RoboTrump – A fully convincing Trump AI text generator | Hacker News Reader

RoboTrump – A fully convincing Trump AI text generator

lawsuit.org

33 pointskristintynski12 comments

I trained this by fine-tuning the Salesforce CTRL transformer model, then surveyed 1,000 to see if people could tell the difference between RoboTrump and real Trump. They can't.

This doesn't really surprise me. Trump's speech patterns are juvenile: lots of repeated words and phrases, simple vocabulary, almost no subtext or complex ideas. A perfect training set for a simple probablistic text generator. This would be more interesting trained on the data set of an better orator, maybe Obama, Reagan, or Kennedy?

That's terrifying. I got 70%, but really only because I'm an aficionado of these bonkers quotes and recognised some phrases.

I do think that Trump is kind of an easy target, here, as his speech and writing is fairly incoherent anyway, but it's a scary demo all the same.

I got 80%, because most of the robo-trump stuff was just hard for me to read. I found that the real trump quotes I could quickly skim and understand. The fake quotes just didn't work in my brain as I read them.

It was definitely made harder by the fact that trump just sorta rambles.

Huh, that's interesting. I got 80% as well but I found Robo-Trump actually was the more composed speaker with more disjointed, stuttering conversations as more an indication of him stopping to think about what he was going to say.

I noticed that effect a few times - some wording just wasn't quite right. I was terrified of the times I guessed it was a machine because the words didn't make sense and it was real. I also got 80%.

The ideal case for a Markov process, really.

I don’t get it. If the point is that the text is indistinguishable from real Trump speeches, this is because it says precisely the kinds of things that the actual Donald Trump says. What would be dangerous would be persuading people that he said things that are substantially different to what he really thinks or says.

It could be easily trained with additional fine-tuning to have whatever bias you want him to have that is different from his current biases. What makes it so scary is the volume of realistic text that can be generated. It could be used to make Twitter/social media bots, or any volume of fake news articles, or combined with deepfakes and AI voice cloning to make unlimited volumes of fake video/audio of him saying things, in his style, about any subject with whatever angle/message you wanted.

If you get the language and intonation right, any message will feel convincing. Even when you know it's fake. Sure, you'd call fake easily enough if the bot suggested voting Democrat, but there's plenty of fun (or serious trouble for democracy) to be had away from the margins. If his new view is only surprising, well, he changes his mind a fair bit.

Now think of it with a politician you know, but not nearly as well as the President.

Got 9/10 but it was a challenge - between the way real Trump mangles English and fake Trump strains to flagrantly fail the Turing test (h/t @JanelleCShane) it was a struggle - nice job, train it more, and hook it up to it's imaging equivalent.....then let them all sort that mess out . :-D

When Trump refers to himself serving more than two terms, it's an executive branch technocracy centered around this that he has in mind.

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