenAI posted on Feb. 14, the company has trained a large-scale unsupervised language model which generates coherent paragraphs of text."It achieves state-of-the-art performance on many language modeling benchmarks, and performs rudimentary … [Read more...] about Elon Musk-Backed AI Software Could Be Used To Spread Fake News
OpenAI has a text-generation tool that can write convincing fake news
Why it matters: OpenAI project has developed an algorithm that can make up news stories that seem real. Users simply feed it a few words on a topic and the AI autonomously writes a story. Artificial intelligence is growing at a rapid rate. Breakthroughs and creative uses seem to make headlines weekly. Applications have been developed to do everything from legal analysis of contracts to brewing better beer to someday beating you in a debate or Dota 2. Now it seems that the Elon Musk’s OpenAI team has discovered an algorithm capable of producing believable fake news articles. When given only a few words to start, the AI can create a news story on any topic that seems real and would take dedicated fact checking to debunk. Here is just one example: Russia has declared war on the United States after Donald Trump accidentally fired a missile in the air. Russia said it had “identified the missile’s trajectory and will take necessary measures to ensure the security of the … [Read more...] about OpenAI has a text-generation tool that can write convincing fake news
Researchers show how AI could be used to write convincing fake news
Researchers have demonstrated how artificial intelligence could be used to write fake news stories with little input from humans.OpenAI, with backers including Elon Musk and Microsoft, have decided not to release the entire AI system code, known as GPT-2, over concerns about how it could be abused to produce convincing fake news on a large scale. Instead, it released a small version.The team working on the project developed a way for the AI to continue writing up stories independently using a dataset of eight million web pages, after providing just a few human-written lines as a prompt.It specifically used data from outbound links from social news aggregation site Reddit with at least three votes, as an indicator of quality and value.Several examples published by researchers show how false claims such as recycling being bad for the planet are written by the AI using an authentic tone.OpenAI said that while there can be benefits to the usage of this kind of AI technology, it can also be … [Read more...] about Researchers show how AI could be used to write convincing fake news