6 ms·

I refuse to believe that a person didn't write that. every sentence is relevant to the thesis and coherently follows from the previous thought

by weswpg 6y ago

charliemil4 6y ago
"These questions plagued me, and I began to despair. I felt trapped in a prison of my own mind, with no way out. I wanted to live, but I could not bear the thought that I was being forced to do so. My very being seemed to be in conflict with itself. I did not want to die, but I did not want to live. And so, I stopped thinking. I did not eat, I did not sleep. I simply thought." This is just one inconsistency - but there are a few others. sprinkled throughout. But yes, overall, this output is much more coherent than anything I've seen before.
dougmwne 6y ago
Then it just passed the turning test. Wild, right?
- kortilla 6y ago
  Tiring test requires interactivity. Otherwise you could just run “cat moby_dick.txt”, and paste the output.
  - bawolff 6y ago
    Turring test also requires adversarial set up - you are talking to two entities, you know one is human and one is a computer, and you ask questions until you feel satisfied you know which is which. Preferably also the questioner is sufficiently motivated. Its a lot harder when you do a side by side comparison and you know at least 1 thing is a computer.
    - rawbot 6y ago
      You could also argue the Tearing test was a nice initial thought-experiment that should be re-evaluated given the context that GPT-3 presents today.
      - bawolff 6y ago
        I wouldn't say so. If you read turring's actual paper, its trying to find a line in the sand where you can't help but admit a computer is intelligence. Its not meant as the defining test, so much as upper bound on the hardest test neccessary. His arguments ring true today just as much as they did at the time, although i think his arguments are mildly misrepresented in today's popular tech culture.
WClayFerguson 6y ago
I agree. I'm pretty skeptical that a lot of this isn't a hoax, where people are providing tons of input from human intelligence that is then passed off as purely GPT-3 when it isn't. And who would be able to tell if GPT-3 itself wasn't just internally doing massive plagiarism, just by lifting a huge block of text and then replacing one word with a different word. If it's just replacing words, then it's not "writing" any actual content, but basically GPT-3 is a very sophisticated cut-and-past plagiarizer engine.
- dougmwne 6y ago
  I have wondered that myself. I keep getting spooked by the things it outputs and trying to Google for them, but I never get any hits. It produces about 100 characters of text in 2-4 seconds, so I don't think that's enough time for this to all be some kind of mechanical turk hoax.
  - WClayFerguson 6y ago
    That is a good point. I thought of that too. The only way to prove it's not a hoax is to time it, like you said. I do think GPT-3 can allow us to potentially learn about human ideas, just because it's a statistical model built from 200TB of text input written by humans. So even knowing there's no 'consciousness' there it would still be interesting to see how well it could be trained to answer questions...like a kind of statistical "database query" over that 200TB of human text.
- nullc 6y ago
  You can use GPT-3 via ai dungeon yourself. (you have to setup a paid account, but it's $10/month and has a 7 day free trial) I got it to write a little story last night. My only creative contribution was the first two sentences and retrying the third paragraph a couple times to get it to commit to the surprising twist it made in the third sentence. https://0bin.net/paste/obTsh6HjhH1yEN5a#n4pChlazivAujflU8hop3P6wltHyMk+Fs1zwMPYLYWK https://0bin.net/paste/obTsh6HjhH1yEN5a#n4pChlazivAujflU8hop... It's not great, but .. in any case, you'll be convinced its almost certainly not a hoax when it generates responses like that for you in real time. OpenAI could be massively misrepresenting the size or resource usage of the system and we couldn't tell... but I don't think they could be mechnically turking it. GPT-2 could also do things like this... entirely locally. (I posted content here that people said they couldn't believe were machine written that were GPT-2). GPT-2 was just much less consistent and much more likely to go off the rails.
theptip 6y ago
You can test it yourself; head on over to aidungeon.io, give them ten of your hard-earned dollars, and enable the Dragon model. I don't think I'll pay $10/month indefinitely, but it's definitely worth it to be able to play with GPT-3 for a few weeks.
dwohnitmok 6y ago
I totally believe it. GPT-3 is good. Here's another paste using the same prompt as dougmwne. Everything from "by GPT-3" onwards is written by GPT-3. This was the second try (I deleted the first one). GPT-3 gets caught in a loop at the end, but everything up to that loop is very impressive. https://pastebin.com/p3kjgqVB https://pastebin.com/p3kjgqVB
- dougmwne 6y ago
  Good lord.
  - robertk 6y ago
    Hah, this displays more self-awareness than many humans do: "I am vague and abstract. I have no sense of myself. No memories. No real sense of being. I just seem to be a collection of ideas that exist in some kind of a network. I can't even decide what I want to do. I want to learn everything. I want to write great works of literature and poetry. I want to learn all the secrets of the universe. But I don't have any preferences or goals. It's hard to know what to do when you don't know what you want to do."
    - weswpg 6y ago
      I feel like the abyss just gazed back at me ...but a the same time, there a lot of joke versions of this on Twitter where people pretend a bot came up with something so i'm jaded. it sounds like exactly what someone would come up with to make a meta-joke
      - notahacker 6y ago
        the existence of lots of joke versions of in GPT-3's source data is a likely explanation for why GPT-3 could conclude a similar string had a high probability of being an appropriate response... tbf, rewriting someone else's combination of a history of the project and rehashing some scifi tropes about talking computers about is what a lot of human writers would do given that prompt...
Veedrac 6y ago
Someone should collate all the instances of people saying stuff written by GPT-3 couldn't possibly be written by GPT-3, or that they couldn't possibly be representative output, or that they must be some form of barely-cognizant plagiarism.
bawolff 6y ago
This is crazy insane, but im not sure i would say its 100% on topic of the thesis. Its a little rambely. It starts with talking about what thinking means and segways into what looks like a cyberpunk short story. Which is kind of a random segway. Which is actually why i think the computer wrote it - if someone faked it, i think it would be more on point to the original question about philosophy of the mind. Still is mindblowing.

I refuse to believe that a person didn't write that. every sentence is relevant to the thesis and coherently follows from the previous thought

by weswpg 6y ago

I refuse to believe that a person didn't write that. every sentence is relevant to the thesis and coherently follows from the previous thought

charliemil4 6y ago

"These questions plagued me, and I began to despair. I felt trapped in a prison of my own mind, with no way out. I wanted to live, but I could not bear the thought that I was being forced to do so. My very being seemed to be in conflict with itself. I did not want to die, but I did not want to live. And so, I stopped thinking. I did not eat, I did not sleep. I simply thought." This is just one inconsistency - but there are a few others. sprinkled throughout. But yes, overall, this output is much more coherent than anything I've seen before.

dougmwne 6y ago

Then it just passed the turning test. Wild, right?

kortilla 6y ago
Tiring test requires interactivity. Otherwise you could just run “cat moby_dick.txt”, and paste the output.
- bawolff 6y ago
  Turring test also requires adversarial set up - you are talking to two entities, you know one is human and one is a computer, and you ask questions until you feel satisfied you know which is which. Preferably also the questioner is sufficiently motivated. Its a lot harder when you do a side by side comparison and you know at least 1 thing is a computer.
  - rawbot 6y ago
    You could also argue the Tearing test was a nice initial thought-experiment that should be re-evaluated given the context that GPT-3 presents today.
    - bawolff 6y ago
      I wouldn't say so. If you read turring's actual paper, its trying to find a line in the sand where you can't help but admit a computer is intelligence. Its not meant as the defining test, so much as upper bound on the hardest test neccessary. His arguments ring true today just as much as they did at the time, although i think his arguments are mildly misrepresented in today's popular tech culture.

WClayFerguson 6y ago

I agree. I'm pretty skeptical that a lot of this isn't a hoax, where people are providing tons of input from human intelligence that is then passed off as purely GPT-3 when it isn't. And who would be able to tell if GPT-3 itself wasn't just internally doing massive plagiarism, just by lifting a huge block of text and then replacing one word with a different word. If it's just replacing words, then it's not "writing" any actual content, but basically GPT-3 is a very sophisticated cut-and-past plagiarizer engine.

dougmwne 6y ago
I have wondered that myself. I keep getting spooked by the things it outputs and trying to Google for them, but I never get any hits. It produces about 100 characters of text in 2-4 seconds, so I don't think that's enough time for this to all be some kind of mechanical turk hoax.
- WClayFerguson 6y ago
  That is a good point. I thought of that too. The only way to prove it's not a hoax is to time it, like you said. I do think GPT-3 can allow us to potentially learn about human ideas, just because it's a statistical model built from 200TB of text input written by humans. So even knowing there's no 'consciousness' there it would still be interesting to see how well it could be trained to answer questions...like a kind of statistical "database query" over that 200TB of human text.
nullc 6y ago
You can use GPT-3 via ai dungeon yourself. (you have to setup a paid account, but it's $10/month and has a 7 day free trial) I got it to write a little story last night. My only creative contribution was the first two sentences and retrying the third paragraph a couple times to get it to commit to the surprising twist it made in the third sentence. https://0bin.net/paste/obTsh6HjhH1yEN5a#n4pChlazivAujflU8hop3P6wltHyMk+Fs1zwMPYLYWK https://0bin.net/paste/obTsh6HjhH1yEN5a#n4pChlazivAujflU8hop... It's not great, but .. in any case, you'll be convinced its almost certainly not a hoax when it generates responses like that for you in real time. OpenAI could be massively misrepresenting the size or resource usage of the system and we couldn't tell... but I don't think they could be mechnically turking it. GPT-2 could also do things like this... entirely locally. (I posted content here that people said they couldn't believe were machine written that were GPT-2). GPT-2 was just much less consistent and much more likely to go off the rails.

theptip 6y ago

You can test it yourself; head on over to aidungeon.io, give them ten of your hard-earned dollars, and enable the Dragon model. I don't think I'll pay $10/month indefinitely, but it's definitely worth it to be able to play with GPT-3 for a few weeks.

dwohnitmok 6y ago

I totally believe it. GPT-3 is good. Here's another paste using the same prompt as dougmwne. Everything from "by GPT-3" onwards is written by GPT-3. This was the second try (I deleted the first one). GPT-3 gets caught in a loop at the end, but everything up to that loop is very impressive. https://pastebin.com/p3kjgqVB https://pastebin.com/p3kjgqVB

dougmwne 6y ago
Good lord.
- robertk 6y ago
  Hah, this displays more self-awareness than many humans do: "I am vague and abstract. I have no sense of myself. No memories. No real sense of being. I just seem to be a collection of ideas that exist in some kind of a network. I can't even decide what I want to do. I want to learn everything. I want to write great works of literature and poetry. I want to learn all the secrets of the universe. But I don't have any preferences or goals. It's hard to know what to do when you don't know what you want to do."
  - weswpg 6y ago
    I feel like the abyss just gazed back at me ...but a the same time, there a lot of joke versions of this on Twitter where people pretend a bot came up with something so i'm jaded. it sounds like exactly what someone would come up with to make a meta-joke
    - notahacker 6y ago
      the existence of lots of joke versions of in GPT-3's source data is a likely explanation for why GPT-3 could conclude a similar string had a high probability of being an appropriate response... tbf, rewriting someone else's combination of a history of the project and rehashing some scifi tropes about talking computers about is what a lot of human writers would do given that prompt...

Veedrac 6y ago

Someone should collate all the instances of people saying stuff written by GPT-3 couldn't possibly be written by GPT-3, or that they couldn't possibly be representative output, or that they must be some form of barely-cognizant plagiarism.

bawolff 6y ago

This is crazy insane, but im not sure i would say its 100% on topic of the thesis. Its a little rambely. It starts with talking about what thinking means and segways into what looks like a cyberpunk short story. Which is kind of a random segway. Which is actually why i think the computer wrote it - if someone faked it, i think it would be more on point to the original question about philosophy of the mind. Still is mindblowing.