The problem for spammers, as well as for fake news writers, has never been in coming up with the text for the spam email or the fake news story. This is already cheap and easy enough. The problem is with distribution and getting enough eyeballs. This new and so very dangerous AI may enable you to come up with 1M fake news stories with the click of a button but it won't get any of those stories published in NYTimes.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. Take their reporting of Charlottesville events and Trump's comments about them. Here's what Trump _actually_ said: https://twitter.com/ZiaErica/status/1096572062196486144. Pretty reasonable point of view, all things considered. What was NYTimes "reporting"? That Trump is "defending white supremacists", of course. Don't believe me? See for yourself: https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+charlottesville+nytime.... Why was NYTimes doing that? It's either deliberate malice or incompetence, both of which would make NYTimes quite friendly to automatically generated fake news as long as they fit their narrative.
But there's a bigger issue with all of this. When people see this tech, they immediately think that it'll be used to generate fake news (which it will be, to be sure). BUT, it could also be used to do the exact opposite: take facts and summarize them without agenda-driven omissions, without "reading minds" or inventing "sources" "familiar with" someone's "thinking", or passing off uncorroborated dossiers or book chapters as gospel truth.
