GPT-2 has been already known by many people for months right now and is capable of generating realistic text since it was introduced. It's just that for 'ethical reasons' OpenAI refused to release the full dataset but instead released a smaller and limited version, but others have recreated a larger one to closely-replicate the original.

> I'm terrified of GPT-2 because it represents the kind of technology that evil humans are going to use to manipulate the population.

GPT-2 only is actually nothing compared to what is really going on. I won't say it is 'terrifying' but I would say that what would be more interesting is that if you combine thispersondoesnotexist.com, FaceApp, GPT-2, fakena.me, Lyrebird, DeepFake, Chatbots and few-shot talking heads [0] you can create realistic fake profiles. Although it is easy to generate, it will be harder to maintain over time as you have to do your due-diligence or several checks to find at least one anomaly and it can be declared as fake. Thus, it is easy to generate but hard to maintain over time.

So, this sort of doom-saying attitude around GPT-2 is actually just nonsense, unless you get your news from Facebook/Twitter/Online/etc. Just don't believe everything you see on the internet.

Time to get out the good old newspaper.