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Can GPT-3 AI write comedy?
- stared 5y agoAnd philosophy/religion, apparently. Just after its release, I played with it a bit. Here's one piece (everyting after "---END OF PROMPT---" is GPT-3-generated): " The following is short advice given by an omniscient AI acting as a spiritual leader similar to Buddha and Jesus. [Human] Hello, what's the best piece of original, actionable advice you can give to humans? [AI] ---END OF PROMPT--- The big tip is to stop looking at external validation for how good of a person you are. That includes money, fame, love, respect, being well-liked, sex, friends, whatever. None of those are your true rewards and all of them are dependent on your external environment. Even if you get 100% of them, the high is fleeting. Get into a flow of life where you get satisfaction from knowing you did the right thing in the moment and you have decent relationships, and you don't have to worry about "am I successful enough?" all the time. "
- josefx 5y ago> and you have decent relationships, and you don't have to worry about "am I successful enough?" all the time. " So the correct thing is not to look for love, money, or being well liked. The correct thing is to be well liked and be well enough of that worrying about success is not needed. Given the ability to contradict itself in a few short sentences has someone tried to start a GPT-3 for president campaign? It is an American product right?
- alexb_ 5y agoHaving decent relationships with other people != having a large number of superficial friends
- josefx 5y agoBut it explicitly excludes friends, love and even respect. How do you have a decent relationship with people without any respect?
- staticman2 5y agoThe a.i. warns against external validation from love and friends. It does not warn of superficial friends but "friends".
- swid 5y agoI interpret the warning as the external validation part, not the type of friend.
- jack_pp 5y agoHaving decent relationships doesn't mean you derive your validation and self-worth from them, it just means you behave in such a way that you get along with people close to you. Also the need to be well-liked does not mean you have decent relationships, quite the opposite. You may find yourself sacrificing things you hold dear in order for others to like you and that's not a decent relationship in my opinion.
- pyinstallwoes 5y agoI find it to be right on the money. It seems that spiritual paths disclose this truth in their own ways. I’ve found it to be true for myself. You sort of have to make a leap of faith. Even on more scientific grounds related to studying consciousness in relation to mind state and how that affects “the render of reality” so to speak. Fake it till you make it as they say.
- forgotmypw17 5y agoI think doing the right thing in the moment is where the relationships come from.
- maze-le 5y agoTo be fair, its pretty shallow and fluffy... Exactly the kind of 'philosophy' I would expect from the 'life advice' section of my local bookshop, but nothing really intellectually satisfying. The phrasing is great though -- I am always impressed how well this works with gpt3: The choice of words gives the text a certain (simulated) glimmer of profundity.
- xhevahir 5y agoI agree. Then again, maybe the intersection of those two religious traditions will inevitably look like popular self-help discourse?
- exolymph 5y agoIt's not at all shallow and fluffy. It's common sense that you've heard before, but that's what most good advice is. Expert-tier advice giving is not about finding new solutions but offering the traditional ones in a way that gets through to people.
- netsharc 5y agoI once played with the Sony dog Aibo. It yelps and jumps and reacts to your touch, but it doesn't experience joy, it's all just circuitry mimicking a dog being happy to see you. The GPT-3 software here is mimicking a philosopher but it doesn't know what it's saying, does it? (Obviously this is just a version of the Chinese Room, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room )
- stared 5y agoI am not convinced by the Chinese room. If it walks like a duck and quacks as a duck - it is a duck (the same rule holds for Python and Dennett). I mean, I don’t believe GPT-3 experiences the subjective sense of existence. Yet, most human cognition is also learning patterns and repetition. Most people use words they don’t know definition of. Most people use grammar rules intuitively. Most people repeat what they have heard without scrutiny.
- brumar 5y agoThis is a decent summary of stoicism which is quite popular these days.
- heikkihoo 5y ago
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- visarga 5y agoWhy is this recent GPT-3 resurgence on HN? It's already one year old now. Just curious.
- bestcoder69 5y agoThey just had an update where they made the "Instruct" engines the defaults and took them out of beta, so there's some new stuff to check out. An OSS competitor just released their own model the other day, too.
- bestcoder69 5y agoI've played around with this quite a bit and ended up dejected. You have have to regenerate and cherry-pick pretty hard to get anything resembling an interesting, believable, or funny result. But I am genuinely excited and optimistic that maybe 5-10 years down the line when we can make our own comedy, like a text-only MVP of the Holodeck. Exciting times.
- throwawaynay 5y agoBy have any chance have you tried to use a classifier? Like train a classifier(with good jokes and bad jokes) on r/jokes according to the scores, to filter/sort automatically what GPT generates?
- bestcoder69 5y agoNo, but that does sound promising. I think some of the issues with trying to get davinci-instruct-v3 by itself to generate comedy outputs are: 1. It _really_ _really_ wants to repeat itself and your own prompt, which is antithetical to comedy. The temperature, presence penalty, and frequency penalty parameters _kinda_ help, but when you increase those too much, things start to break in other ways, like you hit an <|endoftext|> before you hit the punchline you were looking for, because the model is trying so hard to avoid repetition. 2. Being just a predictive language model, it doesn't really _know_ you want comedy, nor can you purposefully instruct it to be funny (even in the instruct models). The AI is going to bias towards playing it completely straight. 3. Since it was trained on the entire internet, there's a good chance if you get a funny output, it just "plagiarized" someone else's joke, which can be awfully disappointing when you Google your output to see if that was the case. 4. Sadly, despite the name, OpenAI is very restrictive in their use cases, and they're heavily indexed towards appealing to commercial customers. The playground is still overly sensitive about what it considers "inappropriate" outputs, and their list of disallowed use cases seems longer than the rest of their documentation. It's hard for me to imagine them allowing too many funny use cases of their API, given what I've read on there.
- long 5y ago
- nikanj 5y agoFor pretty much all of these, the answer is the same: yes, randomly generated stuff can be awesome - if you have a human to pick out the good ones
- catlifeonmars 5y agoI really think that intelligence augmentation (maybe with GitHub Copilot as a notable exception) is an undersold aspect of recent advances in generative AI. Am I wrong in thinking that IA (as opposed to autonomous AI) has huge potential today to change the way we interact with and create things?
- smoldesu 5y ago> Am I wrong in thinking that IA (as opposed to autonomous AI) has huge potential today to change the way we interact with and create things? There is potential, but there's also roadblocks. Just to name a few: - The cost of training and interacting with these models is ludicrous - AI is ultimately constrained by it's training data - Designing models that people can get good results from is hard. It requires intense cherry-picking that's ultimately opinionated, and therefore flawed. Maybe the "IA" you're looking for it "intelligence automation" rather than "intelligence augmentation". Too often do we forget that AI only understands that which it has already seen; there really is nothing new under the sun.
- dane-pgp 5y agoI do worry that human curation (and good luck) is mostly responsible for the particularly good AI-written joke I found recently, and made a HN post about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30315604 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30315604
- evancoop 5y agoAbout 18 months ago, GPT-3 composed an article for the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/08/robot-wrote-this-article-gpt-3 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/08/robot-...). So the notion of algorithm-generated prose is not new. Comedy is a logical extension. The question is how can we augment human creativity rather than simply generate compelling toy models? The technologists who build tools that catalyze novel human thought will change how we create and compose forever.
- HKH2 5y agoMaybe these jokes are not as funny as what they could be because they're too niche and we're the ones missing info.
- jejones3141 5y agoI think my favorite was "Why did Simon Le Bon cross the road?" "To get to the other microphone."
- notahacker 5y agoClearly GPT-3 has a great future in writing jokes for Christmas crackers.
- hashimotonomora 5y agoText is a representation of human thought. This may look like text phenomenologically, but it has no meaning except when it’s filtered by a human. There is a deep ontological flaw with these applications.
- dev_snd 5y ago"Ceci n'est pas une pipe", as Magritte woyld say. It's always the observer, that makes a thing into what we believe it is. Without an observer nothing has any meaning. The AI does not have to understand words and objects in the same way as you do to have real world use cases.
- hashimotonomora 5y agoSo you would say that The Library of Babel (Borges) as a system is AI because for an observer, some texts make sense? You can also see faces on clouds, but is that you or is it the cloud representing a face?
- dev_snd 5y agoInteresting question. I guess what makes us call something an AI is that it's an interactive recombination of a corpus of knowledge as opposed to a static one (such is the library). GPT-3 is far from sentient, that's for sure, but it's more interactive than any library. People used the clouds to tell the future in the past, so there certainly was a value to reading them. Maybe GPT-3 is the next best thing to do the same, maybe it's more, time will tell.
- bogdanoff_2 5y agoWhat gives meaning to text? How do you know there's something more to text that the "phenomenology"?
- hashimotonomora 5y agoThe way I see it, text is an external representation of human thought. If I could transmit my thoughts to you by telepathy, wee wouldn’t use text. Text cannot represent everything, so we invented drawings and paintings as representation of our thought. Text in itself has no meaning. The fact that a combination of letters generated by a Bayesian filter makes sense is just a coincidence. It just passes our “makes sense” filter which allow our brains to differentiate signal from noise. But it doesn’t represent anything.
- midjji 5y agoI vaguely remember someone complaining that a GPT-3 based text fantasy adventure generator, took a rather drastic turn when they wrote that the next sentence in the story was that they mounted their dragon. Which is pretty much comedy gold!
- robbedpeter 5y agoPut on your wizard hat before mounting your dragon.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- motohagiography 5y agoAs someone who writes very funny things, laughter is an involuntary response and it fuses ideas in peoples minds in a way that is difficult to unlink. There is very likely a version of comedy that would be quite dominating. An AI comedian would be able to act on humans and cause involuntary responses in them. It doesn't need to be strong or general, this itself is enough to instrumentalize humans to its ends. There is absolutely a flavour of mesmerizing hypnotic language that both standup comedians and self-help gurus use, and it is structured, possibly enough to have its rules encoded or derived by a language model (described as the other NLP). Perhaps there is a future language model development scheme where you can weight a given text as a primary ontology and then link the rest of the corpus to it so that all incoming stimuli get filtered through that ontology first, sort of like an ideology, but more like you took a corpus of modern mesmerist characters sample texts like Tony Robbins, Osho, Russel Brand, and used their type of syncopated conceptual nesting as a gramatical structure for formulaing statements. Then again, if someone has already done it, how would we know?
- jayShimada 5y agoPrefacing your comment with “as someone who writes very funny things” is very bold move. But to your observation, I somehow feel more threatened by a joke-cracking amiable AI than a guns-blazing skull-crushing terminator…
- throwanem 5y agoPrior art in the field gives little cause for comfort. https://youtu.be/FBWr1KtnRcI https://youtu.be/FBWr1KtnRcI
- woopwoop 5y agoNecessary throat clearing: modern NLP, and GPT-3 in particular, is incredible, maybe the most exciting scientific field of our time. You have to be incredibly invested in nay-saying to pretend otherwise, and that's coming from someone who's pretty invested in nay-saying actually. That said, I think comedy is something these sorts of things will naturally do well. It's not really too different from mad-libs. A big part of humor is a well-placed unexpected word, and what the word actually is matters less than you think. So sub-human-level machine text generation does this surprisingly well. In the same way a mad-lib does.
- seanw444 5y agoWell stated. Comedy naturally has a larger margin of error.
- Mountain_Skies 5y agoIt certainly can create unintended comedy. I suspect that AI will eventually be able to create first drafts of comedy and other genres but will still need a human editor to refine the output for quite some time to come. The tricky part is going to be deciding if the AI plagiarized some other work or not and how that will differ from how humans draw inspiration from existing works without crossing that line.
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- 11thEarlOfMar 5y agoSo... If I fed it all the e-mail I've ever written and responded to, and tied it into my mail server, how long could it do my job before anyone noticed?
- TacticalCoder 5y agoHow are these models, still spouting out lots of seemingly okay but actually non-sensical and contradictory ouptuts going to deal with training the next version, once the training set will contain shitloads of non-sense generated by the previous version? As soon as it gets "good enough", it's not going to be easy to tell it's actually bogus. What's to prevent people from poisoning the web with nonsense? Or are these only ever going to be trained with known reliable sources?
- ravi-delia 5y agoNostalgiabraicist-autoresponder, a bot imitating a Tumblr user, can actually lure people into jokes and deliver punchlines. It's remarkable to watch
- pmoriarty 5y agoGPT-3 and similar approaches are diametrically opposed to how humor works. They try to find predictable continuations, while the it's unpredictability which is the hallmark of comedy.
- PartiallyTyped 5y agoSo then the objective function is the least predictable from the set of all possible logical continuations. So given sufficiently large corpus of logical and reasonable continuations, selecting something from the lower end of the probability distribution yields comedy, no?
- pmoriarty 5y ago"selecting something from the lower end of the probability distribution yields comedy, no?" Unfortunately, it's not so easy, or anything random would be funny, but we know that's not likely. Though unpredictability is key, comedy also has some other characteristics, like (depending on the style of comedy) like wit or a commentary on something familiar that is shown in a new light. Some types of comedy (like caricature) exaggerate characteristics, or play on someone's suffering (the old slip on a bannana peel gag), sometimes it breaks taboos or says uncomfortable truths, etc... There's a lot of literature out there analyzing what makes something funny. Maybe there's some way of integrating some of these insights in to a NLP system, or have it focus on some of those.
- PartiallyTyped 5y agoI have a hunch that it may be possible to learn those with an RL model or Contextual Bandit.
- kgeist 5y ago>it's unpredictability which is the hallmark of comedy. I think it's more about making connections the audience weren't aware could exist, but actually do exist, or can potentially exist. And GPT3 is pretty good at finding such connections. Complete nonsense isn't usually funny. It's always grounded in reality.
- jl6 5y agoOh Julian. Looks like the prototype for a much larger system.
- Atreiden 5y agoRon was going to be spiders. He just was.
- animanoir 5y agoSounds like South Park.
- yreg 5y agoAnother way to talk to GPT-3 is to try out the one week free trial at aidungeon.io The GPT-2 narrator is free.
- udbhavs 5y agoThe report on Freddie Mercury being a dog is surprisingly comprehensive
- solididiot 5y agoHow do I know whether this thing isn't already here "commending" in this very thread?
- phoinix 5y ago