AI is a powerful tool if kept in the right hands, but what happens when (not if) it falls into the wrong hands? And would we even know that we are looking at AI news and not real news?
February 19, 2019

Jacob Ward, NBC News technology correspondent, joined Ali Velshi on Monday to discuss advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and what it could mean going forward.

A few of the shocking things Velshi said:

"The algorithm learns by taking in millions of web pages, scientific articles, other data, it analyzes the text. It learns the language patterns ... feeding one false sentence into the algorithm resulted in a fake article far faster than any humans can write one."

So....the program is smarter than humans and can replicate our language patterns and spit out ANYTHING it wants based off of one sentence. Meaning, this type of fake news could blast out on social media before anyone had time to respond. For example "Trump fires nuclear weapon at Canada" and the article could be so well written, with enough detail to seem real...can you imagine? World War III could start before the military could respond quick enough.

Velshi did say that researchers were so worried about this that they only released a simplified version of the algorithm to the public while "locking up" the full algorithm, but as we all know from watching movies like Da Vinci Code and Indiana Jones, there is always someone searching for the Holy Grail. All it takes is one person to find the full AI code and release it to the highest bidder and the world of fake news and cyber warfare would explode like toothpaste bursting out of a tube - you can't put it back in, folks. I have tried.

Ward talked a bit about the ethics behind AI, what is considered "no go territory" and how the algorithm can do things researchers didn't expect (ie write news articles really fast that don't seem fake).

Very interesting clip, both for good and bad reasons. In the right hands, AI can be a positive thing, but in the wrong hands this could really be dangerous stuff.

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