9 ms·
I've started working on a version of GPT-2 which generates English text. The purpose of this is to improve its ability to predict the next character in a text,
by thewarrior 6y ago
I've started working on a version of GPT-2 which generates English text. The purpose of this is to improve its ability to predict the next character in a text, by having it learn 'grammatical rules' for English. It already works well for predicting the next character when it has seen only a small amount of text, but becomes less accurate as the amount of training text increases.
I have managed to improve this by having it generate text. That is, it creates an 'original' piece of text about 'topic x', then a slightly altered version of this text where one sentence has a single word changed, and this process is repeated many times (about a million). It seems to quickly learn how to vary sentences in a way that seems natural and realistic. I think the reason this works is because it reduces the chance that the grammar it has learned for one specific topic (e.g. snow) will accidentally be transferred to another topic (e.g. dogs).
Of course, this all means nothing unless it actually learns something from the process of generating text. I haven't tried this yet, but the plan is to have it generate text about a topic, then have a second GPT-2 system try to guess what that topic is. If the resulting system is noticeably better at this task, then we know the process has increased its ability to generalize.
One potential issue with this approach is that the text it generates is 'nonsensical', in that it is almost like a word-salad. Although this is a standard problem with neural nets (and other machine learning algorithms), in this case the text actually is a word-salad. It seems that it has learned the rules of grammar, but not the meaning of words. It is able to string words together in a way that sounds right, but the words don't actually mean anything.
Plot twist: This comment was generated by GPT-3 prompted with some of the comments in this thread.
- cs702 6y agoThe thing that kills me is that to the vast majority of human beings the nonsensical technobabble above is probably indistinguishable from real, honest, logically consistent technobabble.[a] Soon enough, someone will replicate the Sokal hoax[b] with GPT-3 or another state-of-the-art language-generation model. It's not hard to imagine GPT-3 writing a fake paper that gets published in certain academic journals in the social sciences. [a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technobabble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technobabble [b] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair -- here's a copy of Sokal's hoax paper, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity:" https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgre...
- thewarrior 6y agoThe thing is that this thing has now crossed into the uncanny valley. Earlier it would have great trouble making a single sentence that makes sense. You only ever remember whether the last two sentences made sense and go together. And with GPT-3 any pair of sentences always makes almost perfect sense. By the time you're four sentences down you go wait a minute ...
- setzer22 6y agoThis was very apparent when reading the generated stories [1]. Especially the shoggoth cat dialogue, I found that one really creepy. The fragment below comes straight out from the uncanny valley: Human: Those memes sound funny. But you didn’t include any puns. So tell me, what is your favorite cat pun? AI: Well, the best pun for me was the one he searched for the third time: “You didn’t eat all my fish, did you?” You see, the word “fish” can be replaced with the word “cats” to make the sentence read “Did you eat all my cats?” [1]: https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3 https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3
- spion 6y agoAn instance of a Voight-Kampff test.
- techdragon 6y agoYeah, GPT-3 never really gives any kind of answer to “why”. It rambles on like Abraham Simpson talking about how an onion on his belt was the style at the time. Devoid of purpose it fills the void with meaningless words until told to stop. It’s subtle gibberish... and fucking irritating as soon as you catch it.
- CamperBob2 6y agoWorse, Sokal's Revenge is probably inevitable, in which someone will generate a nightmarishly complex mathematical proof that takes the whole field in unexplored directions. Some of the most respected professors and most promising students will then be distracted for years trying, and ultimately failing, to make sense of it. Some say this has already happened. Nobody has ever seen the Social Text editors and Mochizuki in the same room together, have they?
- randomsearch 6y agoThat’s interesting, as within a sentence I had dismissed your comment as rambling and moved on to the next one, without thinking it had been generated... but maybe you’re double bluffing me.
- woko 6y agoSame, except that I skipped straight to the last line to check whether it was a generated text after I noticed the first sentence made no sense (GPT-2 already generates grammatically correct English sentences).
- AJRF 6y agoThis comment reminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXJKdh1KZ0w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXJKdh1KZ0w
- pjc50 6y ago> Plot twist: This comment was generated by GPT-3 prompted with some of the comments in this thread. This kills the forum. Seriously, once this is weaponised, discussion of politics on the internet with strangers becomes completely pointless instead of just mostly pointless. You could potentially convince a human; you can't convince a neural net that isn't in learning mode.
- amelius 6y agoPerhaps it will destroy anonymity. Because the only way to be sure a human wrote something is if you somehow know who the comment came from. We might end up with reputation based conversations.
- heavenlyblue 6y agoYou can still be anonymous with this. You just need to be pseudonymous.
- pjc50 6y agoOf course, the human can simply lend their name to the robot. And as previously discussed, ending anonymity entrenches the existing power structure.
- amelius 6y ago> Of course, the human can simply lend their name to the robot. That could have consequences for their reputation, though.