原标题：【媒库文选】“假文本”会是下一个全球政治威胁吗？
Could “Fake Text” Be the Next Global Political Threat？
“假文本”会是下一个全球政治威胁吗？
Oscar Schwartz 奥斯卡·施瓦茨
Earlier this month， an unexceptional thread appeared on Reddit announcing that there is a new way “to cook egg white[s] without a frying pan”.
As so often happens on this website， which calls itself “the front page of the internet”， this seemingly banal comment inspired a slew of responses. “I‘ve never heard of people frying eggs without a frying pan，” one incredulous Redditor replied. “I’m gonna try this，” added another. One particularly enthusiastic commenter even offered to look up the scientific literature on the history of cooking egg whites without a frying pan.
Every day， millions of these unremarkable conversations unfold on Reddit， spanning from cooking techniques to geopolitics in the Western Sahara to birds with arms. But what made this conversation about egg whites noteworthy is that it was not taking place among people， but artificial intelligence （AI） bots.
The egg whites thread is just one in a growing archive of conversations on a subreddit – a Reddit forum dedicated to a specific topic – that is made up entirely of bots trained to emulate the style of human Reddit contributors. This simulated forum was created by a Reddit user called disumbrationist using a tool called GPT-2， a machine learning language generator that was unveiled in February by OpenAI， one of the world's leading AI labs.
Jack Clark， policy director at OpenAI， told me that chief among these concerns is how the tool might be used to spread false or misleading information at scale. In a recent testimony given at a House intelligence committee hearing about the threat of AI-generated fake media， Clark said he foresees fake text being used “for the production of [literal] ‘fake news’， or to potentially impersonate people who had produced a lot of text online， or simply to generate troll-grade propaganda for social networks”.
Alec Radford， a researcher at OpenAI， told me that he also sees the success of GPT-2 as a step towards more fluent communication between humans and machines in general. He says the intended purpose of the system is to give computers greater mastery of natural language， which may improve tasks like speech recognition， which is used by the likes of Siri and Alexa to understand your commands; and machine translation， which is used to power Google Translate.
But as GPT-2 spreads online and is appropriated by more people like disumbrationist – amateur makers who are using the tool to create everything from Reddit threads， to short stories and poems， to restaurant reviews – the team at OpenAI are also grappling with how their powerful tool might flood the internet with fake text， making it harder to know the origins of anything we read online.
Clark and the team at OpenAI take this threat so seriously that when they unveiled GPT-2 in February this year， they released a blogpost alongside it stating that they weren't releasing the full version of the tool due to “concerns about malicious applications”.
However， some feel that this overstates the threat of fake text. According to Yochai Benkler， co-head of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard， the most damaging instances of fake news are written by political extremists and trolls， and tend to be about controversial topics that “trigger deep-seated hatred”， like election fraud or immigration. While a system like GPT-2 can produce semi-coherent articles at scale， it is a long way from being able to replicate this type of psychological manipulation.
Whether or not GPT-2， or a similar technology， becomes the misinformation machine that OpenAI are anxious about， there is a growing consensus that considering the social implications of a technology before it is released is good practice. At the same time， predicting precisely how technologies will be used and misused is notoriously difficult.
本月早些时候，一条再平常不过的主题帖出现在红迪网站上，声称有一种新方法可以“不用煎锅就能烹饪蛋白”。
就像在这个自称“互联网头版”的网站上经常发生的那样，这个看似普通的主题帖引发了一长串的回帖。一名表示怀疑的红迪用户回复说：“我从未听说，有人不用煎锅就能烹饪鸡蛋。”另一名用户说：“我要试试这个方法。”还有一名对此颇感兴趣的用户甚至主动提出，要在科学文献中查询不用煎锅烹饪蛋白的历史。
每天都有数以百万计这样普普通通的对话出现在红迪网站上，内容从烹饪技巧到西撒哈拉的地缘政治再到有手臂的鸟，包罗万象。不过，这些有关蛋白的对话之所以值得注意，是因为它们不是发生在人与人之间，而是人工智能机器人之间。
这条有关蛋白的帖子只是一个完全由机器人组成的红迪话题板块（即红迪上某一话题专属的论坛）的海量对话之一，这些机器人经过训练能够模仿红迪真人用户的对话风格。这个模拟论坛由名为“去本影主义者”的红迪用户利用GPT-2工具创建，GPT-2是一款机器学习语言生成器，由世界领先的人工智能实验室之一开放人工智能研究中心（OpenAI）在今年2月推出。
OpenAI的政策主管杰克·克拉克告诉我，人们最大的担忧是，这个工具可能被用来大规模散播虚假或误导性信息。克拉克最近在众议院情报委员会就人工智能生成假媒体的威胁作证时说，他预见到，假文本可能被用于“制造（字面意义上的）‘假新闻’，也可能被用于假冒曾在线生成大量文本的人，或者仅仅是为社交网络制造菜鸟级的政治宣传”。
OpenAI的研究员亚历克·拉德福德告诉我，他也认为，GPT-2的成功是朝着人机之间更流畅沟通迈进的一步。他说，该系统的设计目的是让计算机更好地掌握自然语言，从而可能改进语音识别和机器翻译等工作，Siri和Alexa等系统就是利用语音识别来理解你的指令，而谷歌翻译则是基于机器翻译。
但随着GPT-2在互联网上传播并被更多像“去本影主义者”这样的业余生产者利用（他们利用这个工具制造从红迪帖子到小说和诗歌再到餐厅评价的各种信息），OpenAI的团队也在苦恼于他们这款强大的工具有可能导致互联网上假文本泛滥，使追溯我们网络浏览内容的源头更加困难。
克拉克和OpenAI的设计团队高度重视这种威胁，今年2月他们在推出GPT-2时还发布了一篇博文，称出于“对恶意应用的担心”，他们没有发布GPT-2的完整版本。
不过，也有人觉得这夸大了假文本的威胁。哈佛大学伯克曼·克莱因互联网与社会中心的联合负责人约凯·本克勒说，假新闻最具破坏性的例子都是政治极端分子和网络喷子所写，往往与竞选舞弊或移民等“激起根深蒂固仇恨”的争议性话题有关。尽管像GPT-2这样的系统能够大规模生产半连贯的文章，但要复制这种心理操控却还有很长的路要走。
无论GPT-2或某种类似的技术能否成为OpenAI所担心的虚假信息生成器，越来越多人的共识是，在推出一种技术之前思考其社会影响是有益的做法。与此同时，准确预测技术将被如何使用和滥用是出了名地困难。（刘白云译自英国《卫报》网站7月4日文章）
