Liberal tech billionaire funded fake-news software

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A liberal billionaire who allegedly backed a misinformation campaign against Roy Moore has helped fund the development of software capable of creating "deepfake" news articles.

Reid Hoffman, a prominent Hillary Clinton supporter and Democratic donor, has greatly increased his financial contributions to the artificial intelligence research group OpenAI, the Daily Caller News Foundation reported.

OpenAI has published software called GT2, which is capable of generating news stories from two sentences that look like the real thing, dubbed "deepfake" articles.

In 2017, groups financed by Hoffman, New Knowledge and American Engagement Technologies, allegedly used social media to undermine support for Republican Roy Moore's U.S. Senate campaign in Alabama. Moore, who had held a sizable lead in polling, lost narrowly to Democrat Doug Jones, who has called for an investigation of the scheme.

Members of Congress in January voiced concerns about so-called deepfake videos that make it difficult for social media users to distinguish fact from fiction.

"It is almost too late to sound the alarm before this technology is released — it has been unleashed ... and now we are playing a bit of defense," said Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., in January.

The Daily Caller said OpenAI decided not to publish any of the code involved in GPT2 out of concern that bad actors might misuse the product to create fake news.

The founder of OpenAI, tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, said he left the group in 2018 partially because of a disagreement about its direction.

Musk wrote on Twitter Sunday that OpenAI also was competing with workers from his main companies, Tesla and SpaceX.