Content area
Full Text
In 2017 - just a few months before his death - Stephen Hawking described the emergence of artificial intelligence as possibly "the worst event in the history of our civilisation". The advent of GPT-3 - a highly accurate synthetic human language generator powered by AI - is the kind of technology that might just prove him right.
As Donald Trump and Joe Biden square off in what is likely to be a brutal US election campaign, experts in the dark arts of misinformation have warned of the risks posed by "deepfakes" to manipulate public opinion.
At a critical moment, so the theory goes, a doctored video - perhaps depicting one of the candidates saying or doing something unconscionable - could be released into the ether to manufacture a scandal designed to dominate the news cycle during the climax of the campaign and swing the vote.
It's a credible risk which we should be prepared for, especially after widespread evidence of meddling in the last presidential campaign.
In the longer run, however, it is GPT-3 and technologies like it which pose a bigger threat and about which we should be truly worried.
AI-powered synthetic human writing is becoming uncannily accurate and ever more difficult to distinguish from the real thing.
It...
