A Harvard medical student fooled volunteers into thinking automatically generated comments submitted about a Medicaid proposal were real, raising concerns about the misuse of AI for misinformation and disinformation.

Of the 1,000 or so comments on proposed changes to Idaho's Medicaid programme on the medicaid.gov website, half had been generated by student Max Weiss using OpenAI's GPT-2 large language model. 

Weiss' research shows Medicaid users were unable to distinguish real comments from fake ones.

The stunt demonstrates how easily large language systems such as OpenAI's GPT-2 can be deployed to produce effective misinformation and disinformation campaigns. 

Research, advocacy 🧮

• Weiss M. (2019). Deepfake Bot Submissions to Federal Public Comment Websites Cannot Be Distinguished from Human Submissions

News, commentary, analysis 🗞️

• https://www.wired.com/story/ai-powered-text-program-could-fool-government/

• https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/02/why-an-undergrad-flooded-government-websites-with-bot-comments/

• https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/ai-powered-text-from-this-program-could-fool-the-government/

• https://www.inputmag.com/culture/artificial-intelligence-machine-was-able-to-dupe-medicaidgov

• https://inversezone.com/2021/01/18/harvard-medical-student-used-openais-gpt-2-to-submit-comments-on-idahos-draft-medicaid-proposal-volunteers-could-not-tell-them-apart-from-humans-will-knight-wired/

• https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/01/ai_in_brief/