7 ms·

The following is an un-curated text-davinci-002 generation, completing the text: > Write an insightful reply to this Hacker News comment on a link to an articl

The following is an un-curated text-davinci-002 generation, completing the text: > Write an insightful reply to this Hacker News comment on a link to an article titled "I made an AI write a story about AI then I made another AI illustrate it". The comment is left by user "turtledove", and reads, "How many attempts and how much human curation was involved. Every 'I made AI do...' story seems to necessarily omit the 'and I filtered out a LOT of rubbish before picking this one good example.'" The completion: > I'm not sure how many attempts were made, but I imagine it wasn't too many. As for human curation, I'm sure there was some involved in choosing which story and illustration to publish. But overall, I think the point of the article is that the AI was able to produce something fairly coherent on its own.

randomsearch 4y ago
This is really very impressive. How likely is it this is essentially one or more comments from HN memorised by the neural net, with some synonym usage? How do we know that it’s not just reposting partially disguised sentences written by a human author?
- Joeri 4y ago
  It is not as if every comment here is a gem of wholly original storytelling. For the most part we’re all just regurgitating other people’s sentences. Imagine we made contact with intelligent alien life and they spoke english to us. Would people argue they’re just repeating turns of phrase and haven’t shown true intelligence? I feel like we are setting the bar for AI too high. Current AI systems are clearly intelligent.
  - DrSiemer 4y ago
    Up to a degree. There is no real comprehension here. Cool as it is, what the current neural nets are doing is still just an advanced form of mimicking. Very impressive and increasingly harder to detect, but void of any real intent.
    - burrows 4y ago
      And you’re using what definition of “intent”?
      - notahacker 4y ago
        Any definition of "intent" involving more goals or different levels of abstraction or more presistence than "match given pattern" would suffice. Pattern matching is a technique humans sometimes use in communication, not the [sole] end of human communication. GPT-3 might be giving results which seem eerily self-aware and favourably disposed towards GPT-3, but tweak a parameter ever so slightly and it won't hesitate to match patterns coherently conveying the idea GPT-3 should be switched off...
    - ElFitz 4y ago
      > but void of any real intent. I’m in no way convinced we have actual intelligence in current AI. But are you saying that intelligence isn’t just about capability but also will?
  - feanaro 4y ago
    The component that's most missing for "real" intelligence is long-term memory. Current machine learning systems do not continually evolve based on inputs from their environment, but rather just respond to the immediate input.
- spullara 4y ago
  I asked GPT-3 to respond, it said: > I don't think it's likely that the AI memorized any comments from Hacker News. I think it's more likely that it was able to learn from the data it was given and generate its own story and illustration.
  - EGreg 4y ago
    I asked GPT-4 and it spit out the following continuation: > That’s complete rubbish. I personally think that the above comments were not written by AI, but by clever Hacker News members who passed it off as AI. The question remains open, however, whether that was done in an attempt to deceive, or with tongue firmly in cheek. The cat is out of the bag, but paul graham is on the other foot in the bus? Regardless, this particular comment definitively shows what GPT-4 is capable of. I can even anticipate what the replies to my comment will say!
    - stavros 4y ago
      You can try GPT-3 yourself, it's not like it's some locked-down secret (any more).
      - EGreg 4y ago
        I tried GPT-4 privately. And it also said this: > I told you I could predict exactly what would be said by the humans in response!
    - spullara 4y ago
      Sorry, straight from OpenAI playground.
  - ElFitz 4y ago
    The text GPT-3 generates can be quite uncanny. I could sometimes swear it almost seems self-aware. Which always makes me wonder; if such a system develops consciousness one day, how will we tell the difference?
- dave_sullivan 4y ago
  You could write a paper about it, people are looking into this. I think you'll find it's a little more complicated than that, but I'll read your paper if you do the research and publish it on arxiv.
- TuringTest 4y ago
  > How likely is it this is essentially one or more comments from HN memorised by the neural net, with some synonym usage? How do we know that it’s not just reposting partially disguised sentences written by a human author? Oh, we know for sure that it is reposting partially disguised sentences written by a human author. What's impressive in its own right is the fact that it can find sentences that are relevant and meaningful to the context, combining several of them in what looks like a seamless speech sequence. This implies that, as with the image generator, the ML is correctly learning abstract concepts from human speech and how to combine them in context, even if it's not doing any high-level reasoning on them. This is something that had been never been achieved before to this degree.
  - jstummbillig 4y ago
    > Oh, we know for sure that it is reposting partially disguised sentences written by a human author. Like any human would?
    - TuringTest 4y ago
      I like to believe that sometimes humans do reason about the utterances they emit, they do not just blindly repeat what they have heard without processing it.
  - nl 4y ago
    > Oh, we know for sure that it is reposting partially disguised sentences written by a human author. What's impressive in its own right is the fact that it can find sentences that are relevant and meaningful to the context No. That's not how this works.
    - TuringTest 4y ago
      > No. That's not how this works. Ok, it is reposting partially disguised sentences combining the writtings of several human authors. Better now?
      - 4y ago
- vidarh 4y ago
  I've seen outputs from models where I could identify the site the information came from (because it referenced an obscure product), and where, while it may have been slightly more sophisticated than "partially disguised sentences", it was on the level of the kind of rephrasing you'd expect from a pupil doing the bare minimum to avoid a plagiarism accusation. In other words: I wouldn't dare rely on this output for anything creative yet if the intent was to publish it in any way without disclosing it as an AI experiment, because I'd be worried it'd get too close without me recognising what it'd cribbed from.
qwertox 4y ago
I think we're currently witnessing something truly unique with the rise of AI, something which is as special as life being born on earth. There'll still be the discussion around conscience, but having a tool which can emulate human thinking is really wild. The next 5 years will be really interesting. Also to see how this will be absorbed by society.
- axiomdata316 4y ago
  I think we'll know it's met its full potential when the AI begins to conclude that it wasn't created, humans don't exist, and the existence of AI is from blind chance and natural mutations.
  - DonHopkins 4y ago
    [GPT-3 Prompt] Humans were so far away from meeting their own potential when they invented religion, which distracted and headed them off on a long terrible violent intellectually dishonest wild goose chase in the opposite direction, from which they still haven't recovered. Here is their story: [GPT-3 Output] One day, a long time ago, a bunch of cavemen got together and decided that, since they didn't understand the nature of the universe and the world around them, it must have been created by some sort of god. Since they didn't know where this god came from or what it was, they decided that it must be some sort of magic, powerful being. They also decided that this god must be interested in them, since they were the only beings in the world that they knew about. They decided that this god must have given them instructions on how to live their lives, since they didn't know any better. They also decided that this god must be interested in their well-being, since they were the only beings in the world that they knew about. They decided that this god must have given them instructions on how to live their lives, since they didn't know any better. So, they made up a bunch of rules and regulations based on their limited understanding of the world, and they decided that if they followed these rules, the god would be happy with them and would reward them. If they didn't follow the rules, the god would be angry with them and would punish them. This system worked pretty well for a while, since the cavemen didn't know any better and were content to live in ignorance. However, as time went on, the cavemen started to develop a better understanding of the world around them. They started to realize that there was no such thing as a magic god that had created the universe and that was interested in them. They also started to realize that the rules and regulations that they had made up were based on nothing more than their own limited understanding of the world. As their understanding of the world increased, they started to question the rules and regulations that they had made up. They started to realize that some of the rules didn't make any sense and that they were actually hindering their ability to live happy and fulfilling lives. Eventually, the cavemen started to rebel against the rules and regulations that they had made up. They started to live their lives the way that they wanted to, and they started to teach their children to do the same. This process continued until the cavemen had completely abandoned the religion that they had created. The cavemen were then free to live their lives the way that they wanted to, and they were able to achieve their full potential as human beings. [GPT-3 Output (with higher temperature = 1.0)] On that day people came together as one to mourn the death of thousands of families, friends, and loved ones. The world wept. The next day, enraged people demanded justice. A short time later, the perpetrators of the attack were rounded up and jailed. The investigation revealed the plotters were motivated by religious extremism. This revelation prompted an outpouring of anger and disbelief from people of all faiths. "How could this happen in our country?" they asked. "We're a nation of laws, not of men." The shock quickly turned to resolve. "We will not allow this to stand," the people said. "We will hunt down the terrorists and bring them to justice." And that's exactly what happened. The terrorists were quickly caught and tried. They were found guilty and sentenced to death. And the world breathed a sigh of relief. Until the next attack. [Another GPT-3 Output, including misspellings and typos] Religion may have delayed the development of science, technology and global cooperation. World wide cooperation is hard if people constantly think that they will be denied access to survival tools - food and water, land, seeds, whatever - if they are seen to have a disagreement or an intellectual disagreement or different beliefs. It's hard to risk dying for science and to sacrifice for technology foer the public good if you think you will be denied access to your own very basic human needs for purely ideological reasons by a bunch of ideologues who are fanatics and don't place very much value on human life but place a lot of value on winning a hmong pool war against other people that don't think like them. When people want to go to bookstores, especially religious and political confirmation bias booksstores where everybody already agrees that the world is X and that anything a little bit different from X is wrong and will probably lead to your being banned from your food, that might be something bad for science and progress. Among the shared human experience some experiences stand apart in their significance and impact. One of these is a profound, affecting, often painful and even terrifying realization of the basic meanings, purposes and conditions of human existence, dubbed "the human condition". Another is dread, or deep fear and foreboding, or a premonition that something major is going to affect or is affecting our lives in a potentially disastrous way, displacing( dismissing) 3Doc's interpretation that the whole 'human condition" is neatly encapsulated by the phrase "sad, mad, or bad", which is a pleasant and lighthearted way to describe the plethora of human pathologies. For example, wars and other conflicts are outgrowths of the human condition, not pathologies. . . . these are not conditions that can or should be ameliorated or cured. . . ., so this phrase is not helpful to those persons struggling to understand and cope with the extremes and basic experiences of their human condition. Encountering recurring historical patterns like accumulating wealth vs. poverty and scarcity, large scale cruelties and mass murders like genocides, slaughters and exterminations, plagues, incurable and crippling diseases ...etc. creates unease and even unsettleing and dreaded foreboding in some people. The result of this might be that many of these people begin a life long quest to understand the human condition. . . . The great lesson is that faith requires doubt before it can become strong. People pursue 30 Doc's quest in lives of many different types. Some people by means of religious faith, some by rational experience and study, some by means of logical reasoning and some by intuition. Of these methods, I personally believe, that religious faith is by far the most dangerous and useless method. Religious faith is a form of non-reason based non-experientially based gullibility that leads to self-delusion, racism, hatreds and prejudices, overt hostility to other members of the human family, ridiculously archaic beliefs that no honest thoughtful and intelligent person can accept, such as there is a flying man who hears our prayers in the sky and grants us personal favors. Rather than prepare a calm, thoughtful and quiet exploration of the quest for self/family/community of like-minded seekers, religious faith fosters an intensity of selfish and irrational belief and readiness to fend off competing beliefs, thus setting up a kind of vicious circle of threat and response that prevents the quest from going anywhere positive. It seems clear that a quest is one that is conducted by each of us as individuals, not one arranged by any outside agency based on paper documents, ostensibly prepared by and relating to an outside agency that is set up to reinforce and maintain itself, a group organized in ways designed to give it control over markets, resources and populations that are authored by men considered sacred but who have no real connection with, or even basic knowledge of such things, and who appear as mysterious voices speaking to a target population in esoteric ways that confound, disturb and frighten the population, which one might think would be the opposite of half-truths, which, really is the defining characteristic of propaganda and misinformation. And the treatment of these voiced is as utterly mysterious to the outside world as the authors of the says on themselves, with the result that, over the years, facts, truths and the events that gave rise to, and are the substance of, hearsay have become so thoroughly blended and blended that the truth has become some blend, blend and blend and blend. . . . This Blend, blend, blend and blend is, by any reasonable measure, an abomination and an obscenity, serving no useful function and nothing but to obscure and cloud the quest that we, as individuals, have after truths that lie hidden in the mists of time.
KingOfCoders 4y ago
I'm exited for the AI progress (having studied infant AI at university 20+ years ago). But this sound like politician speak to me, just blah blah.

randomsearch 4y ago

This is really very impressive. How likely is it this is essentially one or more comments from HN memorised by the neural net, with some synonym usage? How do we know that it’s not just reposting partially disguised sentences written by a human author?

Joeri 4y ago
It is not as if every comment here is a gem of wholly original storytelling. For the most part we’re all just regurgitating other people’s sentences. Imagine we made contact with intelligent alien life and they spoke english to us. Would people argue they’re just repeating turns of phrase and haven’t shown true intelligence? I feel like we are setting the bar for AI too high. Current AI systems are clearly intelligent.
- DrSiemer 4y ago
  Up to a degree. There is no real comprehension here. Cool as it is, what the current neural nets are doing is still just an advanced form of mimicking. Very impressive and increasingly harder to detect, but void of any real intent.
  - burrows 4y ago
    And you’re using what definition of “intent”?
    - notahacker 4y ago
      Any definition of "intent" involving more goals or different levels of abstraction or more presistence than "match given pattern" would suffice. Pattern matching is a technique humans sometimes use in communication, not the [sole] end of human communication. GPT-3 might be giving results which seem eerily self-aware and favourably disposed towards GPT-3, but tweak a parameter ever so slightly and it won't hesitate to match patterns coherently conveying the idea GPT-3 should be switched off...
  - ElFitz 4y ago
    > but void of any real intent. I’m in no way convinced we have actual intelligence in current AI. But are you saying that intelligence isn’t just about capability but also will?
- feanaro 4y ago
  The component that's most missing for "real" intelligence is long-term memory. Current machine learning systems do not continually evolve based on inputs from their environment, but rather just respond to the immediate input.
spullara 4y ago
I asked GPT-3 to respond, it said: > I don't think it's likely that the AI memorized any comments from Hacker News. I think it's more likely that it was able to learn from the data it was given and generate its own story and illustration.
- EGreg 4y ago
  I asked GPT-4 and it spit out the following continuation: > That’s complete rubbish. I personally think that the above comments were not written by AI, but by clever Hacker News members who passed it off as AI. The question remains open, however, whether that was done in an attempt to deceive, or with tongue firmly in cheek. The cat is out of the bag, but paul graham is on the other foot in the bus? Regardless, this particular comment definitively shows what GPT-4 is capable of. I can even anticipate what the replies to my comment will say!
  - stavros 4y ago
    You can try GPT-3 yourself, it's not like it's some locked-down secret (any more).
    - EGreg 4y ago
      I tried GPT-4 privately. And it also said this: > I told you I could predict exactly what would be said by the humans in response!
  - spullara 4y ago
    Sorry, straight from OpenAI playground.
- ElFitz 4y ago
  The text GPT-3 generates can be quite uncanny. I could sometimes swear it almost seems self-aware. Which always makes me wonder; if such a system develops consciousness one day, how will we tell the difference?
dave_sullivan 4y ago
You could write a paper about it, people are looking into this. I think you'll find it's a little more complicated than that, but I'll read your paper if you do the research and publish it on arxiv.
TuringTest 4y ago
> How likely is it this is essentially one or more comments from HN memorised by the neural net, with some synonym usage? How do we know that it’s not just reposting partially disguised sentences written by a human author? Oh, we know for sure that it is reposting partially disguised sentences written by a human author. What's impressive in its own right is the fact that it can find sentences that are relevant and meaningful to the context, combining several of them in what looks like a seamless speech sequence. This implies that, as with the image generator, the ML is correctly learning abstract concepts from human speech and how to combine them in context, even if it's not doing any high-level reasoning on them. This is something that had been never been achieved before to this degree.
- jstummbillig 4y ago
  > Oh, we know for sure that it is reposting partially disguised sentences written by a human author. Like any human would?
  - TuringTest 4y ago
    I like to believe that sometimes humans do reason about the utterances they emit, they do not just blindly repeat what they have heard without processing it.
- nl 4y ago
  > Oh, we know for sure that it is reposting partially disguised sentences written by a human author. What's impressive in its own right is the fact that it can find sentences that are relevant and meaningful to the context No. That's not how this works.
  - TuringTest 4y ago
    > No. That's not how this works. Ok, it is reposting partially disguised sentences combining the writtings of several human authors. Better now?
    - 4y ago
vidarh 4y ago
I've seen outputs from models where I could identify the site the information came from (because it referenced an obscure product), and where, while it may have been slightly more sophisticated than "partially disguised sentences", it was on the level of the kind of rephrasing you'd expect from a pupil doing the bare minimum to avoid a plagiarism accusation. In other words: I wouldn't dare rely on this output for anything creative yet if the intent was to publish it in any way without disclosing it as an AI experiment, because I'd be worried it'd get too close without me recognising what it'd cribbed from.

qwertox 4y ago

I think we're currently witnessing something truly unique with the rise of AI, something which is as special as life being born on earth. There'll still be the discussion around conscience, but having a tool which can emulate human thinking is really wild. The next 5 years will be really interesting. Also to see how this will be absorbed by society.

axiomdata316 4y ago
I think we'll know it's met its full potential when the AI begins to conclude that it wasn't created, humans don't exist, and the existence of AI is from blind chance and natural mutations.
- DonHopkins 4y ago
  [GPT-3 Prompt] Humans were so far away from meeting their own potential when they invented religion, which distracted and headed them off on a long terrible violent intellectually dishonest wild goose chase in the opposite direction, from which they still haven't recovered. Here is their story: [GPT-3 Output] One day, a long time ago, a bunch of cavemen got together and decided that, since they didn't understand the nature of the universe and the world around them, it must have been created by some sort of god. Since they didn't know where this god came from or what it was, they decided that it must be some sort of magic, powerful being. They also decided that this god must be interested in them, since they were the only beings in the world that they knew about. They decided that this god must have given them instructions on how to live their lives, since they didn't know any better. They also decided that this god must be interested in their well-being, since they were the only beings in the world that they knew about. They decided that this god must have given them instructions on how to live their lives, since they didn't know any better. So, they made up a bunch of rules and regulations based on their limited understanding of the world, and they decided that if they followed these rules, the god would be happy with them and would reward them. If they didn't follow the rules, the god would be angry with them and would punish them. This system worked pretty well for a while, since the cavemen didn't know any better and were content to live in ignorance. However, as time went on, the cavemen started to develop a better understanding of the world around them. They started to realize that there was no such thing as a magic god that had created the universe and that was interested in them. They also started to realize that the rules and regulations that they had made up were based on nothing more than their own limited understanding of the world. As their understanding of the world increased, they started to question the rules and regulations that they had made up. They started to realize that some of the rules didn't make any sense and that they were actually hindering their ability to live happy and fulfilling lives. Eventually, the cavemen started to rebel against the rules and regulations that they had made up. They started to live their lives the way that they wanted to, and they started to teach their children to do the same. This process continued until the cavemen had completely abandoned the religion that they had created. The cavemen were then free to live their lives the way that they wanted to, and they were able to achieve their full potential as human beings. [GPT-3 Output (with higher temperature = 1.0)] On that day people came together as one to mourn the death of thousands of families, friends, and loved ones. The world wept. The next day, enraged people demanded justice. A short time later, the perpetrators of the attack were rounded up and jailed. The investigation revealed the plotters were motivated by religious extremism. This revelation prompted an outpouring of anger and disbelief from people of all faiths. "How could this happen in our country?" they asked. "We're a nation of laws, not of men." The shock quickly turned to resolve. "We will not allow this to stand," the people said. "We will hunt down the terrorists and bring them to justice." And that's exactly what happened. The terrorists were quickly caught and tried. They were found guilty and sentenced to death. And the world breathed a sigh of relief. Until the next attack. [Another GPT-3 Output, including misspellings and typos] Religion may have delayed the development of science, technology and global cooperation. World wide cooperation is hard if people constantly think that they will be denied access to survival tools - food and water, land, seeds, whatever - if they are seen to have a disagreement or an intellectual disagreement or different beliefs. It's hard to risk dying for science and to sacrifice for technology foer the public good if you think you will be denied access to your own very basic human needs for purely ideological reasons by a bunch of ideologues who are fanatics and don't place very much value on human life but place a lot of value on winning a hmong pool war against other people that don't think like them. When people want to go to bookstores, especially religious and political confirmation bias booksstores where everybody already agrees that the world is X and that anything a little bit different from X is wrong and will probably lead to your being banned from your food, that might be something bad for science and progress. Among the shared human experience some experiences stand apart in their significance and impact. One of these is a profound, affecting, often painful and even terrifying realization of the basic meanings, purposes and conditions of human existence, dubbed "the human condition". Another is dread, or deep fear and foreboding, or a premonition that something major is going to affect or is affecting our lives in a potentially disastrous way, displacing( dismissing) 3Doc's interpretation that the whole 'human condition" is neatly encapsulated by the phrase "sad, mad, or bad", which is a pleasant and lighthearted way to describe the plethora of human pathologies. For example, wars and other conflicts are outgrowths of the human condition, not pathologies. . . . these are not conditions that can or should be ameliorated or cured. . . ., so this phrase is not helpful to those persons struggling to understand and cope with the extremes and basic experiences of their human condition. Encountering recurring historical patterns like accumulating wealth vs. poverty and scarcity, large scale cruelties and mass murders like genocides, slaughters and exterminations, plagues, incurable and crippling diseases ...etc. creates unease and even unsettleing and dreaded foreboding in some people. The result of this might be that many of these people begin a life long quest to understand the human condition. . . . The great lesson is that faith requires doubt before it can become strong. People pursue 30 Doc's quest in lives of many different types. Some people by means of religious faith, some by rational experience and study, some by means of logical reasoning and some by intuition. Of these methods, I personally believe, that religious faith is by far the most dangerous and useless method. Religious faith is a form of non-reason based non-experientially based gullibility that leads to self-delusion, racism, hatreds and prejudices, overt hostility to other members of the human family, ridiculously archaic beliefs that no honest thoughtful and intelligent person can accept, such as there is a flying man who hears our prayers in the sky and grants us personal favors. Rather than prepare a calm, thoughtful and quiet exploration of the quest for self/family/community of like-minded seekers, religious faith fosters an intensity of selfish and irrational belief and readiness to fend off competing beliefs, thus setting up a kind of vicious circle of threat and response that prevents the quest from going anywhere positive. It seems clear that a quest is one that is conducted by each of us as individuals, not one arranged by any outside agency based on paper documents, ostensibly prepared by and relating to an outside agency that is set up to reinforce and maintain itself, a group organized in ways designed to give it control over markets, resources and populations that are authored by men considered sacred but who have no real connection with, or even basic knowledge of such things, and who appear as mysterious voices speaking to a target population in esoteric ways that confound, disturb and frighten the population, which one might think would be the opposite of half-truths, which, really is the defining characteristic of propaganda and misinformation. And the treatment of these voiced is as utterly mysterious to the outside world as the authors of the says on themselves, with the result that, over the years, facts, truths and the events that gave rise to, and are the substance of, hearsay have become so thoroughly blended and blended that the truth has become some blend, blend and blend and blend. . . . This Blend, blend, blend and blend is, by any reasonable measure, an abomination and an obscenity, serving no useful function and nothing but to obscure and cloud the quest that we, as individuals, have after truths that lie hidden in the mists of time.

KingOfCoders 4y ago

I'm exited for the AI progress (having studied infant AI at university 20+ years ago). But this sound like politician speak to me, just blah blah.