At a credibility score of 6.91/10, many people will rightly judge that the full GPT-2 model will remain insufficient for malicious use in creating fake news.

However, even the smaller models are already good enough for spamming/trolling/astroturfing. It doesn’t take a Shakespearean soliloquy to convince people of a point. Just enough of a flood of short 1-3 sentence pro/con comments on a forum can drastically affect the perceived public opinion of an issue. Those comments can then spur real people to reply, which could result in an ultimately organic but directed propaganda vector. Propaganda directors will carefully craft something for people to look at, and the GPT-2 bots will move people’s eyes in that direction.

You can see the same happen on r/subsimulatorgpt2, where the longer titles and prompts and replies eventually sprawl into incoherence, but the shorter sentences from the finetuned bots in the comments section are effectively indistinguishable from the kinds of short comments you would find on their respective subreddits.

Or in other words, the malicious uses for GPT-2 won’t be a tidal wave, but a flash flood.