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Thursday 31 October 2019

How scary is AI generated text?

Image by Gordon Johnson from PixabaY


As part of my journalism degree, I get to learn a lot about fake news.

OpenAI and other groups have developed artificial intelligence programs that can create automated text on any subject, even strictly academic content.

In February, OpenAI unveiled a language model called GPT-2 that generates coherent paragraphs of text one word at a time. So, I tested it out. While for me, the article it generated, was complete gobbledegook, I wonder how real it would come across to other people, I mean other voters.

Here is what it produced with only minor editing on this heading "The Australian Labor Party will win the 2022 election and here's why".

The Australian Labor Party will win the 2022 election and here's why with exclusive election forecasts.

Labor's odds to win the 2022 election are looking good.

With Liberal Party polling lead falling in the wake of the May budget, this is a time for rethinking the balance between the ALP and crossbench.

Liberal Party polling lead could drop as much as 40 points in the coming six weeks as opinion trends have already turned.

Even more alarmingly for Morrison, the ALP's poll numbers have shifted sharply since October 2019.

The Coalition's election fortunes are mixed at best. Even with the Morrison government's unpopularity and the Labor Party's current political weakness, Morrison’s own numbers are still trailing Albanese by a long way.

If Albanese makes little progress on reforms to pension reforms – which Labor still claims are necessary to "ensure we live better for longer" – the Coalition will still fall a long way short of governing.

This polling is from a slightly wider sample so more precise numbers are needed, but Morrison’s party, with 37 per cent support, would still need about 60 seats at least to have absolute control.