It;s true that selection bias is a factor, and the way GPT-3 is distributed tends to aggravates that. Also, this is a human impersonator. It's not surprising t

It;s true that selection bias is a factor, and the way GPT-3 is distributed tends to aggravates that. Also, this is a human impersonator. It's not surprising that we find it personable and interesting. We find ceramic dolls personable and interesting. People can't really be trusted to evaluate human-looking things well. It's just to triggering to the instinctive biases of a social mammal. A gorilla impersonator would probably amaze gorillas in much the same way. That said, I do think there's something to these nlp systems that we didn't have before. The poke-poke stage of examining novel tech tends to be quirky, and most almost-insights are bogus. Stuff that's cool but useless is as compelling as useful stuff, at first. This isn't a long stage though. We usually gain a grounded understanding of a technology only when we find a use for it. Technology being used for something is what makes it technology, for some definition of. Prompting & filtering by humans is how GPT-3 is "operated." That it's merely augmenting the creativity of the prompter is a philosophical concern. The practical one is that it needs prompting and filtering. Also, it's trivial to automate some kinds of prompting and filtering.