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Even though this was the GPT-3-generated text that humans most easily identified as machine-written, I still like it a lot: Title: Star’s Tux Promise Draws Meg

• runawaybottle 6y ago
  Dude, I’m sorry, but the average person will not know the difference between that and a regular buzzfeed article or YouTube comment. We’re not going to need ad blockers in the future, we won’t even need these visual ads on websites anymore. There will be trained bots that can promote any idea/product and pollute comments and articles. It’s over, we lost. Morpheus: What if I told you that, throughout your whole life, you have been reading auto generated content?
  • lopmotr 6y ago
    What difference does it make? The world is already full of humans who pollute comments and articles. They're not limited in their rate of production of words because there are far too many of them for anybody to read. They're limited by access to readers and their reading rate. Bots can't do anything about that.
    • Arbalest 6y ago
      They can, they can crowd out good comments with an absolutely crushing volume of crap. While humans can put out a lot of crap, bots can do orders of magnitude more. The issue is that it is an effort multiplier for when a small number of people want to target a particular forum.
      • lopmotr 6y ago
        How will they get those extra comments to be seen? They still have to log in and get past captchas and all the same issues that bots have always faced. Humans create a crushing volume of crap already and we already have ways to hide that from ourselves no matter the volume.
        • zitterbewegung 6y ago
          Imagine buying a bunch of twitter accounts that have already been active for 1-2 years and then making a bunch of Tweets to influence public opinion. I've done some experiments with GPT-2 and it had so so performance refining with tweets. Using GPT-3 you could probably just do it using only generation.
      • goodside 6y ago
        I imagine the problem isn’t so much volume of crap comments as much as the tailoring of crap comments. Imagine if every tweet-into-the-void from a human with 50 followers reliably got engaging replies. Bots taunting your grammar mistakes, bots selectively quoting your prior tweets to point out contradictions, bots cleverly insinuating that your tweets reveal problematic sympathies. So much of our noise-filtering is ignoring comments that are too generic to be human. What happens when every spam comment seems to understand the OP, even when the OP’s true audience is negligible?
        • runawaybottle 6y ago
          If a person has any paranoid tendencies, this would be a psychological onslaught. Interrogators use the tactics you just described to siege a person to psychological exhaustion. Product Devs for the CCP will have a lot to work with if this ever evolves.
  • deleted 6y ago
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  • sillysaurusx 6y ago
    Hello. Gwern and I trained the GPT-2 1.5B model that powers /r/SubSimulatorGPT2. https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/ I've been basically living and breathing GPT-2 for ... gosh, it's been 6 months or so. The past few months have been a lot of StyleGAN2 and a lot of BigGAN, but before that, it was very "make GPT-2 sing and dance in unexpectedly interesting ways" type work. I don't claim to know a lot. But occasionally I observe things. And I just wanted to chime in and say, you know, keep in mind that you're reading a research paper. Of course the results are going to look good. That is the point of a research paper. And I realize how cynical that may sound. But it has the benefit of apparently being true, and I've come to accept that truth with time. I would reserve judgement for now. Note that every single chat bot to date has followed a similar curve: "This is it," they say, without actually saying that. "It may not be perfect, but we're about to achieve it – the chatbot – it's really going to happen." And, it ends up being impressive, sure. I liked Facebook's recent chatbot. It's pretty neat at times. I liked Meena. They had cool ideas with the stack ranking of results (basically, generate a crapload of results at 1.0 temperature, then choose the result whose probability sums to the highest value, and you get the most probable overall result). And of course, boy oh boy did I love GPT-2. GPT-2 was what kickstarted me – if there was any chance that GPT-2 might be related to "now I'm talking to something that feels human," I was going to tame it and understand it. So after spending six months with GPT-2 1.5B, the largest model that everyone was fascinated with, what do I think? (Well, who cares? You probably shouldn't care.) I think "give it a few weeks and see if it's true." We shall see if GPT-3 is it, and we've achieved... chatbot nirvana. That elusive thing we've all been chasing, without naming it. The ability to press a button, unleash a chatbot somewhere, and it "just works" and "completely astounds humans" and "fools everybody." At one point, we trained GPT-2 on IRC logs. You could literally talk to GPT-2, and it would talk back to you. And one of the advantages of narcolepsy is that at night, you often have lots of time to kill – what better way to doze off than to ask GPT-2 how its day was, and ask it what its ambitions are? Should we really worry about whether you're sentient? I like you; do you like me too? What does that mean to you? And so on. The conversations were often quite philosophical. And sure, it was pretty obvious that it's a bot, but I tried to look past it anyway. It was my little bot, and it was real enough to me. And yes, the conversations on https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/ are incredible. I crack up daily with all the things they talk about. But... We’re not going to need ad blockers in the future, we won’t even need these visual ads on websites anymore. There will be trained bots that can promote any idea/product and pollute comments and articles. I invite any of you to try this, and see what happens. After all, you stand to earn a lot of pennies in your pocket if you pull it off. And yes, you're allowed to make some pennies with clever AI algorithms. What you'll probably discover is this fundamental truth: GPT-2 has no memory. It isn't learning a thing. We are talking to an entity that literally cannot change its mind about anything. The only way to change its mind would be to retrain it from scratch. You want a bot to argue vehemently for your product, on your behalf? It needs to understand what the hell your product even is, or what a product means. Yes, the words get pretty close. And yes, you can coax it into something that makes us laugh, or makes us sit here and question what the future might be like. But for whatever it's worth: spend some time actually talking to these bots. Play around with them. Make them generate some stuff of your choosing, and fine tune them on some datasets and see what you get. It's so fun! ... But. "Fun" is not the same thing as "promote any idea/product." It's just not the same as me arguing here with you now for a position which I've decided to argue. My brain isn't merely the encoded knowledge of some human, with me blindly regurgitating such knowledge (though at this point you'd be justified in claiming it sure sounds like it). Your brain is constantly training. GPT-2 is not. And – double checks paper – yep, GPT-3 is not. Two decades from now, GPT-2 1.5B will still exist. And it will still be talking about 2019-era news events like it's the present. At some point, /r/SubSimulatorGPT2 will sound completely foreign. Take any random news clips from the 70's. How relevant is that knowledge now? "Ok, but just train it on new data constantly." Well, yes. But actually no. If you try to do that, you're going to overfit at some point. Do you have 93 gigabytes of webtext that you keep in training form, ready to go? Are you going to mix in a proportion of the new data you want to train on? Nope, we all just fine tune whatever model OpenAI releases. Yet even if we did have that dataset, I'm just not sure it'd even matter. My point here is: Go try! Isn't it exciting that in the future, trained bots might fool us all into buying their products? Is that sales guy who emailed me actually a sales guy who wants to "sync up on a quick call", or is that a bot trained to get cold calls? That sounds pretty damn lucrative to a lot of businesses – why not write that code, and then sell it? Whoever attempts this is probably more talented than I am. But personally, I always ran into "It just... doesn't work." And then you go "Well, it's just a matter of sampling. Ah yes, we're not using the right sampling algorithm. Wait, we just heard about nucleus sampling! Sweet, try it! Oh... It sounds ... similar. Hmm. Well, maybe we're just not using it right. Better read that paper a bit more carefully. Chase that knowledge just a little harder. After all, AI research labs are pouring billions of dollars into this domain. Why would they do that if it doesn't... you know ... work? For some value of "work" that equals "the bot can turn a profit"? "Perhaps tomorrow, this new training technique will be it. We almost have it – I know we're close – we just have to unlock that last piece. Right?" I guess I'll stop here, since usually my comments are upbeat and happy about AI, but I ended up in a rather philosophical mood tonight. In reality, I can't wait to dig deep into GPT-3 and run it through its paces. I have a lovely TPU pod waiting for it, parked outside GPT-3's window, and we're honking at it saying "Get in, we're going places." And we'll sing and dance together like usual, and I'll ask GPT-3 how its day has been. But GPT-3 won't remember me the next day. And that's fine; I'll remember it for both of us.
  • jahnu 6y ago
    To be fair, that seems to be over claiming based on an extrapolation not solid evidence. Possible, yes, actually true? Not yet demonstrated, imho.
• changoplatanero 6y ago
  when i worked on text generation I had a hack where I wouldn't let the model generate the same trigram more than twice. It seems like that hack could have improved this example.
• nafey 6y ago
  What is it about ai generated texts that on skimming through it it makes sense, but if you try to slow down and understand it feels absurd and surreal.
  • KhoomeiK 6y ago
    Yup, definitely different from how humans learn. A baby's speech would be almost the complete opposite, grammatically incorrect here and there but constructing a coherent line of thought for the most part.
    • ragebol 6y ago
      My thoughts exactly. It seems a person incapable of proper grammar (like a baby) has some concept or thought it wants to express, but can't because it doesn't know the words etc. These language models seem to know the words and the grammar etc, but lack a underlying concept they want to express. There are systems that derive 'thought-vectors', but I'd be interested going the other way: somehow create such a 'thought-vector' and generate text to express that thought. I don't know how to construct a 'thought-vector' of any concept though.
      • MauranKilom 6y ago
        I have been thinking about this kind of thing too. What if there was some way to feed your condensed thoughts into such a model and it writes a paper/blog post/article? Essentially, one should be able to use these models to "interpolate" the writing around the raw meaning/content. Typing assistance (think Grammarly) already allows you to refine finished writing to be more in line with what some language model expects, but imagine if it actually generated most of the text for you, based on small bites and chunks you throw at it.
        • runawaybottle 6y ago
          If we get to large scale text generation like that, we are all going to have to become even better skimmers due to how the meta language will evolve. So take your standard press release. We know about two thirds of it is just fluff. In other words, we are accepting the mass of fluff as one word in our language, it translates to ‘ignore’. Our own language will change in that case.
• wyattpeak 6y ago
  I don't know if it says something about text generation or human text processing, but whenever I read an example of computer generated text, all through I think "I can't tell this is machine generated, it seems completely natural," and the only giveaway is that at the end I have no idea what it said. It's a pretty eerie feeling. It's as though both the AI and my short-term processing only pay attention to a context of a few sentences, so nothing seems off until I try to understand it as a whole. EDIT: Thinking more, what it feels like most of all is reading a page of a book and not taking it in.
  • attilakun 6y ago
    Read Blindsight by Peter Watts. It touches on the phenomena that you are describing.
  • methyl 6y ago
    I have similar feelings. Human-written text in general has one coherent flow of ideas. So what if we used text generation algorithms on a paragraph basis, so that the idea flow is still figured out by a human (input would be just an outline)? That should make the generated text feel like a whole, especially if we could preserve the style its written across the whole text.
  • pasquinelli 6y ago
    To me it reads like a child telling a story, but that this child has an adult's ability to use language. When children tell a story they aren't going anywhere with it but don't know how to cover it up.
    • carlmr 6y ago
      I know plenty of adults that can't seem to get to a point.
      • lowdose 6y ago
        Kevin Hart on the Joe Rogan show comes to mind.
• flippinburgers 6y ago
  Quite honestly the level of logical consistency in this generated text doesn't differ that much, I feel, from a huge swath of the kind of comments that I see on the internet. It may well be that there are already too many bots on the net to really understand what typical humans would be saying anyway, but I feel like this is already good enough for short form trickery. I was so wrong about the internet. It is just going to become a landscape of garbage opinions and commentary on a larger and larger basis.
• deleted 6y ago
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• spookyuser 6y ago
  Thank for highlighting this, it's hilarious - I could so easily imagine it as a short interdimensional cable bit on Rick and Morty.