I think this is reflective of a substantial disconnect and polarisation in society, because OpenAI's position here was driven by a very fundamental intuition about human nature which is not universally shared.

Namely, their rationale was something like this: the world is dominated by people whose opinions are fundamentally shaped by what others are saying, and moreover, by how frequently other people seem to be saying it. They don't really think about things or rely on their own experience: they're just mimics.

In such a world being able to auto-generate fake messages of support for some political position or another at scale would give you immense power, because the population would automatically swing behind you based merely on the perception that everyone was swinging behind you.

So that's their fear. But is it realistic?

Well, this is where we get into the polarisation. "You aren't smart enough to have an opinion" is the sort of viewpoint that leads to an elitist vs populist conflict. There have been reams of analysis about this and it's not really AI specific - e.g. did people vote for Brexit because of Twitter, or because of things they saw in the press, or did they vote based on their own experiences, or what their close friends/family thought, or what mix of "all of the above" is the truest mix?

When they refused to release GPT-2 the OpenAI researchers took an extreme on that spectrum, asserting that essentially they had built a mind control device. But of course which didn't work on themselves, only on lesser minds. Not surprisingly this was very controversial, albeit I think the Valley/Hacker News set would be surprised at just how controversial it would have been if anyone outside the AI world had really noticed. You can't tell most of the world their opinions aren't really their own and not expect pushback.

Personally I don't share those intuitions at all. The controversy over DeepFakes is similar. Photoshop has existed for decades and hasn't led to a dystopia, but suddenly DeepFakes is going to create fundamental social change? I don't think so.

AI researchers, especially in academia, need big narratives to keep up the funding and suggest they're on a mission to save the world vs e.g. making slightly better playlist recommendations. GPT-2 seems like a classic case of this being taken to absurdity.