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I spent some time reading GPT-3 reddit replies [1] and I'm impressed with the quality of writing - but the actual content is terrible IMO - it's like reading th
by reader_mode 6y ago
I spent some time reading GPT-3 reddit replies [1] and I'm impressed with the quality of writing - but the actual content is terrible IMO - it's like reading the most annoying people on forums - grasping at semantics etc. while they have nothing valuable or insightful to say. It just creates noise and writes for the sake of writing something.
It can say things, it just doesn't have anything valuable to say.
So asking GPT-3 random metaphysical questions gets you semi credible responses because those kinds of questions reduce to semantics and bullshit anyway.
I could see this as a layer that bridges some AI reasoning model and human language.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/user/thegentlemetre https://www.reddit.com/user/thegentlemetre
- WA 6y agoI think you nailed it. I played around with AI Dungeon as well and couldn't shake the feeling that GPT-3 is just a text completion engine filled with smart-sounding, but empty stuff written by a teen on Reddit. To put it another way: If you read anything from/about GPT-3, imagine who and in which sub would've posted something like this.
- sfshaw 6y agoCould a model be trained to predict the prompt given to GPT3 based on the responses?
- antihero 6y agoWell that's the thing, it isn't coming up with deeper concepts and using language to express them, it is merely expressing the language that would make sense to as a reply to a prompt. The meaning it has is shallow, much like most young posters. It sounds completely devoid of meaning and purpose because it is.
- inglor_cz 6y agoThere are some real gems there, though: "For example, in order for me to be 'born', my parents had to deprive themselves of their greatest happiness by having sex and conceiving me. They could have done something constructive with their time like, I don't know, doing philosophy or playing chess or studying physics."
- raxxorrax 6y agoIsn't that a quote from a book? I don't remember, but pretty sure I read something like that with very similar wording at least.
- inglor_cz 6y agoIDK. Haven't read anything like this before. But GPT-3 is notorious for plagiarizing, so chances are that your memory is correct.
- segfaultbuserr 6y agoGPT-2 was notorious for plagiarizing. GPT-3 is better, from gwern.net's blog post [0] and my limited experience of playing AI Dungeon, it appears to be really good at generating original writings by mixing, matching, and rewriting existing ideas. Sometimes they are verbatim copies, but more often they are rephased. For example, this is the output from GPT-3 after gwern fed a large number of quotes into the system, > Real is right now, this second. This might seem trivially true, but it is trivial only if you identify the real with the material. > Cameras may document where we are, but we document what the camera cannot see: the terror we experience in the silence of our eyes. > No society values truth-tellers who reveal unpleasant truths. Why should we value them when they are our own? Almost everything written by GPT-3 gives you a perception of "I've read something similar before", and of course, the ideas and meanings must come from pre-existing works. Yet, you often cannot find the original text, it has been rewritten beyond recognition. It's almost like Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation [1] - everything is a copy, yet with no original. > The first stage is a faithful image/copy [...] The second stage is perversion of reality, this is where we come to believe the sign to be an unfaithful copy [...] The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality, where the sign pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original. Signs and images claim to represent something real, but no representation is taking place and arbitrary images are merely suggested as things which they have no relationship to. [...] The fourth stage is pure simulacrum, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims. [0] https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3 https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation
- andybak 6y agoYou don't seem to see much value in metaphysics.
- reader_mode 6y agoEspecially true for casual/forum variety, like I said it's not meaningfully insightful and reduces to bullshit (and usually takes effort to reduce)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ramblerman 6y agoIt's ironic that in a lot of old school sci-fi the robots couldn't talk properly yet where completely sentient. Even Data couldn't do contractions. Yet it seems we reached the opposite, a fully eloquent idiot.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago> Even Data couldn't do contractions Neither did my father (although English wasn't his first language, but still). I did find it very odd.
- npstr 6y agoDid you ever see Data and your father in the same room together?
- _petronius 6y agoUnnecessarily detailed nitpick: Data uses contractions throughout the dialogue of TNG -- there is just one episode ("Datalore" it might have been?) where they decide to make it a plot point that he doesn't use them as a way of having the rest of the bridge crew figure out that he's been replaced by his evil twin who can use contractions. I'm pretty sure the plot point (and the ban on Data using contractions) doesn't even get a mention again in the rest of the series.
- fakedang 6y agoDid the bot only answer in AskReddit? Because if it did cover other subs too, I'd be shocked more.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y agoIt simulates many subreddits: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/top?t=all https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/top?t=all
- amelius 6y ago> So asking GPT-3 random metaphysical questions gets you semi credible responses because those kinds of questions reduce to semantics and bullshit anyway. Ask GPT-3 about quantum physics, and you get a pop-sci book ;)
- sdan 6y agoYeah most of the dataset most NLP models use is common crawl; most of which contains Reddit, which is probably at gpt3 is giving those sorts of results.
- coldtea 6y agoHeh, I think the opposite, it's very impressive and often surprising subtle, whereas I find this a typical dismissive HN top post... >So asking GPT-3 random metaphysical questions gets you semi credible responses because those kinds of questions reduce to semantics and bullshit anyway. That's the tech person's preconseption about "those kinds of questions". GTP-3 could answer to the same quality as Plato, Pascal, Hume, or Kierkegaard and they would dismiss them too...
- thelastwave 6y agoWell yes, the poster was quite clear in his assertion that Pascal, Hume, and Kierkegaard are all either bullshitters or quite meaningless (reducible to semantics.)
- dspillett 6y ago> It just creates noise and writes for the sake of writing something. So what you are saying is that it passes a Turing test, if we only concern ourselves with emulating the intelligence of ~75% of those online? That in itself is an achievement of sorts.
- vaccinator 6y agoGPT-3 would probably be good at clairvoyance then?
- helsinkiandrew 6y ago> while they have nothing valuable or insightful to say. It just creates noise and writes for the sake of writing something. Isn't that 99% of all internet comments/tweets/posts?
- reader_mode 6y agoI think that people who haven't seen the reddit threads I linked will find my post insightful - GPT-3 blogposts usually contain handpicked/tailored discussion where the authors ask metaphysical questions, when the model starts answering random questions from reddit not tailored for a bot conversation you get a different picture of what it's limits are. (So I think 99% is an exaggeration, but yeah there is a lot of noise)
- ChefboyOG 6y agoIt's important to keep in mind when reading anything about GPT-3 that the stated objective in training it wasn't to produce any kind of AGI, but specifically to see if a model could perform context-specific language tasks without first being fine-tuned to the specific context. For example, GPT-2 (GPT-3's predecessor) was originally used in AI Dungeon, but it first had to be fine-tuned on a large corpus of choose-your-own-adventure texts. GPT-3 doesn't need to be fine-tuned—it just works. From the original paper: "Here we show that scaling up language models greatly improves task-agnostic, few-shot performance, sometimes even reaching competitiveness with prior state-of-the-art fine-tuning approaches. Specifically, we train GPT-3, an autoregressive language model with 175 billion parameters, 10x more than any previous non-sparse language model, and test its performance in the few-shot setting. For all tasks, GPT-3 is applied without any gradient updates or fine-tuning, with tasks and few-shot demonstrations specified purely via text interaction with the model." Of course, it makes sense that people critique GPT-3 in terms of its actual progress towards human-like intelligence, since every news publication writes about it like it's Skynet and OpenAI's stated goal is AGI. I do think, however, that we miss all the parts of GPT-3 that are exciting and innovative when we view it through the binary of "Is it really understanding as a human does?" (Not that you were reducing it to that, just speaking about the conversation around GPT-3 more broadly.)
- reader_mode 6y agoI agree, and I'm impressed with the result quality - I expect that this approach is viable for creating something like a verbalisation layer for an AGI process.
- alisonkisk 6y agoHow? By design, GPT has no model of the meaning of what it's saying. One of GPT's major tells is that it is so context-free that short passages will contain contradictory facts.
- derefr 6y agoI believe GPT has been demonstrated to be usable for machine translation of long passages without "losing the thread." As long as the input has structure, and GPT just has to "follow along" the structure of the input when generating the output, then it the output is structured intelligibly. Also, I've seen GPT used in recursive fill-in-the-blanks approaches, where it does equally well, since the "skeleton" of its answer is already there. I imagine the task of "translating" between natural language, and a set of expert-system assertion predicates (or vice-versa) would work very well for GPT, and be "scalable." I'd love someone to go ahead and try this experiment, actually. It could potentially be meta-learnable in just a few prompts.
- ttcbj 6y agoI haven't paid much attention to GPT-3, and this is an interesting point (that is picks up the tone of forums). Although the original article is interesting, I think it would be more interesting to try to systematically vary the original prompt, and then see how much the tone and utility of the response depends on the prompt itself. It is forums, or is it the prompt, or some of both? It did seem to me like the response was flirting with something interesting but not quite getting there. I thought it would have been interesting if the response had echoed the original book by having the parent eventually grow old and sick, and the child mature and have children of his own who begin asking similar questions, and come to understand the question not as understanding the universe, but as understanding the people in his own life. In my view, that would have been an interesting nod to Adams with a bit more poignant and actionable outcome. In the final section, I thought it was going to go there, and when it did not, I was quite disappointed.