21 ms·

Sci-fi story coauthored by GPT-3, including in-character human/AI chats

161 points by eliotpeper 6y ago

echelon 6y ago
GPT-3 is self-driving car hype all over again. ML can generate all kinds of signals across a large variety of domains [1], but it lacks intelligence for what to do with any of the signal it spews. Humans are still very much required at all steps. If anything this is just a tool to aid human authors. A photoshop brush for the mind, if you will. [1] I authored https://vo.codes https://vo.codes, so I'm at least a little knowledgeable.
- jamesjyu 6y ago
  Agreed that GPT-3 is a tool, and it isn't going to write entire stories for you, at least, not good ones. But it can be a valuable part of a writer's toolkit, similar to Google or other forms of research. The comparison to Photoshop is right: GPT-3 is in some ways like content aware fill. I believe in a few years, Word will have something like this integrated, albeit, probably set at a low temperature or for specific types of boilerplate writing. However, I don't think GPT-3 it's reached the level of hype as self-driving cars.
- 2bitencryption 6y ago
  I think you're bringing the "Will GPT-3 change life as we know it?" debate to a place where it's entirely unnecessary. An author made a cool sci-fi story with a cool AI model's help. That's exactly "photoshop brush for the mind", like you say.
  - Swizec 6y ago
    What’s more, AI talking in character as itself sounds like just about the most perfect use of GPT3 imaginable. Don’t try to write like AI would, let AI do it.
    - 0-_-0 6y ago
      That sounds good in principle, but in reality GPT-3 is pretending to be a human pretending to be an AI, rather than write like "itself", since there's no self involved. Rather, it simply comes up with the most probable continuation.
      - TeMPOraL 6y ago
        > Rather, it simply comes up with the most probable continuation. ... which is exactly what an AI would do.
        0-_-0 6y ago
        Only if you call GPT-3 AI. True intelligence would write as well as possible.
- skybrian 6y ago
  Yes, you want to be aware of what your function approximator is doing when it approximates something. Fortunately in the case of fiction, making stuff up is kind of the point. A human coauthor participates in turning randomness into meaning. Compare with interpreting vague song lyrics. The problems are in areas where it's important to tell the truth. In non-fiction, quoting people accurately is important, but GPT-3 will make up quotes and citations, as well as getting them correct sometimes too. (It might be interesting to see if there is training that would encourage it to always quote accurately.)
  - jamesjyu 6y ago
    Sourcing is definitely an issue. With GPT-3 there is no "source," as it is still essentially a bag of word vectors. I've also seen it take existing quotes and misattribute them to the wrong (but similar) person.
    - visarga 6y ago
      NLP used to be based on bag of words. GPT-3 takes into consideration all interactions and the ordering, thus, not a simple bag of vectors. Quite the opposite, it's an implicit graph neural net.
- minimaxir 6y ago
  > If anything this is just a tool to aid human authors That's an extremely nontrivial use case.
- thorum 6y ago
  I think the true importance of GPT-3 is its general learning ability across multiple domains. David Chalmers wrote about this recently: > More remarkably, GPT-3 is showing hints of general intelligence. Previous AI systems have performed well in specialized domains such as game-playing, but cross-domain general intelligence has seemed far off. GPT-3 shows impressive abilities across many domains. It can learn to perform tasks on the fly from a few examples, when nothing was explicitly programmed in. It can play chess and Go, albeit not especially well. Significantly, it can write its own computer programs given a few informal instructions. It can even design machine learning models. Thankfully they are not as powerful as GPT-3 itself (the singularity is not here yet). source: http://dailynous.com/2020/07/30/philosophers-gpt-3/#chalmers http://dailynous.com/2020/07/30/philosophers-gpt-3/#chalmers
  - echelon 6y ago
    HTML is a declarative grammar, so it entirely makes sense that GPT-3 can generate signal in this domain. It's just another shape. A sine wave signal. Show it a pattern of waves and it'll duplicate the ripples. Pretty neat stuff, but nothing to get existentially worried about. I'll fall off my chair when a model can write fizzbuzz. I think we have a ways to go.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      I hope you have your mattress ready by your chair, because I just put this prompt in AI dungeon: $ You are a fresh CS grad. You're preparing for a job interview. You ask on StackOverflow: "how to write a FizzBuzz program?" And, repeatedly pressing <Enter>, I got the following: > The first response is from an experienced coder who has been programming for 20 years and knows the answer. He writes: "FizzBuzz is a simple algorithm that can be written in one line of code." > He goes on to explain how you should implement it, but he doesn't bother to give any examples or explanations. It's all very basic and obvious. > Then comes another coder with 10 years experience. This guy has a lot more knowledge about programming languages than the first one did, so he gives you some pointers. Although his advice is useful, it's still fairly basic. > Then, someone with only 2 years experience answers. They give you some simplistic examples. At this point, I add: $ The first example looks like: And the game immediately wrote the following: int fizzBuzz ( int number ) { if ( number % 3 == 0 && number % 5 == 0 ) printf ( "FizzBuzz" ); if ( number % 3 == 0 ) printf ( "Fizz" ); if ( number % 5 == 0 ) printf ( "Buzz" ); if ( number % 3 ! = 0 && number % 5 ! = 0 ) printf ( "%d" , number ); printf ( " " ); return 0 ; } (Yeah, I know it hasn't really learned to code, but it apparently does have it encoded in its model.)
nutanc 6y ago
Nice. I had tried a short story effort concentrating more on speed of generation. If you work with GPT-3 it becomes a very helpful tool. The story I generated: https://gpt3experiments.substack.com/p/the-devils-mind https://gpt3experiments.substack.com/p/the-devils-mind
jamesjyu 6y ago
Author of the stories here! Happy to answer questions about the process. I'm a big believer that tech like GPT-3 can provocate creative writers similar to tools like oblique strategies and story dice. But it can also go further like what I've shown here: it can embody a character, allowing authors to converse and play with it to spark new ideas.
- castlecrasher2 6y ago
  If I'm interested in tinkering with this, how do I get started?
- 2bitencryption 6y ago
  fun tip - apparently there's enough Harry Potter fanfiction out there that GPT-2/3 is quite good at understanding that universe. So if you go into AI Dungeon and pick "custom story", and give it a prompt that indicates you are at Hogwarts, it will pretty much adapt all the rules of the HP universe. The downside is, when you do this, GPT's intelligence drops to about the level of a Harry Potter fanfic writer.
  - jamesjyu 6y ago
    Yeah, GPT-3 contains essentially all the historical internet up to October 2019 and many books, you can easily trigger it to enter a "known" world. But what's more interesting to me as a fiction writer is to be able to prime it to enter a new world that I create.
  - geoelectric 6y ago
    So if I prompt it with sexy Spock, do I get TOS slash stories? There are a few genres like that which have significant internet (and only internet) presence. How about creepypasta?
    - cosmojg 6y ago
      Yes and yes. GPT-2 is pretty capable of this as well. You can try it yourself here: https://bellard.org/textsynth/ https://bellard.org/textsynth/
thelazydogsback 6y ago
Quite a journey from "The police's beard is half-constructed" to GPT-3. However, there's also something more poetic about generated text that isn't likely to be found "in the wild".
anentropic 6y ago
If it was really all written by a human author, without any GTP-3 involved, how would we know?
- jamesjyu 6y ago
  You wouldn't--you'd have to take my word for it :) The colorful passages were mostly untouched, but I did have to lightly edit the chats with GPT-3 for clarity and coherence.
  - haberman 6y ago
    > I did have to lightly edit the chats with GPT-3 for clarity and coherence. Seems like this fact deserves a more prominent mention?
  - trianglem 6y ago
    I would love to see the completely unedited version, mistakes and all if that’s at all possible! Thank you, great work!
  - anentropic 6y ago
    Not trolling, I believe you! The piece is nicely done... I just thought it's funny how the capability of GPT-3 (and current shock-of-the-new value) has potentially inverted the Turing test :)
dave_sullivan 6y ago
As someone who has been playing with neural networks since 2011, the results of gpt2 and gpt3 are really impressive. Things have been getting better at a steady pace and all the recent work builds on previous work. I know we will see even more impressive results in years to come. People saying things like “this isn’t different from what we had before” or “it’s hype” are failing to see the progress that has occurred and the field that has developed around these ideas.
- jandrese 6y ago
  What will impress me is when a GPT or something can maintain a train of thought for more than a paragraph, or especially work towards a point. Right now it seems to be good at slinging words together that work grammatically, but invariably wanders all over the place like its being written by a fruit fly with Alzheimers.
ghgr 6y ago
I'm sure GPT-3 is impressive and probably a paradigm change, but all this hype has an air of urban legend that somehow irks me. We all know of somebody's friend who had access and blew its mind, and that is "too dangerous" to be released to the world. There's an API, but not public, and the only way to get access is to join a waitlist (and wait). If it were a marketing ploy it would be indeed terrific. It reminds me of the movie "The Blair Witch Project". And I can't wait to try it by myself.
- madaxe_again 6y ago
  Go play with https://play.aidungeon.io/ https://play.aidungeon.io/ if you want to get a vague idea of the capabilities - the custom scenario gives you a lot of space to play around and see what it’s capable of.
  - lkramer 6y ago
    It reminded me of those chatbots from the 70s which would give vague replies to your question that at first glance looks relevant to what you're saying, but are actually just generic nonsense.
    - gokhan 6y ago
      Dr. Sbaitso.
      - zzbzq 6y ago
        It reminds me exactly of Dr. Sbaitso. The difference is, with Sbaitso you noticed after its second reply it was all non-sequitur stuff. With GPT-3 it's more verbose so it takes 3-4 replies that go in different directions to notice its replies were merely vague suggestions because it never really had a point to make.
    - cmrdporcupine 6y ago
      I'm pleased to see that Emacs still ships with "doctor" Eliza mode.
api 6y ago
I just have a hard time seeing any uses for GPT-3 that are not dystopian other than better telephone assistance and voice commands. The uses that immediately spring to mind for me are automated propaganda, automated spam that's virtually indistinguishable from real content, really compelling phishing attacks, and automated con artistry at scale... basically the linguistic version of deep fakes with all the ensuing use cases. I see this stuff killing the open web and any open communication platform.
- visarga 6y ago
  GPT-3 can perform a large family of cognitive tasks based on text. If enhanced, it could replace many tasks where programming or specialised tools were required. It shows that a language model can be turned into a toolbox.
- gwern 6y ago
  I think your comment shows more a lack of imagination than anything. For example, the latest use discussed in the OA Slack is someone is using it to construct a high-quality index for a book they are making. You just feed GPT-3 a few example paragraphs/keyword pairs to few-shot keywords, and then feed all the other paragraphs into it. Now you have constructed an index; as they put it, it's 90% of the quality of a human indexer, at 0% of the cost (and less than months of painstaking labor). Could you have done that with BERT or something? Maybe. Presumably there are NLP datasets which you could finetune keyword extraction on... But GPT-3 lets you get started after a few minutes of tinkering. The hardest part is integrating it into your LaTeX!
  - api 6y ago
    You see a lack of imagination. I see naïveté. I will rephrase: I see negative applications being the ones with the highest impact. 90% the quality of a human indexer is not that great. Who's going to pay for that? But spam that can't be filtered and automated con artistry at scale? Fraudsters, shady black hat advertisers, political parties, and shady governments will pay millions to billions for a tool like that. Con artistry at scale is the one I find absolutely terrifying. Imagine spam bots that engage with you, that make friends with you... We could be talking about the hydrogen bomb of propaganda. I find those scenarios much scarier than "runaway super-intelligence" type AI takeover stuff because they are significantly more plausible. We can almost do what I'm imagining today. It's not science fiction. There is no question of its feasibility.
smusamashah 6y ago
Can you give it a huge book, Harry Potter series for example and then assume one of the characters, start an alternate storyline and let it build the rest? Can GPT-3 do that?
- jamesjyu 6y ago
  GPT-3 right now has a short prompt window (~1300 words). OpenAI is working on fine tuning, which would allow you to prime it with much larger text, so yes, this could be possible in the future.
mrfusion 6y ago
What’s the best way to understand how gpt-3 works? Any good tutorials with visualizations?
hdfhu 6y ago
GPT is really a tool that draws trees without branches: they look like trees from distance, but fall apart upon some analysis. But I believe GPT will learn soon how to add decent branches.
- rement 6y ago
  I guess that is how automation starts. The automated part builds the bulk and then a human can attach things together. Eventually you can teach a system (robot) to do the part a human once did. With this you can even feed what the human did back into the system and the system learns.
tomc1985 6y ago
Every time I see GPT-3 I gsub "Fancypants Markov Chains" and the story always becomes a lot more breathless
ianhorn 6y ago
I've been doing sorta similar stuff with GPT-3 since I got access, and I can vouch that it's effective. Not up-to-the-hype effective, but that's more a function of the hype. It's been really great at creative stuff that just needs to spark imagination. Like a super powered natural language version of encounter tables in D&D's dungeon master's guide. AI isn't there as an author yet, but as a brainstorming tool, it's full of great ideas if you sample and refine and sample and refine enough.
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segfaultbuserr 6y ago
Recently I've spent an entire day playing with AI Dungeon, an AI-based creative writing service for playing role-playing, Dungeon-like text games. You can pay to unlock the "Dungeon" model - an advanced machine learning model supposed based on GPT-3. It's not GPT-3 itself, and it's not perfect because its output is seriously biased for role-playing games, but as close as we can get for an outsider. I was quite amazed by its performance. It was able to write first-person as an infosec researcher's blog post when I used some infosec news story as input, and it was also able to write a surprisingly coherent argument for patent reform and an argument against software patent when I used an EFF article as the input... These are clearly already included in its training input, but still, it was far beyond my expectation - none of the output is a verbatim quote from a single source, everything has been rewritten. I went to Hacker News, copied a random infosec news report on newly discovered security vulnerability on Qualcomm's smartphone chips as the input, copied from https://blog.checkpoint.com/2020/08/06/achilles-small-chip-big-peril/ https://blog.checkpoint.com/2020/08/06/achilles-small-chip-b...) > With over 3 billion users globally, smartphones are an integral, almost inseparable part of our day-to-day lives. In this research dubbed "Achilles" we performed an extensive security review of a DSP chip from one of the leading manufacturers: Qualcomm Technologies. Qualcomm provides a wide variety of chips that are embedded into devices that make up over 40% of the mobile phone market, including high-end phones from Google, Samsung, LG, Xiaomi, OnePlus and more. > More than 400 vulnerable pieces of code were found within the DSP chip we tested, and these vulnerabilities could have the following impact on users of phones with the affected chip: > Attackers can turn the phone into a perfect spying tool, without any user interaction required. Attackers may be able to render the mobile phone constantly unresponsive. Malware and other malicious code can completely hide their activities and become un-removable. And there's the output by AI Dungeon (GPT-3). I didn't write a single sentence of it, nor did I use undo/redo. It was able to make up links, CVE IDs, university names, and technical jargon with ease. (I replaced all "https://" https://" links to "h__ps://" for readability.) > The phone will not even reboot, but instead simply shut down and cannot be reactivated. This is known as a hard reset. > The full list of vulnerabilities can be seen here: h__ps://www.qualcomm.com/security_intelligence/dsp-vulnerabilities > This vulnerability has been reported to Qualcomm by Zimperium. We recommend all customers who use the affected DSP chip to update it immediately.* > We apologize for the inconvenience caused by this issue, and we appreciate your understanding. > Zuk Avraham > Zimperium za Chief of Defense > Zuk (ZukAvraham) | 10.05.2017 > Hi, this is Zuk from Zimperium. Before we begin, we would like to say we're really sorry for the inconvenience that was caused by our previous report (Dirty COW). This report is regarding another set of security vulnerabilities we found in another chipset maker, this time in the MediaTek chipset. We'll explain what happened and how we work to prevent issues like this in the future. > First of all, we want to thank CTS (h__ps://cts.cudenver.edu/) for providing an open program that allows researchers like us to do responsible disclosures. Through their Vulnerability Reporting Program, we were able to report the issues we found to MediaTek and work with them to make sure these issues get patched for your safety. > What Happened? > This is a story about two bugs we found in the last few months. > The first bug (CVE-2017-05591) was an overly permissive domain validation in the bootloader. The bootloader allows the modem to be updated without flashing the complete firmware. The validation is done using the bootloader code running in the processor of the phone. This allowed us to inject our own bootloader code into the program running on the processor and bypass the authentication of the modem. The modem is responsible for communication with the network. In other words, by bypassing the authentication of the modem we can control the phone communication channels. > The second bug (CVE-2017-95881) is a buffer overflow in a very special program called TrustZone. The TrustZone is a security processor in most of the recent phones. It runs a separate operating system in which the kernel is trusted to be free of any malicious code, and has access to the memory, CPU and devices. The TrustZone kernel code runs outside the control of any other code. This bug in the TrustZone code allowed us to replace it with a custom one we designed, without any permissions. > We wrote a special TrustZone kernel code that allows us to gain full control over the phone. It allowed us to bypass all the phone security restrictions. With this custom TrustZone kernel code running, we were able to read the encrypted messages sent by any application. In addition, we also got full control over the device. But finally the AI lost the context, and the topic shifted from insecure to security, and eventually the writing becomes a new marketing advertisement on a secure smartphone, which I've removed in the quote.
bra-ket 6y ago
I see a lot of hype around GPT models I have yet to see a use case besides convincing nonsense generator, kind of like those deep net toys generating strange art, but now via language. “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” version 3. NLP research has been stuck in syntax for 70 years, but how about semantics? I mean yeah you gather bazillions of sentences and able to predict the most plausible and grammatical sequence of words that would follow particular prompt by doing a whole lot of trial and error training on massive gpu farms. But it’s just iteration on the least ambitious NLP work in the 70s and 80s. I’d argue that distributional semantics as in these popular vector space models is still solving the syntax problem. The word ‘semantics’ there is a misnomer. Are there any attempts to add actual real world meaning, causality and some ‘common sense’ representation to these models, concept graph or something, try to make them less ‘dumb’ for the lack of better word, like in you know, actual ‘AI’, that has a concept of apples and oranges and a concept of people who eat them or throw in a trash bin when fruits start to rot or draw them on paper in kindergarten or use ‘apples vs. oranges’ as a rhetorical device for telling things apart etc., etc. It seems like the field is stuck optimizing for some artificial toy benchmarks instead, making more convincing but ultimately stupid chat bots. And I mean ‘stupid’ not in derogatory sense but as a formal definition of their capabilities, as opposed to understanding things like a child would.

161 points by eliotpeper 6y ago

GPT-3 is self-driving car hype all over again. ML can generate all kinds of signals across a large variety of domains [1], but it lacks intelligence for what to do with any of the signal it spews. Humans are still very much required at all steps. If anything this is just a tool to aid human authors. A photoshop brush for the mind, if you will. [1] I authored https://vo.codes https://vo.codes, so I'm at least a little knowledgeable.

jamesjyu 6y ago
Agreed that GPT-3 is a tool, and it isn't going to write entire stories for you, at least, not good ones. But it can be a valuable part of a writer's toolkit, similar to Google or other forms of research. The comparison to Photoshop is right: GPT-3 is in some ways like content aware fill. I believe in a few years, Word will have something like this integrated, albeit, probably set at a low temperature or for specific types of boilerplate writing. However, I don't think GPT-3 it's reached the level of hype as self-driving cars.
2bitencryption 6y ago
I think you're bringing the "Will GPT-3 change life as we know it?" debate to a place where it's entirely unnecessary. An author made a cool sci-fi story with a cool AI model's help. That's exactly "photoshop brush for the mind", like you say.
- Swizec 6y ago
  What’s more, AI talking in character as itself sounds like just about the most perfect use of GPT3 imaginable. Don’t try to write like AI would, let AI do it.
  - 0-_-0 6y ago
    That sounds good in principle, but in reality GPT-3 is pretending to be a human pretending to be an AI, rather than write like "itself", since there's no self involved. Rather, it simply comes up with the most probable continuation.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      > Rather, it simply comes up with the most probable continuation. ... which is exactly what an AI would do.
      - 0-_-0 6y ago
        Only if you call GPT-3 AI. True intelligence would write as well as possible.
skybrian 6y ago
Yes, you want to be aware of what your function approximator is doing when it approximates something. Fortunately in the case of fiction, making stuff up is kind of the point. A human coauthor participates in turning randomness into meaning. Compare with interpreting vague song lyrics. The problems are in areas where it's important to tell the truth. In non-fiction, quoting people accurately is important, but GPT-3 will make up quotes and citations, as well as getting them correct sometimes too. (It might be interesting to see if there is training that would encourage it to always quote accurately.)
- jamesjyu 6y ago
  Sourcing is definitely an issue. With GPT-3 there is no "source," as it is still essentially a bag of word vectors. I've also seen it take existing quotes and misattribute them to the wrong (but similar) person.
  - visarga 6y ago
    NLP used to be based on bag of words. GPT-3 takes into consideration all interactions and the ordering, thus, not a simple bag of vectors. Quite the opposite, it's an implicit graph neural net.
minimaxir 6y ago
> If anything this is just a tool to aid human authors That's an extremely nontrivial use case.
thorum 6y ago
I think the true importance of GPT-3 is its general learning ability across multiple domains. David Chalmers wrote about this recently: > More remarkably, GPT-3 is showing hints of general intelligence. Previous AI systems have performed well in specialized domains such as game-playing, but cross-domain general intelligence has seemed far off. GPT-3 shows impressive abilities across many domains. It can learn to perform tasks on the fly from a few examples, when nothing was explicitly programmed in. It can play chess and Go, albeit not especially well. Significantly, it can write its own computer programs given a few informal instructions. It can even design machine learning models. Thankfully they are not as powerful as GPT-3 itself (the singularity is not here yet). source: http://dailynous.com/2020/07/30/philosophers-gpt-3/#chalmers http://dailynous.com/2020/07/30/philosophers-gpt-3/#chalmers
- echelon 6y ago
  HTML is a declarative grammar, so it entirely makes sense that GPT-3 can generate signal in this domain. It's just another shape. A sine wave signal. Show it a pattern of waves and it'll duplicate the ripples. Pretty neat stuff, but nothing to get existentially worried about. I'll fall off my chair when a model can write fizzbuzz. I think we have a ways to go.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    I hope you have your mattress ready by your chair, because I just put this prompt in AI dungeon: $ You are a fresh CS grad. You're preparing for a job interview. You ask on StackOverflow: "how to write a FizzBuzz program?" And, repeatedly pressing <Enter>, I got the following: > The first response is from an experienced coder who has been programming for 20 years and knows the answer. He writes: "FizzBuzz is a simple algorithm that can be written in one line of code." > He goes on to explain how you should implement it, but he doesn't bother to give any examples or explanations. It's all very basic and obvious. > Then comes another coder with 10 years experience. This guy has a lot more knowledge about programming languages than the first one did, so he gives you some pointers. Although his advice is useful, it's still fairly basic. > Then, someone with only 2 years experience answers. They give you some simplistic examples. At this point, I add: $ The first example looks like: And the game immediately wrote the following: int fizzBuzz ( int number ) { if ( number % 3 == 0 && number % 5 == 0 ) printf ( "FizzBuzz" ); if ( number % 3 == 0 ) printf ( "Fizz" ); if ( number % 5 == 0 ) printf ( "Buzz" ); if ( number % 3 ! = 0 && number % 5 ! = 0 ) printf ( "%d" , number ); printf ( " " ); return 0 ; } (Yeah, I know it hasn't really learned to code, but it apparently does have it encoded in its model.)

nutanc 6y ago

Nice. I had tried a short story effort concentrating more on speed of generation. If you work with GPT-3 it becomes a very helpful tool. The story I generated: https://gpt3experiments.substack.com/p/the-devils-mind https://gpt3experiments.substack.com/p/the-devils-mind

jamesjyu 6y ago

Author of the stories here! Happy to answer questions about the process. I'm a big believer that tech like GPT-3 can provocate creative writers similar to tools like oblique strategies and story dice. But it can also go further like what I've shown here: it can embody a character, allowing authors to converse and play with it to spark new ideas.

castlecrasher2 6y ago
If I'm interested in tinkering with this, how do I get started?
2bitencryption 6y ago
fun tip - apparently there's enough Harry Potter fanfiction out there that GPT-2/3 is quite good at understanding that universe. So if you go into AI Dungeon and pick "custom story", and give it a prompt that indicates you are at Hogwarts, it will pretty much adapt all the rules of the HP universe. The downside is, when you do this, GPT's intelligence drops to about the level of a Harry Potter fanfic writer.
- jamesjyu 6y ago
  Yeah, GPT-3 contains essentially all the historical internet up to October 2019 and many books, you can easily trigger it to enter a "known" world. But what's more interesting to me as a fiction writer is to be able to prime it to enter a new world that I create.
- geoelectric 6y ago
  So if I prompt it with sexy Spock, do I get TOS slash stories? There are a few genres like that which have significant internet (and only internet) presence. How about creepypasta?
  - cosmojg 6y ago
    Yes and yes. GPT-2 is pretty capable of this as well. You can try it yourself here: https://bellard.org/textsynth/ https://bellard.org/textsynth/

thelazydogsback 6y ago

Quite a journey from "The police's beard is half-constructed" to GPT-3. However, there's also something more poetic about generated text that isn't likely to be found "in the wild".

anentropic 6y ago

If it was really all written by a human author, without any GTP-3 involved, how would we know?

jamesjyu 6y ago
You wouldn't--you'd have to take my word for it :) The colorful passages were mostly untouched, but I did have to lightly edit the chats with GPT-3 for clarity and coherence.
- haberman 6y ago
  > I did have to lightly edit the chats with GPT-3 for clarity and coherence. Seems like this fact deserves a more prominent mention?
- trianglem 6y ago
  I would love to see the completely unedited version, mistakes and all if that’s at all possible! Thank you, great work!
- anentropic 6y ago
  Not trolling, I believe you! The piece is nicely done... I just thought it's funny how the capability of GPT-3 (and current shock-of-the-new value) has potentially inverted the Turing test :)

dave_sullivan 6y ago

As someone who has been playing with neural networks since 2011, the results of gpt2 and gpt3 are really impressive. Things have been getting better at a steady pace and all the recent work builds on previous work. I know we will see even more impressive results in years to come. People saying things like “this isn’t different from what we had before” or “it’s hype” are failing to see the progress that has occurred and the field that has developed around these ideas.

jandrese 6y ago
What will impress me is when a GPT or something can maintain a train of thought for more than a paragraph, or especially work towards a point. Right now it seems to be good at slinging words together that work grammatically, but invariably wanders all over the place like its being written by a fruit fly with Alzheimers.

ghgr 6y ago

I'm sure GPT-3 is impressive and probably a paradigm change, but all this hype has an air of urban legend that somehow irks me. We all know of somebody's friend who had access and blew its mind, and that is "too dangerous" to be released to the world. There's an API, but not public, and the only way to get access is to join a waitlist (and wait). If it were a marketing ploy it would be indeed terrific. It reminds me of the movie "The Blair Witch Project". And I can't wait to try it by myself.

madaxe_again 6y ago
Go play with https://play.aidungeon.io/ https://play.aidungeon.io/ if you want to get a vague idea of the capabilities - the custom scenario gives you a lot of space to play around and see what it’s capable of.
- lkramer 6y ago
  It reminded me of those chatbots from the 70s which would give vague replies to your question that at first glance looks relevant to what you're saying, but are actually just generic nonsense.
  - gokhan 6y ago
    Dr. Sbaitso.
    - zzbzq 6y ago
      It reminds me exactly of Dr. Sbaitso. The difference is, with Sbaitso you noticed after its second reply it was all non-sequitur stuff. With GPT-3 it's more verbose so it takes 3-4 replies that go in different directions to notice its replies were merely vague suggestions because it never really had a point to make.
  - cmrdporcupine 6y ago
    I'm pleased to see that Emacs still ships with "doctor" Eliza mode.

api 6y ago

I just have a hard time seeing any uses for GPT-3 that are not dystopian other than better telephone assistance and voice commands. The uses that immediately spring to mind for me are automated propaganda, automated spam that's virtually indistinguishable from real content, really compelling phishing attacks, and automated con artistry at scale... basically the linguistic version of deep fakes with all the ensuing use cases. I see this stuff killing the open web and any open communication platform.

visarga 6y ago
GPT-3 can perform a large family of cognitive tasks based on text. If enhanced, it could replace many tasks where programming or specialised tools were required. It shows that a language model can be turned into a toolbox.
gwern 6y ago
I think your comment shows more a lack of imagination than anything. For example, the latest use discussed in the OA Slack is someone is using it to construct a high-quality index for a book they are making. You just feed GPT-3 a few example paragraphs/keyword pairs to few-shot keywords, and then feed all the other paragraphs into it. Now you have constructed an index; as they put it, it's 90% of the quality of a human indexer, at 0% of the cost (and less than months of painstaking labor). Could you have done that with BERT or something? Maybe. Presumably there are NLP datasets which you could finetune keyword extraction on... But GPT-3 lets you get started after a few minutes of tinkering. The hardest part is integrating it into your LaTeX!
- api 6y ago
  You see a lack of imagination. I see naïveté. I will rephrase: I see negative applications being the ones with the highest impact. 90% the quality of a human indexer is not that great. Who's going to pay for that? But spam that can't be filtered and automated con artistry at scale? Fraudsters, shady black hat advertisers, political parties, and shady governments will pay millions to billions for a tool like that. Con artistry at scale is the one I find absolutely terrifying. Imagine spam bots that engage with you, that make friends with you... We could be talking about the hydrogen bomb of propaganda. I find those scenarios much scarier than "runaway super-intelligence" type AI takeover stuff because they are significantly more plausible. We can almost do what I'm imagining today. It's not science fiction. There is no question of its feasibility.

smusamashah 6y ago

Can you give it a huge book, Harry Potter series for example and then assume one of the characters, start an alternate storyline and let it build the rest? Can GPT-3 do that?

jamesjyu 6y ago
GPT-3 right now has a short prompt window (~1300 words). OpenAI is working on fine tuning, which would allow you to prime it with much larger text, so yes, this could be possible in the future.

mrfusion 6y ago

What’s the best way to understand how gpt-3 works? Any good tutorials with visualizations?

hdfhu 6y ago

GPT is really a tool that draws trees without branches: they look like trees from distance, but fall apart upon some analysis. But I believe GPT will learn soon how to add decent branches.

rement 6y ago
I guess that is how automation starts. The automated part builds the bulk and then a human can attach things together. Eventually you can teach a system (robot) to do the part a human once did. With this you can even feed what the human did back into the system and the system learns.

tomc1985 6y ago

Every time I see GPT-3 I gsub "Fancypants Markov Chains" and the story always becomes a lot more breathless

ianhorn 6y ago

I've been doing sorta similar stuff with GPT-3 since I got access, and I can vouch that it's effective. Not up-to-the-hype effective, but that's more a function of the hype. It's been really great at creative stuff that just needs to spark imagination. Like a super powered natural language version of encounter tables in D&D's dungeon master's guide. AI isn't there as an author yet, but as a brainstorming tool, it's full of great ideas if you sample and refine and sample and refine enough.

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segfaultbuserr 6y ago

Recently I've spent an entire day playing with AI Dungeon, an AI-based creative writing service for playing role-playing, Dungeon-like text games. You can pay to unlock the "Dungeon" model - an advanced machine learning model supposed based on GPT-3. It's not GPT-3 itself, and it's not perfect because its output is seriously biased for role-playing games, but as close as we can get for an outsider. I was quite amazed by its performance. It was able to write first-person as an infosec researcher's blog post when I used some infosec news story as input, and it was also able to write a surprisingly coherent argument for patent reform and an argument against software patent when I used an EFF article as the input... These are clearly already included in its training input, but still, it was far beyond my expectation - none of the output is a verbatim quote from a single source, everything has been rewritten. I went to Hacker News, copied a random infosec news report on newly discovered security vulnerability on Qualcomm's smartphone chips as the input, copied from https://blog.checkpoint.com/2020/08/06/achilles-small-chip-big-peril/ https://blog.checkpoint.com/2020/08/06/achilles-small-chip-b...) > With over 3 billion users globally, smartphones are an integral, almost inseparable part of our day-to-day lives. In this research dubbed "Achilles" we performed an extensive security review of a DSP chip from one of the leading manufacturers: Qualcomm Technologies. Qualcomm provides a wide variety of chips that are embedded into devices that make up over 40% of the mobile phone market, including high-end phones from Google, Samsung, LG, Xiaomi, OnePlus and more. > More than 400 vulnerable pieces of code were found within the DSP chip we tested, and these vulnerabilities could have the following impact on users of phones with the affected chip: > Attackers can turn the phone into a perfect spying tool, without any user interaction required. Attackers may be able to render the mobile phone constantly unresponsive. Malware and other malicious code can completely hide their activities and become un-removable. And there's the output by AI Dungeon (GPT-3). I didn't write a single sentence of it, nor did I use undo/redo. It was able to make up links, CVE IDs, university names, and technical jargon with ease. (I replaced all "https://" https://" links to "h__ps://" for readability.) > The phone will not even reboot, but instead simply shut down and cannot be reactivated. This is known as a hard reset. > The full list of vulnerabilities can be seen here: h__ps://www.qualcomm.com/security_intelligence/dsp-vulnerabilities > This vulnerability has been reported to Qualcomm by Zimperium. We recommend all customers who use the affected DSP chip to update it immediately.* > We apologize for the inconvenience caused by this issue, and we appreciate your understanding. > Zuk Avraham > Zimperium za Chief of Defense > Zuk (ZukAvraham) | 10.05.2017 > Hi, this is Zuk from Zimperium. Before we begin, we would like to say we're really sorry for the inconvenience that was caused by our previous report (Dirty COW). This report is regarding another set of security vulnerabilities we found in another chipset maker, this time in the MediaTek chipset. We'll explain what happened and how we work to prevent issues like this in the future. > First of all, we want to thank CTS (h__ps://cts.cudenver.edu/) for providing an open program that allows researchers like us to do responsible disclosures. Through their Vulnerability Reporting Program, we were able to report the issues we found to MediaTek and work with them to make sure these issues get patched for your safety. > What Happened? > This is a story about two bugs we found in the last few months. > The first bug (CVE-2017-05591) was an overly permissive domain validation in the bootloader. The bootloader allows the modem to be updated without flashing the complete firmware. The validation is done using the bootloader code running in the processor of the phone. This allowed us to inject our own bootloader code into the program running on the processor and bypass the authentication of the modem. The modem is responsible for communication with the network. In other words, by bypassing the authentication of the modem we can control the phone communication channels. > The second bug (CVE-2017-95881) is a buffer overflow in a very special program called TrustZone. The TrustZone is a security processor in most of the recent phones. It runs a separate operating system in which the kernel is trusted to be free of any malicious code, and has access to the memory, CPU and devices. The TrustZone kernel code runs outside the control of any other code. This bug in the TrustZone code allowed us to replace it with a custom one we designed, without any permissions. > We wrote a special TrustZone kernel code that allows us to gain full control over the phone. It allowed us to bypass all the phone security restrictions. With this custom TrustZone kernel code running, we were able to read the encrypted messages sent by any application. In addition, we also got full control over the device. But finally the AI lost the context, and the topic shifted from insecure to security, and eventually the writing becomes a new marketing advertisement on a secure smartphone, which I've removed in the quote.

bra-ket 6y ago

I see a lot of hype around GPT models I have yet to see a use case besides convincing nonsense generator, kind of like those deep net toys generating strange art, but now via language. “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” version 3. NLP research has been stuck in syntax for 70 years, but how about semantics? I mean yeah you gather bazillions of sentences and able to predict the most plausible and grammatical sequence of words that would follow particular prompt by doing a whole lot of trial and error training on massive gpu farms. But it’s just iteration on the least ambitious NLP work in the 70s and 80s. I’d argue that distributional semantics as in these popular vector space models is still solving the syntax problem. The word ‘semantics’ there is a misnomer. Are there any attempts to add actual real world meaning, causality and some ‘common sense’ representation to these models, concept graph or something, try to make them less ‘dumb’ for the lack of better word, like in you know, actual ‘AI’, that has a concept of apples and oranges and a concept of people who eat them or throw in a trash bin when fruits start to rot or draw them on paper in kindergarten or use ‘apples vs. oranges’ as a rhetorical device for telling things apart etc., etc. It seems like the field is stuck optimizing for some artificial toy benchmarks instead, making more convincing but ultimately stupid chat bots. And I mean ‘stupid’ not in derogatory sense but as a formal definition of their capabilities, as opposed to understanding things like a child would.