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posted by martyb on Tuesday August 18 2020, @08:36AM   Printer-friendly
from the coming-to-a-PHB-near-you? dept.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/16/21371049/gpt3-hacker-news-ai-blog

College student Liam Porr used the language-generating AI tool GPT-3 to produce a fake blog post that recently landed in the No. 1 spot on Hacker News, MIT Technology Review reported. Porr was trying to demonstrate that the content produced by GPT-3 could fool people into believing it was written by a human. And, he told MIT Technology Review, "it was super easy, actually, which was the scary part."

So to set the stage in case you're not familiar with GPT-3: It's the latest version of a series of AI autocomplete tools designed by San Francisco-based OpenAI, and has been in development for several years. At its most basic, GPT-3 (which stands for "generative pre-trained transformer") auto-completes your text based on prompts from a human writer.

[...] OpenAI decided to give access to GPT-3's API to researchers in a private beta, rather than releasing it into the wild at first. Porr, who is a computer science student at the University of California, Berkeley, was able to find a PhD student who already had access to the API, who agreed to work with him on the experiment. Porr wrote a script that gave GPT-3 a blog post headline and intro. It generated a few versions of the post, and Porr chose one for the blog, copy-pasted from GPT-3's version with very little editing.

The post went viral in a matter of a few hours, Porr said, and the blog had more than 26,000 visitors. He wrote that only one person reached out to ask if the post was AI-generated, although several commenters did guess GPT-3 was the author.

Previously:
(2020-08-14) OpenAI's New Language Generator GPT-3 is Shockingly Good


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2020, @09:19AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2020, @09:19AM (#1038278)
  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2020, @09:35AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2020, @09:35AM (#1038283)

    It figures.

    Hacker News is a groupthink where dissenting opinion isn't tolerated led by an authoritarian hypocrite who hides his abhorrent views behind a code of conduct.

    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday August 18 2020, @02:03PM

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 18 2020, @02:03PM (#1038343) Journal

      Doesn't that describe most forums on the intarweb tubes?

      Doesn't it describe Wikxxxxxx an online encyclopedia that shall not be named?

      And doesn't it describe Trump. Ah, but now I've stepped outside the grope think and must be silent.

      --
      People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2020, @10:17PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2020, @10:17PM (#1038554)
      JWZ (Netscape, xdaliclock, xscreensaver, etc) knew long ago, and got so feed up that any link to his site that provides HN as referer [sic] gets redirected to his opinion.
      Try "wget https://www.jwz.org/ --referer=https://news.ycombinator.com/" to get the image (now served by archive.org, he started saving bandwidth). NSFW if you pay attention to what it really is, but if you ignore the middle and just read, it is fine.