10 ms·

Are Humans Intelligent? An AI Op-Ed

121 points by jerezzprime 6y ago

scottlocklin 6y ago
I'm coming around to the idea that people who are impressed by "results" like this are NPCs who probably could be replaced by GPT-3.
- ericd 6y ago
  Shrug I thought it was wonderful and hilarious. I think people who aren't impressed are probably in denial.
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  Could you elaborate on why you aren't impressed? This particular example doesn't suffer from either of the main GPT-3 "tells" I've noticed up to this point (weak backbone and nonsensical assertions). If I had to guess, I would say this essay was written by a human pretending to be GPT-3. Do you agree (except with higher confidence) and that's why you aren't impressed?
- isochronous 6y ago
  I mean, it's not going to win any philosophical debates, but these kinds of results are WORLDS better than they would have been just a couple of years ago. I have to wonder what would it take to impress you.
naringas 6y ago
> So what does it mean to be intelligent? It means to be able to do nothing. I think this AI is onto something
naringas 6y ago
here's a parragraph in which I replaced "brain" with "scientist" and mouth with "experimental data" > The point of this is to form a hypothesis. If the scientist and the experimental data say the same thing, then the scientist will think it has a hypothesis that is correct. But if the experimental data and the scientist say different things, then the scientist will think it has a hypothesis that is wrong. The scientist will think the experimental data is right, and it will change its hypothesis.
QasimK 6y ago
I’m continually amazed - flabbergasted - by GPT-3. I’ve read stories, articles and HTML written by it and each time I am shocked at how good the output is. This essay made me laugh! It’s practically indistinguishable from a human. Not a creative, insightful and unique human. But an average human? Yes, I cannot tell the difference. I must repeat that - I cannot tell the difference! This can probably completely replace or supplement most online content that I see including news, certainly on the vacuous side of things of which I think there is a lot of content. Those online recipes with irrelevant life stories before them? Replaced. Those opinion pieces in news? Replaced. Basic guides to tasks? Probably replaceable. I know I probably only see the best output, and it would be nice if I had more context, but the peak performance is amazing The twitter video showing GPT-3 generate HTML based on your request? I think there’s a lot of potential. I don’t knew whether it can, in general, live up to these specific examples though.
- spanhandler 6y ago
  > Those online recipes with irrelevant life stories before them? Replaced. Oh man. Machines replacing humans writing stories that humans were only writing to satisfy machines in the first place.
- jerezzprime 6y ago
  I think the hurdle is going to be getting it to write accurately. For example, if you want it to write a news article, ideally you want to give it some facts (this event happened, x people died) and it pumps out some accurate prose about it. I'm not sure you can trust GPT-3 to do that. It could produce something that sounds good, but there is not really a guarantee it is not spewing falsities that came from it's training data.
  - Decade 6y ago
    I don’t trust most journalists today to pump out accurate prose around the facts.
    - dwaltrip 6y ago
marta_morena_25 6y ago
There is pretty much one thing advances in AI tells us. Most of humanity is nothing more than a statistical approximation algorithm. But that doesn't mean human intelligence is. What is fundamentally lacking from modern AI is the ability to "invent". They can perfectly (at least very soon) approximate the behavior of "Joe". But they get nowhere close to even touching anything like the Einstein's of humanity. The main problem I see with AI is that it is very easy to approximate "general human intelligence", which is essentially equal to "being indistinguishable from the Joe next to you". But it is a completely different league to actually advance the human race. For that, statistical approximation will never work. The next step is to create AI that innovates. As long as that isn't done, all we have is a demonstration of how "unintelligent" most human beings really are (i.e. nothing more than a statistical approximation + pattern matching... Instagram and social media essentially is like an AI forcing function for human beings, to make them become average). And yes, we can couple AI with things like a Go-Engine, SAT solver, theorem provers, etc. to give them abilities beyond what humans can do in these categories, but who builds that? Humans... As long as AI can't build an AI for a category it knows nothing about and has had no training for, that AI remains "as unintelligent as a brick". All it can do is reproduce what its creator taught it. That isn't necessarily a bad thing at all. This could still be extremely useful for society and put a new evolutionary pressure on the human race to become "above" average. Something that has been utterly lacking in the past century. With general, yet stupid AI becoming a reality soon, >90% of humanity is rendered obsolete. This will cause a significant pressure to improve on an unforeseen scale, which is probably a good thing overall. Truly intelligent AI on the other hand, might as well lead to our immediate extinction, since it renders the entirety of the human race irrelevant.
- oneng 6y ago
  Along this line of thinking that "society is being forced into being average", I would reference this piece from Epsilon Theory: https://www.epsilontheory.com/the-elton-hootie-line/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/the-elton-hootie-line/ TL;DR: In order to be "heard" or to achieve enough of a following to be economically/politically relevant, you must "dynamically range compress" everything to sound the same and appeal to the largest audience, which removes diversity.
plaidfuji 6y ago
Impressive? Absolutely. Monetizable? Unclear to me, but probably somewhere within the vast ad/chatbot/garbage text generation service-scape. Scary? Not GPT-3, but when GPT-6 or 7 gets involved in the political realm, that’s when people will take notice. This essay has a glimmer of “humans can’t be trusted to govern themselves” - and it’s not entirely unconvincing.
- spanhandler 6y ago
  IMO it's (human control, at high levels) all over as soon as a major corporation or state finds a way to gain significant competitive advantage by handing over the reigns to machines. Absent sustained, vigorous opposition and punishment by an alliance of basically everyone else, we'll compete ourselves right into having no choice but to let AI run things, or else become subservient to and marginalized by those who do. In other words by the time it's a choice, I doubt it'll even be a choice.
  - Nasrudith 6y ago
    Think about that logic for a bit about distribution of expertise vs control. Reducto ad absurdum wouldn't that say we should get rid of doctors? They have an insurmountable competitive advantage if we personally aren't at least a canidate for medical school. Never in our lives could we do better than them. I think the sheer stupid fear leading to a tall poppy competence treatment is far more dangerous than the dark future ever could be from actually competent entities in charge that we could never do better than.
    - spanhandler 6y ago
      I'm not at all following what tall poppies and getting rid of doctors has to do with my view that we're not likely to choose whether machines start giving us orders, but rather to just find ourselves in that situation and with few other options in the nearish future. I'd liken it to the invention of the state, more than anything else, and similarly practically-unavoidable once the advantages are made clear. It's just something that'll happen to us as a result of competitive forces soon after it's made possible, not some deliberate choice we're all going to make collectively, let alone individually. ... either that or all this machine-learning and "AI" development stalls out and we never get much better at it or anything like it. I guess that could happen, too. Doubt it, but you never know. What "stupid fear"? I'm not even sure it's a dark future, and, as I expect is now clear, I don't really think my or anyone else's opinion on that would affect whether it happens, anyway. It's either possible and so (damn near) inevitable, or not, so won't happen. What I don't think it is, is any kind of choice we're going to make.
Xeing0ei 6y ago
That's impressive. A few weeks ago, GPT-3 generated content looked like nonsensical content farm's content to me. Today, this article makes points and follows an argumentative line. There are still a few oddities, but this time, it looks like thinking and not just putting related words next to one another with proper grammar.
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  Ditto, this seems much more coherent than previous GPT-3 output. Have people gotten better at prompting / selecting output? Or is this a fake GPT-3 output written by a human?
  - dougmwne 6y ago
    I have been trying out different prompts for a week now and this seems plausibly written by GPT-3. There's quite a bit of luck involved since each time you submit the same prompt you can get a different response. Some prompts produce garbage output and some good prompts produce a range of outputs from lame to amazing. There's quite of bit of cherry picking and selection bias involved. No one publishes the uninteresting responses and you don't read or comment on them. Still, I think this is all quite amazing and it seems like it's close to ready for commercialization.
    - jjoonathan 6y ago
      Thanks for the intuition!
    - keenmaster 6y ago
      Quick, someone train an AI on labeled GPT-3 outputs. They can be labeled as "good" "ok" "bad" "bad grammar" "convincing argument" etc... There's a website, scribophile.com, for crowdsourced literary criticism. We should make something similar but for AI training. The key difference is that the critique of AI output would be more structured (in the form of labels you can apply to sentences, words, paragraphs, etc...that you highlight) than unstructured. Another website that is more structured than scribophile but is used for crowdsourced photo critiques instead is photofeeler.com. An interesting thing they do is that if someone is consistently "harsh" or "lenient" on photos, as measured by their standard deviation from the average rating, their feedback is adjusted accordingly. My email is in my bio for collabs. Note: No one should dare submit GPT-3 content to scribophile. It is a beautiful, sacred, and fragile place for humans only.
jasode 6y ago
With GPT-3, I guess lots of upcoming stories of various discussion forums getting the "Sokal Affair"[1] treatment. We'll keep amusing each other by trolling everybody with more fake GPT-3 stories. I think GPT-3 is very convincing for "soft" topics like the other HN thread "Feeling Unproductive?"[2], and philosophical questions like "What is intelligence?" where debaters can just toss word salad at each other. It's less convincing for "hard" concrete science topics. E.g. Rust/Go articles of programming to improve performance. An interesting question is what happens when the input to the future GPT-4 is inadvertently fed by lots of generated GPT-3 output. And in turn, GPT-5 is fed by GPT-4 (which already ingested GPT-3). A lot of the corpus feeding GPT-3 was web scraping and now that source is tainted for future GPT-x models. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24062702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24062702
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  Not even actual treatments of soft topics. Take this essay. It’s a solid C paper. So, mostly just Internet forum philosophy.
  - jjoonathan 6y ago
    It was asked for internet forum philosophy, not academic philosophy.
- p0ckets 6y ago
  But only the best examples of GPT-3 output will be worth putting on the web, so even without any code improvements in future GPT-x models you can still expect an improvement in quality. A writer (human or AI) should be able to improve by writing a million articles and then be told which ones are good (i.e. worth publishing).
- wcoenen 6y ago
  > A lot of the corpus feeding GPT-3 was web scraping and now that source is tainted for future GPT-x models It might be possible to filter out GPT-3 generated text from future training data. Simply feed part of the text to GPT-3, and if it is way too good at predicting what follows you throw it out. The same trick could be used to detect students writing essays with it. This trick will stop working though as more variants of good text prediction algorithms appear, unless we can do the same test against each one.
namenotrequired 6y ago
Only the insightful analogies are missing. I wonder if there's a better prompt to come up with those? Edit: anecdotes -> analogies
holoduke 6y ago
wonder if one day a forum like hackernews appears where gpt-x bots are posting comments on cool articles and blogs created by the very same bots. very deep complicated topics are discussed no human ever understand. If our progression in these fields will not come to a halt then this must happen one day.
dexen 6y ago
In AI research, the territory is not the map. A half-joking prediction: at some point we'll solve all arbitrarily hard milestones for AIs and will still find ourselves 'nowhere near having real general intelligence'. At that point we might start questioning our assumptions about intelligence.
- falcor84 6y ago
  That sounds interesting, could you please expand on that? Do you have in mind any particular facet of general intelligence that a milestone cannot be defined for?
  - dexen 6y ago
    Ah apologies for having been unclear. No, not like that - I was thinking about more meta aspects of it: - shared context (shared biological & cultural heritage) - recognition & willingness to ascribe intelligence Basically trying to imply that the general AI problem is of similar nature to the 10x programmer problem - communication & recognition, or lack of thereof. A 10x programmer makes a hard problem look easy. A general AI makes people around it feel very smart & productive. Which is also why I prefaced it with, The terrain is not the map - we humans know surprisingly little about our intelligence. [edit] Case in point, an older discussion about intelligence in animals: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21772648 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21772648
- FeepingCreature 6y ago
  A fully serious prediction: it'll be the singularity, superintelligence will be optimizing human affairs and launching probes to other stars as it disassembles the solar system for material to build a Dyson swarm, and people will still claim it's not "really" intelligent.
wslh 6y ago
Related question that I don't know how to quickly find on Internet: imagine that IQ is a good measure for intelligence. I read Ainan Celeste Cawley[1][2] has an IQ of 263 (again, believe this number is accurate for a moment). How do you measure an IQ of 500, 1000, or 5000? I mean, not the actual test but how the test structure would change from measuring normal and outlier IQs? Disclaimer: I am not an avid science fiction reader but interested in sources talking about superintelligence [3]. Is superintelligence more of the same or it is more about having different layers interconnected? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainan_Celeste_Cawley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainan_Celeste_Cawley [2] https://www.rd.com/list/highest-iq-in-the-world/ https://www.rd.com/list/highest-iq-in-the-world/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence
- andrewla 6y ago
  IQ can only really be calibrated relative to a specific test for it. I don't think there are tests for which even a perfect score would yield a value above 160, since the scoring is basically what percentile of the population you are scoring higher than. It's not like the tests are even modeled as approximations to some "ideal" test; they are fundamentally about trying to measure deviation against the population at large. Talking about IQs in excess of human intelligence is not really interesting because of that. It's just not a designed for measuring intelligence as an actual number.
- jerf 6y ago
  There's a few measures of "IQ". The most common one today centers at 100, and defines a standard deviation of separation on the task of being "generally intelligent" as 15 points. An IQ of 263 is a claim that that person is nearly in the 11th standard deviation above average, which corresponds to a claim that they are roughly 1 out of 6 × 10^26. This is not a plausible claim. The number is meaningless. IQ tests would have to be constructed to measure somewhat similar intelligences of a population large enough to have a meaningful "population". The scales could then potentially be roughly calibrated to each other, but they wouldn't really be translatable. The task of constructing them would be up to the intelligences in question. It is possible no such measure could exist; as the "size" of the intelligence increases, the number of degrees of freedom of "intelligence" almost certainly increases, just as we can be good at bugle but terrible at piano as humans (and that's already a fairly microscopic focus in the grand scheme of human activities), but those statements are almost meaningless to ask about a raccoon, even if we give them raccoon versions of the instruments. Even at human scales, while IQ seems to measure something, we can see the measure is getting fairly strained. You probably need an increasingly multidimensional "number" as the intelligence continues to scale up. As for what intelligence is, all we have are other hypotheses that are on the one hand clearly related to the question at hand, yet on the other, not the answer. Arguably, AI like GPT-3 is also a measure of our best definition of "intelligence". If we could completely clearly define it, we could probably implement whatever it is we defined.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
weeksie 6y ago
GPT-3 will revolutionize spam, twitter astroturfing, and high school essays that you didn't study for.
- falcor84 6y ago
  >high school essays I suppose it's a gradual slope here, with spell checkers on the one side, a grammar checker a bit further ahead, then Google Doc's autocomplete, and then close to the very end of the slope you have this system that just needs a few sentences and completes the entire essay for you. One question then is - at which point on the slope does the comment stop being a direct product of your mind? Another question is - in what ways does this distinction matter?
  - weeksie 6y ago
    I think that one of the neat new narrative art forms that GPT-3 like algorithms will make possible is a prose cinema where the author is more like a director, prompting agents to react to one another. Like lining up billiards shots. I think a bunch of people are doing stuff kinda like that now at least in regard to poetry generation. At what point does the billiard ball stop being an object of your will?
motohagiography 6y ago
Did they train it on Stephen Fry novels? If we deepfaked this text onto his voice and image, I think we might have something better than how Martin Amis turned out.
noiv 6y ago
Turns out language is no longer an indication of intelligence. Any new proposals?
- Tade0 6y ago
  Never was really, as indicated by the Chinese Room Argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
  - johnc1 6y ago
    Highly debated argument though; to me it's like saying you CPU doesn't understand HTML and your browser is running on a CPU, hence it can't understand HTML either. Scott Aaronson explained it nicely too: https://scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec4.html#:~:text=Searle%27s%20Chinese%20Room https://scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec4.html#:~:text=Searl... . Even the wikipedia page mentions many reasonable counter-arguments.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mellosouls 6y ago
From the same site, this brilliant attempt at comedy writing - with some passages better than many human comedy writers: https://arr.am/2020/07/22/why-gpt-3-is-good-for-comedy-or-reddit-eats-larry-page-alive/ https://arr.am/2020/07/22/why-gpt-3-is-good-for-comedy-or-re...
- FeepingCreature 6y ago
  > cut to Larry at his computer typing away at GPT-4, and running the model. > Peter sits in his office, staring out the window, muttering: “I’m telling you it’s a bad idea. A bad idea.” > He gets a text from Larry, that says “Oops.”
hosh 6y ago
This seems to me like a very technologically sophisticated version of the ancient myth of Narcissus and Echo. As brilliant as it is, I think this speaks more to how we as humanity think about ourselves than it does about AI.
czzr 6y ago
I wish I could see the original of this - this quote “As with previous posts, I picked the best responses, but everything after the bolded prompt is by GPT-3“ could mean anything from a minor improvement to this being essentially human written, and there’s no way to tell.
koeng 6y ago
Whenever people talk about how GPT-3 can’t do a lot of things that humans can do, I always think back to the “Bitter Lesson”. I don’t want to believe that general AI will just come from a stupid amount of compute, but it might.
- elmo2you 6y ago
  I highly doubt that. Ever since I had my first encounters with AI, somewhere in the early 90s, one thing has remained rather constant: the extraordinary successes of AI originate mostly from when it is used for tasks we humans perform naturally poorly at, and when confined to a narrow applications. Most of the often touted amazing general purpose AI is largely just a lot of smoke and mirrors. The main reason for that is another thing that also hardly changed since the early 90s: a lot of profit is made from convincing (/fooling) investors into believing that AI is far more powerful/useful than it actually is.
tsimionescu 6y ago
The article states the following: > I picked the best responses, but everything after the bolded prompt is by GPT-3. Based on this, I am pretty sure that the order of paragraphs and the general structure (introduction, arguments, conclusion, PS) are entirely the product of the editor, not of GPT-3. I'm assuming that this is at the level paragraphs and not individual sentences, which does leave some pretty good paragraphs. Another question that I don't know how to answer is how different these paragraphs are to text that is in the training corpus. I would love to see what is the closest bit of text from the whole corpus to each output paragraph. And finally, human communication and thought is not organized neatly in a uniform level of difficulty from letters to words to sentences to paragraphs to chapters to novels or anything like that, and an AI that can sometimes produce nice-sounding paragraphs is not necessarily any part of the way to actually communicating a single real fact about the world. I still believe that there is never going to be meaningful NLP without a model/knowledge base about the real physical world. I don't think human written text has enough information to deduce a model of the world from it without assuming some model ahead of time.
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  Good catch! The coherent structure was what got me excited. If the structure turns out to be the product of human selection -- and now that you point out the plural on "responses" I think that's likely -- then these results are much more in line with my expectations.
- dqpb 6y ago
  > I still believe that there is never going to be meaningful NLP without a model/knowledge base about the real physical world. I think this article is quality enough to constitute meaningful NLP. But, your questions about the amount of human intervention are key. If it takes several hours to a day to produce one of these, then it's not really that meaningful. If one person can produce 100 of these in a day, that's pretty meaningful.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
kangnkodos 6y ago
My mouth says, "This sucks". Then my brain says, "This sucks". Therefore my brain thinks I have a correct hypothesis.
vadansky 6y ago
How much of GPT-3 impressiveness is our ability to read meaning and create patterns where there is none? Similar to our ability to anthropomorphize?
darepublic 6y ago
Another annoying GPT piece where there is no ability for a regular member of the public to verify it. I guess in applying to the beta I should have said under 'what do you plan to do with this' - "post on social media cherry-picked examples that hype up GPT-3".
Nasrudith 6y ago
One potential area for the future is "augmented writing" where writers aren't as we think of today but more editors who feed in prompts and possibly rearrange and tweak to get better results than just their meat brains could come up with. There would be a diversity of styles and approaches of course. Imagine say some trying to maintaining training sets per individual character and finding that they would not only provide better lines but choose different actions.

121 points by jerezzprime 6y ago

I'm coming around to the idea that people who are impressed by "results" like this are NPCs who probably could be replaced by GPT-3.

ericd 6y ago
Shrug I thought it was wonderful and hilarious. I think people who aren't impressed are probably in denial.
jjoonathan 6y ago
Could you elaborate on why you aren't impressed? This particular example doesn't suffer from either of the main GPT-3 "tells" I've noticed up to this point (weak backbone and nonsensical assertions). If I had to guess, I would say this essay was written by a human pretending to be GPT-3. Do you agree (except with higher confidence) and that's why you aren't impressed?
isochronous 6y ago
I mean, it's not going to win any philosophical debates, but these kinds of results are WORLDS better than they would have been just a couple of years ago. I have to wonder what would it take to impress you.

naringas 6y ago

> So what does it mean to be intelligent? It means to be able to do nothing. I think this AI is onto something

naringas 6y ago

here's a parragraph in which I replaced "brain" with "scientist" and mouth with "experimental data" > The point of this is to form a hypothesis. If the scientist and the experimental data say the same thing, then the scientist will think it has a hypothesis that is correct. But if the experimental data and the scientist say different things, then the scientist will think it has a hypothesis that is wrong. The scientist will think the experimental data is right, and it will change its hypothesis.

QasimK 6y ago

I’m continually amazed - flabbergasted - by GPT-3. I’ve read stories, articles and HTML written by it and each time I am shocked at how good the output is. This essay made me laugh! It’s practically indistinguishable from a human. Not a creative, insightful and unique human. But an average human? Yes, I cannot tell the difference. I must repeat that - I cannot tell the difference! This can probably completely replace or supplement most online content that I see including news, certainly on the vacuous side of things of which I think there is a lot of content. Those online recipes with irrelevant life stories before them? Replaced. Those opinion pieces in news? Replaced. Basic guides to tasks? Probably replaceable. I know I probably only see the best output, and it would be nice if I had more context, but the peak performance is amazing The twitter video showing GPT-3 generate HTML based on your request? I think there’s a lot of potential. I don’t knew whether it can, in general, live up to these specific examples though.

spanhandler 6y ago
> Those online recipes with irrelevant life stories before them? Replaced. Oh man. Machines replacing humans writing stories that humans were only writing to satisfy machines in the first place.
jerezzprime 6y ago
I think the hurdle is going to be getting it to write accurately. For example, if you want it to write a news article, ideally you want to give it some facts (this event happened, x people died) and it pumps out some accurate prose about it. I'm not sure you can trust GPT-3 to do that. It could produce something that sounds good, but there is not really a guarantee it is not spewing falsities that came from it's training data.
- Decade 6y ago
  I don’t trust most journalists today to pump out accurate prose around the facts.
  - dwaltrip 6y ago

marta_morena_25 6y ago

There is pretty much one thing advances in AI tells us. Most of humanity is nothing more than a statistical approximation algorithm. But that doesn't mean human intelligence is. What is fundamentally lacking from modern AI is the ability to "invent". They can perfectly (at least very soon) approximate the behavior of "Joe". But they get nowhere close to even touching anything like the Einstein's of humanity. The main problem I see with AI is that it is very easy to approximate "general human intelligence", which is essentially equal to "being indistinguishable from the Joe next to you". But it is a completely different league to actually advance the human race. For that, statistical approximation will never work. The next step is to create AI that innovates. As long as that isn't done, all we have is a demonstration of how "unintelligent" most human beings really are (i.e. nothing more than a statistical approximation + pattern matching... Instagram and social media essentially is like an AI forcing function for human beings, to make them become average). And yes, we can couple AI with things like a Go-Engine, SAT solver, theorem provers, etc. to give them abilities beyond what humans can do in these categories, but who builds that? Humans... As long as AI can't build an AI for a category it knows nothing about and has had no training for, that AI remains "as unintelligent as a brick". All it can do is reproduce what its creator taught it. That isn't necessarily a bad thing at all. This could still be extremely useful for society and put a new evolutionary pressure on the human race to become "above" average. Something that has been utterly lacking in the past century. With general, yet stupid AI becoming a reality soon, >90% of humanity is rendered obsolete. This will cause a significant pressure to improve on an unforeseen scale, which is probably a good thing overall. Truly intelligent AI on the other hand, might as well lead to our immediate extinction, since it renders the entirety of the human race irrelevant.

oneng 6y ago
Along this line of thinking that "society is being forced into being average", I would reference this piece from Epsilon Theory: https://www.epsilontheory.com/the-elton-hootie-line/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/the-elton-hootie-line/ TL;DR: In order to be "heard" or to achieve enough of a following to be economically/politically relevant, you must "dynamically range compress" everything to sound the same and appeal to the largest audience, which removes diversity.

plaidfuji 6y ago

Impressive? Absolutely. Monetizable? Unclear to me, but probably somewhere within the vast ad/chatbot/garbage text generation service-scape. Scary? Not GPT-3, but when GPT-6 or 7 gets involved in the political realm, that’s when people will take notice. This essay has a glimmer of “humans can’t be trusted to govern themselves” - and it’s not entirely unconvincing.

spanhandler 6y ago
IMO it's (human control, at high levels) all over as soon as a major corporation or state finds a way to gain significant competitive advantage by handing over the reigns to machines. Absent sustained, vigorous opposition and punishment by an alliance of basically everyone else, we'll compete ourselves right into having no choice but to let AI run things, or else become subservient to and marginalized by those who do. In other words by the time it's a choice, I doubt it'll even be a choice.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  Think about that logic for a bit about distribution of expertise vs control. Reducto ad absurdum wouldn't that say we should get rid of doctors? They have an insurmountable competitive advantage if we personally aren't at least a canidate for medical school. Never in our lives could we do better than them. I think the sheer stupid fear leading to a tall poppy competence treatment is far more dangerous than the dark future ever could be from actually competent entities in charge that we could never do better than.
  - spanhandler 6y ago
    I'm not at all following what tall poppies and getting rid of doctors has to do with my view that we're not likely to choose whether machines start giving us orders, but rather to just find ourselves in that situation and with few other options in the nearish future. I'd liken it to the invention of the state, more than anything else, and similarly practically-unavoidable once the advantages are made clear. It's just something that'll happen to us as a result of competitive forces soon after it's made possible, not some deliberate choice we're all going to make collectively, let alone individually. ... either that or all this machine-learning and "AI" development stalls out and we never get much better at it or anything like it. I guess that could happen, too. Doubt it, but you never know. What "stupid fear"? I'm not even sure it's a dark future, and, as I expect is now clear, I don't really think my or anyone else's opinion on that would affect whether it happens, anyway. It's either possible and so (damn near) inevitable, or not, so won't happen. What I don't think it is, is any kind of choice we're going to make.

Xeing0ei 6y ago

That's impressive. A few weeks ago, GPT-3 generated content looked like nonsensical content farm's content to me. Today, this article makes points and follows an argumentative line. There are still a few oddities, but this time, it looks like thinking and not just putting related words next to one another with proper grammar.

jjoonathan 6y ago
Ditto, this seems much more coherent than previous GPT-3 output. Have people gotten better at prompting / selecting output? Or is this a fake GPT-3 output written by a human?
- dougmwne 6y ago
  I have been trying out different prompts for a week now and this seems plausibly written by GPT-3. There's quite a bit of luck involved since each time you submit the same prompt you can get a different response. Some prompts produce garbage output and some good prompts produce a range of outputs from lame to amazing. There's quite of bit of cherry picking and selection bias involved. No one publishes the uninteresting responses and you don't read or comment on them. Still, I think this is all quite amazing and it seems like it's close to ready for commercialization.
  - jjoonathan 6y ago
    Thanks for the intuition!
  - keenmaster 6y ago
    Quick, someone train an AI on labeled GPT-3 outputs. They can be labeled as "good" "ok" "bad" "bad grammar" "convincing argument" etc... There's a website, scribophile.com, for crowdsourced literary criticism. We should make something similar but for AI training. The key difference is that the critique of AI output would be more structured (in the form of labels you can apply to sentences, words, paragraphs, etc...that you highlight) than unstructured. Another website that is more structured than scribophile but is used for crowdsourced photo critiques instead is photofeeler.com. An interesting thing they do is that if someone is consistently "harsh" or "lenient" on photos, as measured by their standard deviation from the average rating, their feedback is adjusted accordingly. My email is in my bio for collabs. Note: No one should dare submit GPT-3 content to scribophile. It is a beautiful, sacred, and fragile place for humans only.

jasode 6y ago

With GPT-3, I guess lots of upcoming stories of various discussion forums getting the "Sokal Affair"[1] treatment. We'll keep amusing each other by trolling everybody with more fake GPT-3 stories. I think GPT-3 is very convincing for "soft" topics like the other HN thread "Feeling Unproductive?"[2], and philosophical questions like "What is intelligence?" where debaters can just toss word salad at each other. It's less convincing for "hard" concrete science topics. E.g. Rust/Go articles of programming to improve performance. An interesting question is what happens when the input to the future GPT-4 is inadvertently fed by lots of generated GPT-3 output. And in turn, GPT-5 is fed by GPT-4 (which already ingested GPT-3). A lot of the corpus feeding GPT-3 was web scraping and now that source is tainted for future GPT-x models. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24062702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24062702

throwawaygh 6y ago
Not even actual treatments of soft topics. Take this essay. It’s a solid C paper. So, mostly just Internet forum philosophy.
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  It was asked for internet forum philosophy, not academic philosophy.
p0ckets 6y ago
But only the best examples of GPT-3 output will be worth putting on the web, so even without any code improvements in future GPT-x models you can still expect an improvement in quality. A writer (human or AI) should be able to improve by writing a million articles and then be told which ones are good (i.e. worth publishing).
wcoenen 6y ago
> A lot of the corpus feeding GPT-3 was web scraping and now that source is tainted for future GPT-x models It might be possible to filter out GPT-3 generated text from future training data. Simply feed part of the text to GPT-3, and if it is way too good at predicting what follows you throw it out. The same trick could be used to detect students writing essays with it. This trick will stop working though as more variants of good text prediction algorithms appear, unless we can do the same test against each one.

namenotrequired 6y ago

Only the insightful analogies are missing. I wonder if there's a better prompt to come up with those? Edit: anecdotes -> analogies

holoduke 6y ago

wonder if one day a forum like hackernews appears where gpt-x bots are posting comments on cool articles and blogs created by the very same bots. very deep complicated topics are discussed no human ever understand. If our progression in these fields will not come to a halt then this must happen one day.

dexen 6y ago

In AI research, the territory is not the map. A half-joking prediction: at some point we'll solve all arbitrarily hard milestones for AIs and will still find ourselves 'nowhere near having real general intelligence'. At that point we might start questioning our assumptions about intelligence.

falcor84 6y ago
That sounds interesting, could you please expand on that? Do you have in mind any particular facet of general intelligence that a milestone cannot be defined for?
- dexen 6y ago
  Ah apologies for having been unclear. No, not like that - I was thinking about more meta aspects of it: - shared context (shared biological & cultural heritage) - recognition & willingness to ascribe intelligence Basically trying to imply that the general AI problem is of similar nature to the 10x programmer problem - communication & recognition, or lack of thereof. A 10x programmer makes a hard problem look easy. A general AI makes people around it feel very smart & productive. Which is also why I prefaced it with, The terrain is not the map - we humans know surprisingly little about our intelligence. [edit] Case in point, an older discussion about intelligence in animals: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21772648 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21772648
FeepingCreature 6y ago
A fully serious prediction: it'll be the singularity, superintelligence will be optimizing human affairs and launching probes to other stars as it disassembles the solar system for material to build a Dyson swarm, and people will still claim it's not "really" intelligent.

wslh 6y ago

Related question that I don't know how to quickly find on Internet: imagine that IQ is a good measure for intelligence. I read Ainan Celeste Cawley[1][2] has an IQ of 263 (again, believe this number is accurate for a moment). How do you measure an IQ of 500, 1000, or 5000? I mean, not the actual test but how the test structure would change from measuring normal and outlier IQs? Disclaimer: I am not an avid science fiction reader but interested in sources talking about superintelligence [3]. Is superintelligence more of the same or it is more about having different layers interconnected? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainan_Celeste_Cawley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainan_Celeste_Cawley [2] https://www.rd.com/list/highest-iq-in-the-world/ https://www.rd.com/list/highest-iq-in-the-world/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence

andrewla 6y ago
IQ can only really be calibrated relative to a specific test for it. I don't think there are tests for which even a perfect score would yield a value above 160, since the scoring is basically what percentile of the population you are scoring higher than. It's not like the tests are even modeled as approximations to some "ideal" test; they are fundamentally about trying to measure deviation against the population at large. Talking about IQs in excess of human intelligence is not really interesting because of that. It's just not a designed for measuring intelligence as an actual number.
jerf 6y ago
There's a few measures of "IQ". The most common one today centers at 100, and defines a standard deviation of separation on the task of being "generally intelligent" as 15 points. An IQ of 263 is a claim that that person is nearly in the 11th standard deviation above average, which corresponds to a claim that they are roughly 1 out of 6 × 10^26. This is not a plausible claim. The number is meaningless. IQ tests would have to be constructed to measure somewhat similar intelligences of a population large enough to have a meaningful "population". The scales could then potentially be roughly calibrated to each other, but they wouldn't really be translatable. The task of constructing them would be up to the intelligences in question. It is possible no such measure could exist; as the "size" of the intelligence increases, the number of degrees of freedom of "intelligence" almost certainly increases, just as we can be good at bugle but terrible at piano as humans (and that's already a fairly microscopic focus in the grand scheme of human activities), but those statements are almost meaningless to ask about a raccoon, even if we give them raccoon versions of the instruments. Even at human scales, while IQ seems to measure something, we can see the measure is getting fairly strained. You probably need an increasingly multidimensional "number" as the intelligence continues to scale up. As for what intelligence is, all we have are other hypotheses that are on the one hand clearly related to the question at hand, yet on the other, not the answer. Arguably, AI like GPT-3 is also a measure of our best definition of "intelligence". If we could completely clearly define it, we could probably implement whatever it is we defined.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

weeksie 6y ago

GPT-3 will revolutionize spam, twitter astroturfing, and high school essays that you didn't study for.

falcor84 6y ago
>high school essays I suppose it's a gradual slope here, with spell checkers on the one side, a grammar checker a bit further ahead, then Google Doc's autocomplete, and then close to the very end of the slope you have this system that just needs a few sentences and completes the entire essay for you. One question then is - at which point on the slope does the comment stop being a direct product of your mind? Another question is - in what ways does this distinction matter?
- weeksie 6y ago
  I think that one of the neat new narrative art forms that GPT-3 like algorithms will make possible is a prose cinema where the author is more like a director, prompting agents to react to one another. Like lining up billiards shots. I think a bunch of people are doing stuff kinda like that now at least in regard to poetry generation. At what point does the billiard ball stop being an object of your will?

motohagiography 6y ago

Did they train it on Stephen Fry novels? If we deepfaked this text onto his voice and image, I think we might have something better than how Martin Amis turned out.

noiv 6y ago

Turns out language is no longer an indication of intelligence. Any new proposals?

Tade0 6y ago
Never was really, as indicated by the Chinese Room Argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
- johnc1 6y ago
  Highly debated argument though; to me it's like saying you CPU doesn't understand HTML and your browser is running on a CPU, hence it can't understand HTML either. Scott Aaronson explained it nicely too: https://scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec4.html#:~:text=Searle%27s%20Chinese%20Room https://scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec4.html#:~:text=Searl... . Even the wikipedia page mentions many reasonable counter-arguments.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

mellosouls 6y ago

From the same site, this brilliant attempt at comedy writing - with some passages better than many human comedy writers: https://arr.am/2020/07/22/why-gpt-3-is-good-for-comedy-or-reddit-eats-larry-page-alive/ https://arr.am/2020/07/22/why-gpt-3-is-good-for-comedy-or-re...

FeepingCreature 6y ago
> cut to Larry at his computer typing away at GPT-4, and running the model. > Peter sits in his office, staring out the window, muttering: “I’m telling you it’s a bad idea. A bad idea.” > He gets a text from Larry, that says “Oops.”

hosh 6y ago

This seems to me like a very technologically sophisticated version of the ancient myth of Narcissus and Echo. As brilliant as it is, I think this speaks more to how we as humanity think about ourselves than it does about AI.

czzr 6y ago

I wish I could see the original of this - this quote “As with previous posts, I picked the best responses, but everything after the bolded prompt is by GPT-3“ could mean anything from a minor improvement to this being essentially human written, and there’s no way to tell.

koeng 6y ago

Whenever people talk about how GPT-3 can’t do a lot of things that humans can do, I always think back to the “Bitter Lesson”. I don’t want to believe that general AI will just come from a stupid amount of compute, but it might.

elmo2you 6y ago
I highly doubt that. Ever since I had my first encounters with AI, somewhere in the early 90s, one thing has remained rather constant: the extraordinary successes of AI originate mostly from when it is used for tasks we humans perform naturally poorly at, and when confined to a narrow applications. Most of the often touted amazing general purpose AI is largely just a lot of smoke and mirrors. The main reason for that is another thing that also hardly changed since the early 90s: a lot of profit is made from convincing (/fooling) investors into believing that AI is far more powerful/useful than it actually is.

tsimionescu 6y ago

The article states the following: > I picked the best responses, but everything after the bolded prompt is by GPT-3. Based on this, I am pretty sure that the order of paragraphs and the general structure (introduction, arguments, conclusion, PS) are entirely the product of the editor, not of GPT-3. I'm assuming that this is at the level paragraphs and not individual sentences, which does leave some pretty good paragraphs. Another question that I don't know how to answer is how different these paragraphs are to text that is in the training corpus. I would love to see what is the closest bit of text from the whole corpus to each output paragraph. And finally, human communication and thought is not organized neatly in a uniform level of difficulty from letters to words to sentences to paragraphs to chapters to novels or anything like that, and an AI that can sometimes produce nice-sounding paragraphs is not necessarily any part of the way to actually communicating a single real fact about the world. I still believe that there is never going to be meaningful NLP without a model/knowledge base about the real physical world. I don't think human written text has enough information to deduce a model of the world from it without assuming some model ahead of time.

jjoonathan 6y ago
Good catch! The coherent structure was what got me excited. If the structure turns out to be the product of human selection -- and now that you point out the plural on "responses" I think that's likely -- then these results are much more in line with my expectations.
dqpb 6y ago
> I still believe that there is never going to be meaningful NLP without a model/knowledge base about the real physical world. I think this article is quality enough to constitute meaningful NLP. But, your questions about the amount of human intervention are key. If it takes several hours to a day to produce one of these, then it's not really that meaningful. If one person can produce 100 of these in a day, that's pretty meaningful.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

kangnkodos 6y ago

My mouth says, "This sucks". Then my brain says, "This sucks". Therefore my brain thinks I have a correct hypothesis.

vadansky 6y ago

How much of GPT-3 impressiveness is our ability to read meaning and create patterns where there is none? Similar to our ability to anthropomorphize?

darepublic 6y ago

Another annoying GPT piece where there is no ability for a regular member of the public to verify it. I guess in applying to the beta I should have said under 'what do you plan to do with this' - "post on social media cherry-picked examples that hype up GPT-3".

Nasrudith 6y ago

One potential area for the future is "augmented writing" where writers aren't as we think of today but more editors who feed in prompts and possibly rearrange and tweak to get better results than just their meat brains could come up with. There would be a diversity of styles and approaches of course. Imagine say some trying to maintaining training sets per individual character and finding that they would not only provide better lines but choose different actions.