[Day 3] The Era of Fake News - AI to build fake stories

This article is part of 7 day challenge, today is day 3.

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Artificial Intelligence(AI) is changing the way we use technology. Slowly but steadily Artificial Intelligence is growing in the space of technology. It has moved from 'hype' to 'real-world' scenarios. Almost all the tech enterprises have invested in AI.

Data is the new 'oil' ! Oil rich countries have been exploited by western powers for many years and same will happen to 'data' rich countries that's where major tech firms are interested to capture the market. The job market for data scientist, machine learning(ML) expert, python developer and other related AI-ML skills have shot up in recent years. For sure AI is here to stay and definitely make an impact.

AI powered News

If you are using Google News(formerly known as Google Newstand), you are already shown news based on AI recommendations. The AI analyses your interest based on topics you have read already, your geography, also based on majority of the people in your region/country, of course the manual preference which you set. It take multiple factors into account to show you the news and it keeps updating itself as your usage pattern changes.

Google News is just one example. AI is used in many other apps, ecommerce websites, social networking sites which analyze user behavior, browsing pattern etc and show you recommendations and other relevant information to you.

AI to Stitch Fake News

Using AI/ML researchers developed data models which can write a complete story based on some of the hints or disconnected few letters. Imagine you pick few sentences(1-2) from 5 different articles, then feed those into AI, then it will connect the dots out of those words(disjoint set) into a complete new story which is obviously a 'fake' story. It may sound fun but eventually someone can mass-produce fake news for the profit or to deceive people.

There are few web apps and online tools available today which will spin some of the words from original article and give a complete new set of words. Such tools are used by plagiarist who copy others' work and post as their own.

Over a period of time when AI keep understanding the patterns, the fake news it produces will turn out to be more real-like story. People can easily fall for it, believe it is true and no one knows it impact. Mob violence is one example of how a large number of people believe a rumor, accept it and start to believe it. India saw many mob violence in the past two years. Social network sites had to pull up their socks to contain the situation and sometimes government had to ban internet access in few areas for few days. Imagine the impact if fake news are generated 'automagically' by AI!

Research OpenAI Blog.

OpenAI, a non-profit artificial intelligence research group in San Francisco, has unveiled a machine learning algorithm that can generate coherent text, including fake news articles, after being given just a small sample to build on.

The use of fake news stories for political disinformation has become a major concern for governments around the world in the wake of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. As pointed in the earlier post, the term 'fake news' gained popularity from late 2016 and significantly in 2017, according to Google search trends.

Call to action | Points to remember

• Do not blindly believe any news article, what you see might not be true always.
• What you see(news article) might be written by a bot or any AI based mechanism. So the authenticity might not even be valid.
• AI is going to stay and you will see many more AI based apps.

A glimpse of what is coming up in this 7 day writing challenge:

You can also read my previous posts on the same topic, by clicking on the links below.

Day 0 - Announcement - Plan - Prizes
Day 1 - Social media
Day 2 - Going back in time
Day 3 - AI to build fake stories
Day 4 - Exploiting technology to fuel
Day 5 - The science behind it
Day 6 - Financial impact
Day 7 - The future