The technology behind OpenAI’s fiction-writing, fake-news-spewing AI, explained - Karen Hao, MIT Technology Review

The language model can write like a human, but it doesn’t have a clue what it’s saying. The passages of text that the model produces are good enough to masquerade as something human-written. But this ability should not be confused with a genuine understanding of language—the ultimate goal of the subfield of AI known as natural-language processing (NLP). (There’s an analogue in computer vision: an algorithm can synthesize highly realistic images without any true visual comprehension.) In fact, getting machines to that level of understanding is a task that has largely eluded NLP researchers. That goal could take years, even decades, to achieve, surmises Liang, and is likely to involve techniques that don’t yet exist. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612975/ai-natural-language-processing-explained/