A Silicon Valley research company will not release a new tool that can generate coherent text using artificial intelligence, including news articles, over fears it could be used to create fake news.

But, non-profit firm Open AI has released a smaller version of its GPT-2 text generator for researchers along with a technical paper on its tool.

The tool, which the firm says was trained on a dataset of 8m web pages (equal to 40GB) to predict the next word in a sentence can produce “realistic and coherent” text following a prompt written by a human.