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GPT-3 generated blog post reach #1 on Hacker News
- joshka 6y agoWas this article written by GPT-3? It's so meta even this article ;)
- aldanor 6y agoWas this comment left by GPT-3?
- dane-pgp 6y agoIt's GPT-3 comments all the way down, I'm afraid. Anyway, for those who missed the joke in the grandparent post: https://xkcd.com/917/ https://xkcd.com/917/
- FridgeSeal 6y agoAre we GPT-3?
- maybesentient 6y agoNot sure if you meant this in jest, but seeing what GPT-3 can do and extrapolating from there - I'm left with an uneasy feeling about this very idea.. What does it really mean to understand something? Is it all just an illusion generated by a fancier biological generative transformer? :P
- mellosouls 6y agoMore from the "author". https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=adolos https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=adolos
- greenyoda 6y agoAnd another article from the author's blog, that describes the whole game: "What I would do with GPT-3 if I had no ethics" [8/3/20] https://adolos.substack.com/p/what-i-would-do-with-gpt-3-if-i-had https://adolos.substack.com/p/what-i-would-do-with-gpt-3-if-... > Ever since COVID hit, everyone and their mother started writing online. One of the most interesting ways people have been playing with this technology is in feeding it article headlines and introductions. > While the output is not perfect, you can easily curate it to something that's convincing. This will make it so easy for people to just pump out clickbait articles to drive traffic. > It would be pretty simple to do actually. > First thing you would need to do is come up with a name. If it were me, I’d name it after the Greek god of deception or something like that just to be clever. Then I’d just stick an “A” in front so nobody gets suspicious. > After that, I’d make a substack because it takes no time to set up. Once thats done you have to come up with some content. GPT-3 isn’t great with logic, so inspirational posts would probably be best, maybe some pieces on productivity too. > Once you have your name, your website, and your content, its time to promote. Just start posting your articles on a website like Hacker News and a couple are bound to get popular.
- chmod775 6y agoI have hopes this will actually improve the average quality of blog posts that get upvoted and shared on platforms. Because people may realize that if their blog entry is going to be so bad it could be generated by GPT-3, they should probably be doing something else. And everyone else who is upvoting may just become a bit more aware what constitutes something of substance. Things GPT-3 can't do: - Research - Technical Documentation - Investigative Journalism - Write useful software GPT-3 may be able to fake the first three, but that would be glaringly obvious (because it'd be lying if it isn't just copying and also each of those are generally more than just text content).
- greenyoda 6y agoThe HN article that this is about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23893817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23893817 Congratulations to the authors of these comments, who correctly guessed that it was written by GPT-3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23894742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23894742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23894000 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23894000
- Kuinox 6y agoAh ah ah, the answer "your comment punches below the belt and isn't acceptable in a community like this.".
- swyx 6y agois this the largest scale Turing test ever performed on an audience acutely aware of what a Turing test is?
- whymauri 6y agoWow, good observation. I wouldn't be surprised if this is actually true.
- AndrewKemendo 6y agoI think fewer people know what the Imitation game actually consists of than think they do - namely that a questioner has to guess whether a machine is a respondent to their questions, rather than another player. That certainly hasn't been tried with GPT-3 that I'm aware of. However I would agree that it is an oblique version - that is, can a machine fool humans into thinking that they are human. In which case I think it's probably safe to assume that GPT-3 has passed.
- sthnblllII 6y agoTuring actually asked a slightly different question, that I think is a lot more interesting. From Computing Machinery and Intelligence by A. M. Turing: > The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either "X is A and Y is B" or "X is B and Y is A." The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B > What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?" Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? Somewhat politically incorrect, assuming men and women should ever be distinguished, but much more revealing about how exactly people see themselves.
- anigbrowl 6y agoThe best part is the very serious people shushing those who saw through the prank.
- emsy 6y agoTo be fair: it sounds like a GPT-3 post was considered an insult back when. Not sure it passes as an insult anymore.
- xyzzy_plugh 6y ago25 days ago?
- mensetmanusman 6y agoWay back in the day. Covid will be remembered in the future as when GTP-3 arose from the ashes.
- emsy 6y agoTime isn’t the issue here, it’s the fact that people defended an AI as if it were a person.
- trianglem 6y agoThose serious people keep this place sane/productive
- happytoexplain 6y agoI've seen this criticism a few times, specifically about the example in the article, and it's bonkers to me. What I see is somebody calling the blog post garbage, and another person saying that person was being hostile. In what possible interpretation is that a "very serious" person "shushing" somebody who "saw through the prank"? It's totally reasonable to interpret "this looks like an AI wrote it - regurgitated garbage" as primarily an insult. That it turned out to be factually true is unrelated to that.
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- runawaybottle 6y agoSaw this coming a mile away. A lot of articles that make it to the front page of HN are formulaic. We open ourselves up to this. Every blog post with shallow observations, every tutorial showcasing the first few pages of documentation, every biography on how to make money fast, every lucky shit that pontificates on how to manage teams and companies, every one selling an ebook, and everyone selling an ebook about selling an ebook after having sold 50 lifetime ebooks (topic being about success of course), and it was only a matter of time. I count 3-4 posts about depression and existentialism per week on HN, and few ever reference the depth in which many great writers dig deep into the subject. Exercise more I guess. Time to add ‘did a novice or a robot or a sociopathic narcissist write this?’ to our critical thinking toolbox. Edit: I can’t tell if I fell for a gpt article about a gpt article, for what it’s worth. This is going to be a disaster when it hits the masses.
- nabla9 6y agoI think GPT-3 could be blessing for Reddit and HN type forums. Add some GPT-3 content and links into the feed. Decrease the vote weight for users who upvote them and increase vote weight for those who downvote them.
- drivingmenuts 6y agoSo, you’re experimenting on users without their knowledge? There’s a thing called ethics. You might want to look into that.
- XCSme 6y agoSo if a restaurant sells today pizza only while yesterday sold only pasta to see what sells better, is that unethical? Or is it unethical if half the people get one waiter and the other half a different one, to see who can sell better?
- greenyoda 6y agoIsn't every single ad ever created experimenting on users without their knowledge? I.e., will the user click on this ad or buy the product if we show them this content? That has much greater probability of adverse consequences for the user than the proposed experiment.
- plorkyeran 6y agoSure, I have no problem with calling all advertising unethical. A lot of software A/B tests also land in unethical territory too.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoWho said users can't be told about the system?
- tialaramex 6y agoYou can avoid ethical concerns by ensuring that users are technically informed this might be happening. In fact you might get great results by informing users this might be happening even if it you rarely or never actually do it. You can also phrase it quite broadly so as to ensure that participants were technically informed of why it's being done and yet nonetheless unaware of what exactly you're actually doing. That's how psychologists design experiments that want to measure something subjects would prefer to conceal because of low social desirability. For example suppose we're wondering if people are secretly biased against rectangular shapes in video games but are feeling a social pressure not to admit this bias. We tell subjects we want to test for bias against rectangles, they're going to play a video game, they are to collide with the red objects (regardless of shape) and avoid blue objects, we will show how many rectangles they hit on the screen. But we don't actually care about the count, we actually use eye-tracking technology to measure which objects on the screen the subjects look at, when and for how long and we use this fact, that the subjects don't realise we care about, to check for bias.
- guscost 6y agoThe first GPT-3 academic paper will be accepted before the end of the year.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- minimaxir 6y agoHN submission from the blog post author, where the comments from dang reveal the author engaged in voting manipulation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24062702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24062702
- lajawfe 6y agoWith that there is no credibility to the blog being actually generated by GPT-3, or at least being heavily cherry picked.
- dang 6y agoSorry to pop the balloon, but the story is bogus. It's false that the post was generated by GPT-3. The author admitted to writing the title and editing the intro. He also described the article body this way: "as unedited as possible"—in other words, edited. It's false that (as he originally claimed) only one commenter called the post as GPT-3, and false that (as he now claims—since the article says it and who else would have come up with that) all such comments were downvoted. All that is just what he publicly admitted. How much of the rest is also fake? People who try to game HN like he did, including with bogus accounts and fake votes, are not known for scruples. It seems that, having got busted in dishonest attempts to get attention on HN, he decided to get attention from journalists instead, and found one who didn't bother to check the other side of the story.
- minimaxir 6y agoI was trying to be neutral but your response is much more accurate. :P
- cs702 6y agoUpon reading things like this, I feel... so innocent and naive.
- kazinator 6y agoRegardless of who or what wrote it, the article is insubstantial, pseudo-intellectual blather. It reads like a fourth grader mocking grown-up problems by throwing around words he doesn't understand. The following is completely nonsensical, and occurs very early in the article, right after the general introduction: "Over-Thinking (OT) is the act of trying to come up with ideas that have already been thought through by someone else. OT usually results in ideas that are impractical, impossible, or even stupid." The only reason to keep reading after this is just to see what other bullshit has been heaped on, like not being able to take your eyes away from a train wreck. I didn't visit the story when it appeared (regardless of its upvotes) because the very title smelled of self-helpy twaddle. I would for sure have flagged it. That behavior may be a clue as to what happened. The submission title was crafted in such a way as to deter "nonsense-averse" users from clicking on it, and that may have helped it evade flagging. If a submission evades flags, the only other points it can get are upvotes.
- dorkwood 6y agoI remember skimming this article. My initial feeling was that it was written by someone who wasn't a native English speaker. It seems like I'll have to pay more close attention to that feeling in the future.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoOn the other hand, you could have been right. It could have been a non-native speaker. I'd hate to end up in a situation where non-native speakers are accused of being bots...
- runawaybottle 6y agoI feel like so many of you are just utterly too kind. Without getting into the generated article, we have a lot of Orwellian new speak everywhere. Your standard corporate/management/hr speak is very pervasive. It sounds inhuman. This is a language many people adopt to fit in and make it in this world. It shadows itself in blogs they write, particularly signaling blogs. The generated article follows in this vein. That’s what gpt will replicate, not the simplicity of a non native speaker (that would be easier to spot). It will follow the amorphous blob shape of saying something, but nothing, with the ominous undertone of ‘you know what’s going on, but you wouldn’t dare speak up’. How many of you read something from a company and instantly think ‘this sounds like horseshit?’. How long did we let that go on? Forever right? We lost this fight before it even happened.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoI think I agree with most of what you said, I just think you need to be careful. Don't confuse "horseshit" with bad English. The latter may contain something interesting, and the former never will.
- bostik 6y agoYou don't need to be a non-native speaker for that. If the other side is convinced you're a bot, it will be very difficult to make them believe otherwise. Which in a funny way has echoes of conspiracy theory believers who take every denial as a further proof of their existing belief. The first I heard of this was 15 years ago[0]. The original article is no longer online, so the link takes to a PDF rendition. It cites the source. 0: https://msu.edu/~pennock5/courses/ALife/Striegel_Failed_Turing_test.pdf https://msu.edu/~pennock5/courses/ALife/Striegel_Failed_Turi...
- thrill 6y ago“I think the value of online content is going to be reduced a lot.” Or raised...
- ekianjo 6y agoIndeed, it's not like every community out there get HN-like level content.
- camjohnson26 6y agoLooks like he wrote the title by hand, how many upvoters read the actual article?
- cellular 6y agoI couldn't read this article. I was convinced it was another AI generated text. I just scrolled to the bottom to see if I was right. Then didn't read anyway because it could still probably be an ai. You guys saw the last ai generated text about ai generated text-right?
- umanwizard 6y agoThe article if written by a human was bad -- poorly argued and trite. However, my mind is blown if it really was written by an AI. As bad as it might seem by human standards, it's almost impossible for me to accept that this was created by an entity without consciousness or at least understanding. Edit: it seems this might be a fraud; i.e., it indeed was produced by an entity with consciousness. I almost hope that’s true, as it’s much less unsettling.
- not2b 6y agoIt is stringing together phrases and sentences that appear in the training data. After digesting gigabytes of text, it has built up structures that represent grammar and semantics to some degree, so you'll find very coherent sentences, because those sentences were originally written by humans or pasted together from sentences written by humans. It's amazing that it works as well as it does.
- umanwizard 6y agoI disagree. The essay in question develops a coherent argument over several paragraphs. It’s not just disjointed individual sentences. The argument about overthinking vs creative thinking isn’t particularly _great_, but it’s certainly intelligible.
- bawolff 6y agoInteresting. Has anyone done any analysis on what the tells are for GPT-3 written articles? To me they feel like they're slightly off grammatically. Not in an ESL way, but more like someone really anxious who wants to explain a conspiracy theory to you. However i can't entirely put my finger on it. They do seem to overuse self-reflective statements (I think X) and transitionsal phrases. Maybe.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]