Society awakened to the delight, threat, and sheer weirdness of realistic images and other media dreamed up by computers.

Automatically generated text summaries are becoming common in search engines and news websites. But existing summarizers often mix up facts. For instance, a victim’s name might get switched for the perpetrator’s.

China announced a ban on fake news, targeting deepfakes in particular. The Cyberspace Administration of China issued new rules restricting online audio and video, especially content created using AI.

As black-box algorithms like neural networks find their way into high-stakes fields such as transportation, healthcare, and finance, researchers have developed techniques to help explain models’ decisions. New findings show that some of these methods can be fooled.

Will AI fakery erode public trust in the key social institutions? Generative models will flood media outlets with convincing but false photos, videos, ads, and news stories. The ensuing crisis of authority will lead to widespread distrust in everything from the financial system to democracy itself.

Deepfakes threaten to undermine law and order, perhaps democracy itself. A coalition of tech companies, nonprofits, and academics joined forces to counter potential adverse impacts.

OpenAI raised eyebrows in February when it announced — and withheld — the full version of its groundbreaking language model, GPT-2. Six months later, the company has re-examined the decision.