New AI Generates Horrifyingly Plausible Fake News

The website (with toy Fake News generator): https://rowanzellers.com/grover/

The paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.12616.pdf

First impressions: naturally the examples in the article are cherry picked, but the AI still manages to display an unusually high level of coherence. It demonstrates thematic chaining across sentences and inserts real facts along with plausible ones:

"McMahon also made it clear he thought Omarosa Manigault Newman, a White House aide who has written a tell-all book, was “incompetent”. Trump has been critical of Manigault Newman but said last year he could “understand why she is disgruntled”."

The fact about Newman is correct - she has written a "tell-all" book. The Trump statement is plausible in context (unless of course you happen to know Trump[1]) and naturally follows from the previous statement.

The paragraph-level coherence is not all it could be, but it's easy to miss that if you're reading quickly. There's definitely some wow here.

[1] Here's an actual Trump quote about Newman: "While I know it's 'not presidential' to take on a lowlife like Omarosa, and while I would rather not be doing so, this is a modern day form of communication and I know the Fake News Media will be working overtime to make even Wacky Omarosa look legitimate as possible. Sorry!"

It still has the surrealism that I have seen from other generators "On May 26, a group of young women celebrating a bachelorette party in Okinawa turned to karaoke in a public laundromat for an impromptu session. They were surprised to find that, instead of the karaoke system they knew, the floor was covered in a thick layer of the highly prized fur pelt of Nadeshiko, Japan’s national sashimi"

So what? The credibility of a news article is a function of its provenance, not its style. Creator reputation matters a lot more than internal textual signals, and the most sophicated ML system can only reproduce the latter.