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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 purel

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.
- bawolff 6y ago
  Damn. This is straight up unsettling.

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.

bawolff 6y ago
Damn. This is straight up unsettling.