As It Happens vs. artificial intelligence: Can you tell which 2020 headlines are real?
CBC Radio | Posted: December 30, 2020 8:31 PM | Last Updated: January 15, 2021
Researcher Janelle Shane fed real AIH headlines to an AI algorithm, and it came up with a few of its own
From mysterious monoliths to invasive murder hornets, 2020 was a weird year, with even weirder headlines.
So weird, in fact, that when Colorado research scientist Janelle Shane fed a batch of actual 2020 headlines to a language-mimicking artificial intelligence called GPT-3, it generated some truly bizarre news of its own, including: "Massive Radioactive Sinkhole Continues to Grow in Russia" and "When Killer Orchids Attack: How the Deadly Corpse Orchid Is Turning Up in U.S. Backyards."
These AI-generated headlines sound exactly like the kind of quirky stories we love to cover on our program. So we asked Shane to feed the AI some real 2020 headlines from As It Happens, and see what it would come up with.
The computer-generated headlines were so perfectly As It Happens-esque that even our own senior producer and assistant director couldn't always tell the difference. Watch them try it:
Want to try it yourself? Take our quiz below and see if you can spot the difference between real As It Happens headlines, and fake ones generated by an artificial intelligence.