“Deepfake Bot Submissions to Federal Public Comment Websites Cannot Be Distinguished from Human Submissions”, 2019-12-18 (; backlinks; similar):
Publicly available artificial intelligence methods can generate an enormous volume of original, human speech-like topical text (“Deepfake Text”) that is not based on conventional search-and-replace patterns.
I created a computer program (a bot) that generated and submitted 1,001 deepfake comments regarding a Medicaid reform waiver to a federal public comment website, stopping submission when these comments comprised more than half of all submitted comments. I then formally withdrew the bot comments.
When humans were asked to classify a subset of the deepfake comments as human or bot submissions, the results were no better than would have been gotten by random guessing.
Federal public comment websites currently are unable to detect Deepfake Text once submitted, but technological reforms (eg. CAPTCHAs) can be implemented to help prevent massive numbers of submissions by bots.