Data Backup Digest

Interactive and informative content is the lifeblood of any website in the 21st century. Whether it's an award-winning news outlet or a niche blog, the art of content development often means all the difference between success and failure. It's a fine line that's not always easy for human writers and journalists to tread – but it's apparently rather easy for the AI-driven counterparts of the future.

Automated Content Creation

While highly sophisticated and advanced in its design and execution, the overall premise of GPT2 is simple: to automatically generate content and populate a complete article that is not only articulate, but one that is already suitable for online publishing. It achieves this by using a brief, human-generated prompt of a few words – just to set the overall subject, theme, and tone. The rest is left up to AI.

During the initial development phase, researchers trained GPT2 via a comprehensive database comprising approximately eight million Reddit pages. The results were filtered to include only those pages that had a karma rating of three or higher.

The entire GPT2 is the brainchild of OpenAI, a non-profit, San Francisco-based IT group that is pursuing various applications of artificial intelligence in order to benefit humanity – and it's already creating a lot of controversy.

Examining the Controversy

Although the breakthrough is a potential boon for some, such as startup companies that are trying to create awareness of their product on a limited budget and those who regularly use generic content as filler on their personal blogs, professional publishing companies are frightened at the potential ramifications of such a product – including the possibility that unscrupulous writers could use this tool to automatically generate articles and pass them off as their own.

However, the current iteration of GPT2 is far from perfect. While the content it creates is readable enough to pass at first glance, it often includes repeated words, stats or quotes that are completely incorrect, and other rudimentary mistakes. These are all elements that are easily spotted by the trained eye – but easily missed when scanning an article to try and pick up on the key details.

The developers have also chosen to withhold GPT2 from a public release – at least for the time being. Whether or not they'll orchestrate a public launch in the future is unclear, but the very presence of such a tool is bound to cast even more uncertainty and confusion over a time that is already muddied by online scams, fake news, and automated SPAM.

It's also unclear whether or not the GPT2 project has sparked any type of competitive development by another party. If so, these developers might try to gain an edge over the original by making their utility publicly available – much to the dismay of real publishers, writers, and journalists around the world.

To find out more information about GPT2, which is not currently available as a public release, or to learn more about any of OpenAI's other projects, please visit their official website at {{https://openai.com|openai.com}}.