By: Felicia Vacarelu, Communications Specialist, UN Global Pulse
June 10, 2019
What if that speech you just read was entirely AI generated? UN Global Pulse released a new study discussing the risks that can arise from the malicious use of automated text generation software, and the potential impacts. The study used open-source tools and data from UN General Assembly speeches to build a fake UN speech generator.
Automated text generation is being broadly applied in many domains, from marketing to robotics, and used to create chatbots, product reviews and even to write poetry. The ability to synthesize text, however, presents many potential risks, while access to the technology required to build generative models is becoming increasingly easy.
To build the speech generator, Global Pulse researchers first created a taxonomy for the machine learning algorithms using English language transcripts of speeches given by high level representatives at the UN General Assembly between 1970 and 2015. The goal was to train a language model that could be used to generate text on topics ranging from general issues such as climate change, to UN Secretary-General’s remarks, to inflammatory and discriminating speech.