New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Should algorithmic news like GPT-2 and clickbait be banned?

Ask HN: Should algorithmic news like GPT-2 and clickbait be banned?
6 by burtonator | 3 comments on Hacker News.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately but algorithms like GPT-2 scare the hell out of me: http://bit.ly/2U3ixvq (if you're out of the loop on that one) I'm excited about it in some ways. It might mean we can build real models from content and build real understanding but the option for Google spam and fake news is too frightening. I think I'm generally OK with A/B testing. I'm actually a bad writer and sometimes titles are rough. If you A/B test a bunch of them via something like Mailchimp you can come up with a better title but of course I don't have nefarious intentions. Maybe a middle path could be to implement some sort of public key system / validation for actual humans. This would also solve the fake news problem we currently have but it would also mean people need to actually use keys responsibly. The idea being that every blog post, email, etc you send off needs to be signed. Google could just flat out DROP content by anything created by GPT-2 as it's not validated by a chain of trust that goes back to a human. The reason I'm leaning towards making it illegal is that humans are just too naive. I have family members who have sent out images that are clearly photoshopped because they not technically literate enough to understand that they're fake. When something like GPT-2 can write 5-10 pages of content and it looks completely legitimate I think we might be in a world of hurt.

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