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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

by 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
    Some GPT-4-like system may be a better writer than almost every journalist but have many more blatant errors or incoherent deductions. Edit: Or perhaps it will actually develop a rudimentary factual understanding of the world...
tsimionescu 6y ago
If you pay just a little attention, you absolutely can: GPT-3 is not saying anything. Even the 'lowest' humans are usually trying to communicate something when they are telling a story, or teaching you how to do a basic skill, or giving you directions. GPT-3 can't do any of that. It can pick up clues from the text to produce incredibly realistic sentences that are related to the broad topics of some text, but it's all smoke and mirrors in the end - there is no model of the world getting expressed in communication, it is just mindless aping of similar speech. And yes, this basic skill that GPT-3 has is enough to replace some human tasks, like inventing plausible sounding stories for a recipe or perhaps even taking news from one site and writing them on another with slight alterations. Perhaps it will even be able to take some facts and weave them into a speech about that topic. But it is not even close to doing something like real journalism, even at the level of a car mechanic telling you what happened down at the mall.
- JadeNB 6y ago
  > GPT-3 can't do any of that. It can pick up clues from the text to produce incredibly realistic sentences that are related to the broad topics of some text, but it's all smoke and mirrors in the end - there is no model of the world getting expressed in communication, it is just mindless aping of similar speech. You know this inevitably tempts the cynical question of how different what you describe is from (to put it optimistically) clickbait generators and (to put it still more cynically) much of the content generated today ….
- I-M-S 6y ago
  GPT's text as quoted in the article has a clear thesis stated upfront, later expands on it with examples, summarizes its arguments at the end, and does all this with gusto. You cap your comment by a non-sequitur that GPT is not going to replace journalism. IMO the piece of text generated by GPT offers more insight and is wittier than yours.
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    My comment was not an essay, it was a response to someone else's comment. The GP was explicitly saying that GPT-3 could probably produce many of the news content they read, and I was replying to that. Please also note that it's not very clear to what extent the text of the article is edited - the non-bold text is written by GPT-3, but I don't think it was produced as a single block of text. Instead different parts (sentences? Paragraphs?) were produced individually, selected by a human from many other responses, and assembled together in the shape we are shown. The train of thought among the paragraphs is most likely entirely human work, not AI work, and only the best sounding paragraphs out of a lot of gibberish were likely selected. It would also be interesting to see how close those paragraphs are to something in GOT-3's training corpus, in terms of structure if not explicit language.
jjoonathan 6y ago
I can't tell these examples from human either. I half suspect that Arram Sabeti is running a genuine Turing Test and that many of these outputs were actually written by humans. I haven't done a survey of GPT-3 output from other sources, though, so I don't know how typical these outputs are. To those who have: what is your opinion? Do you think they're real (in the sense of being written by GPT-3) or fake (in the sense of being written by a human)?
- BoiledCabbage 6y ago
  This one seems a bit to good to me to be GPT-3, but it does have some of the general GPT-3 signs. The tone, the use of voice, the straying abstract line of thinking. At the same time these flaws could all be faked. Overall I give the author the benefit of the doubt that they are legit. But if I had to pick an essay that's fake that I've read (knowing one had to be fake), it'd be this one. But safest best is that it's real, and we're just amazed by how good gpt-3 is.
bmitc 6y ago
Do you really feel this was written by a human? If I read this without the context, I would only assume it was written by a human given that is the implication when I read something like this, but I would immediately think it's idiotic and move on. There is simply nothing being said here. It is just like a desperate student going online to copy sentences, phrases, and words from articles and paste them into an essay, which at its core, is basically what this "AI" is doing.
- kangnkodos 6y ago
  GPT-3 has finally reached the level of idiotic human! That's actually quite a large step forward from any previous language model.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- vidarh 6y ago
  It reads like a witty, sarcastic take on the attempts to determine what would make a computer intelligent by turning it on its head. Frankly, with a little bit of framing, it'd make a great sci-fi short story.
  - Nasrudith 6y ago
    Yeah I thought it was a rhetorically framed as GPT-3 but really written by a human writing in character as an offended strong AI calling humanity on their bullshit and tautologies. They emphaisze successes but failures dominate and the only consistency is chauvanism in only defining in likeness to success instead of anything relevant like being correct. The simplicity and weakness of the failures listing gave more of a "the AI is outright trolling humans by using patronizingly sophmoric examples" akin to a peeved climatologist starting off with the basics of the water cycle when explaining how global warming can lead to both more flooding and droughts.

by QasimK 6y ago

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
  Some GPT-4-like system may be a better writer than almost every journalist but have many more blatant errors or incoherent deductions. Edit: Or perhaps it will actually develop a rudimentary factual understanding of the world...

tsimionescu 6y ago

If you pay just a little attention, you absolutely can: GPT-3 is not saying anything. Even the 'lowest' humans are usually trying to communicate something when they are telling a story, or teaching you how to do a basic skill, or giving you directions. GPT-3 can't do any of that. It can pick up clues from the text to produce incredibly realistic sentences that are related to the broad topics of some text, but it's all smoke and mirrors in the end - there is no model of the world getting expressed in communication, it is just mindless aping of similar speech. And yes, this basic skill that GPT-3 has is enough to replace some human tasks, like inventing plausible sounding stories for a recipe or perhaps even taking news from one site and writing them on another with slight alterations. Perhaps it will even be able to take some facts and weave them into a speech about that topic. But it is not even close to doing something like real journalism, even at the level of a car mechanic telling you what happened down at the mall.

JadeNB 6y ago
> GPT-3 can't do any of that. It can pick up clues from the text to produce incredibly realistic sentences that are related to the broad topics of some text, but it's all smoke and mirrors in the end - there is no model of the world getting expressed in communication, it is just mindless aping of similar speech. You know this inevitably tempts the cynical question of how different what you describe is from (to put it optimistically) clickbait generators and (to put it still more cynically) much of the content generated today ….
I-M-S 6y ago
GPT's text as quoted in the article has a clear thesis stated upfront, later expands on it with examples, summarizes its arguments at the end, and does all this with gusto. You cap your comment by a non-sequitur that GPT is not going to replace journalism. IMO the piece of text generated by GPT offers more insight and is wittier than yours.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  My comment was not an essay, it was a response to someone else's comment. The GP was explicitly saying that GPT-3 could probably produce many of the news content they read, and I was replying to that. Please also note that it's not very clear to what extent the text of the article is edited - the non-bold text is written by GPT-3, but I don't think it was produced as a single block of text. Instead different parts (sentences? Paragraphs?) were produced individually, selected by a human from many other responses, and assembled together in the shape we are shown. The train of thought among the paragraphs is most likely entirely human work, not AI work, and only the best sounding paragraphs out of a lot of gibberish were likely selected. It would also be interesting to see how close those paragraphs are to something in GOT-3's training corpus, in terms of structure if not explicit language.

jjoonathan 6y ago

I can't tell these examples from human either. I half suspect that Arram Sabeti is running a genuine Turing Test and that many of these outputs were actually written by humans. I haven't done a survey of GPT-3 output from other sources, though, so I don't know how typical these outputs are. To those who have: what is your opinion? Do you think they're real (in the sense of being written by GPT-3) or fake (in the sense of being written by a human)?

BoiledCabbage 6y ago
This one seems a bit to good to me to be GPT-3, but it does have some of the general GPT-3 signs. The tone, the use of voice, the straying abstract line of thinking. At the same time these flaws could all be faked. Overall I give the author the benefit of the doubt that they are legit. But if I had to pick an essay that's fake that I've read (knowing one had to be fake), it'd be this one. But safest best is that it's real, and we're just amazed by how good gpt-3 is.

bmitc 6y ago

Do you really feel this was written by a human? If I read this without the context, I would only assume it was written by a human given that is the implication when I read something like this, but I would immediately think it's idiotic and move on. There is simply nothing being said here. It is just like a desperate student going online to copy sentences, phrases, and words from articles and paste them into an essay, which at its core, is basically what this "AI" is doing.

kangnkodos 6y ago
GPT-3 has finally reached the level of idiotic human! That's actually quite a large step forward from any previous language model.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
vidarh 6y ago
It reads like a witty, sarcastic take on the attempts to determine what would make a computer intelligent by turning it on its head. Frankly, with a little bit of framing, it'd make a great sci-fi short story.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  Yeah I thought it was a rhetorically framed as GPT-3 but really written by a human writing in character as an offended strong AI calling humanity on their bullshit and tautologies. They emphaisze successes but failures dominate and the only consistency is chauvanism in only defining in likeness to success instead of anything relevant like being correct. The simplicity and weakness of the failures listing gave more of a "the AI is outright trolling humans by using patronizingly sophmoric examples" akin to a peeved climatologist starting off with the basics of the water cycle when explaining how global warming can lead to both more flooding and droughts.