Elon Musk¹'s OpenAI has an algorithm that can generate weirdly² believable fake news stories.

埃隆·马斯克的OpenAI公司有一种能写出相当逼真的假新闻报道的算法。

Artificial intelligence is getting pretty good at generating entire articles and stories, which raises troubling implications about its potential to mass produce fake news.

人工智能在编造完整的文章和故事方面发展地太好了，它批量生产假新闻的潜能引起了人们的隐隐不安。

A program developed by a team at OpenAI, the non-profit research institute founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman, can make up stories based on a handful of words that actually sound pretty believable.

OpenAI是埃隆·马斯克和山姆·奥特曼创建的非盈利研究机构，它的一个团队研发的一个项目能用少量的词汇编造出听起来十分可信的故事。

Here's a snippet of what it's capable of:

这是它的作品选段：

Russia has declared war on the United States after Donald Trump³ accidentally fired a missile in the air.

在唐纳德·特朗普不小心向空中发射导弹后，俄罗斯向美国宣战。

Russia said it had “identified the missile’s trajectory⁴ and will take necessary measures to ensure the security of the Russian population and the country’s strategic nuclear forces.” The White House said it was “extremely concerned by the Russian violation⁵” of a treaty banning intermediate-range ballistic missiles.

俄罗斯表示，它已经“确定了导弹的弹道，并将采取必要措施确保俄罗斯人民和国家战略性核武装的安全”。白宫表示，它“极为关切俄罗斯违反了”禁止中程弹道导弹的条约。

The US and Russia have had an uneasy relationship since 2014, when Moscow annexed⁶ Ukraine’s Crimea region and backed separatists in eastern Ukraine.

自2014年莫斯科吞并乌克兰克里米亚地区并支持乌克兰东部的分离主义者以来，美俄关系一直紧张。

The AI came up with the entire story on its own, after simply being provided with the words "Russia has declared war on the United States after Donald Trump accidentally..."这个人工智能是独立自主地编造了上面整个故事，而提供给它的材料仅仅是“在唐纳德·特朗普不小心……，俄罗斯向美国宣战”。

The researchers wanted to develop a general purpose language algorithm, trained on a huge amount of text from the web. This encompassed⁷ 45 million pages from the web, chosen via Reddit.

研究人员想通过用网页上的大量文本做练习，研发出一个通用语言的算法。这些文本涵盖了经过Reddit筛选出的4500万页网页内容。

They originally intended for the program to be able to do things like translate text and answer questions, but it soon became clear that there was also great potential for abuse and exploitation. It was simply too competent at generating stories, which could then be misused⁸.

这个项目的本意是用于翻译文本和解答问题，但很快人们发现它隐藏着巨大的被滥用和被过度开发的忧患。它编故事编得实在是太好了，以致很可能被别有用心地利用。