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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: 5, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Tuesday August 18 2020, @09:28AM (4 children)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Tuesday August 18 2020, @09:28AM (#1038280) Journal

    The article cites two comments attached to that post, that are very illustrative of the current discussion climate.

    The first comment said:

    This is either something written by GPT-3, or the human equivalent. Zero substantive content, pure regurgitation.

    Which is a factually correct statement about the post, and IMHO also written in a neutral tone. However it got the following reply:

    Maybe you're new here, but your comment punches below the belt and isn't acceptable in a community like this. If you disagree, be civil and give reasons rather than throw insults.

    So telling the true fact that a post doesn't provide anything substantial (in this case objectively confirmed by the fact that it indeed was written by GPT-3) now counts as insult. Interesting.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +3  
       Interesting=3, Total=3
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   5  
  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by inertnet on Tuesday August 18 2020, @09:54AM

    by inertnet (4071) on Tuesday August 18 2020, @09:54AM (#1038286) Journal

    Makes me think that apk is a badly trained GPT-3 (GPT+3?), instead of a person who sometimes runs out of medicine.

    We all run out of mod points when that happens.

  • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2020, @01:46PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2020, @01:46PM (#1038339)

    you dont get out much, do you?

    this has been the definition of "ad hominem" in sweden for decades, just to be negative about something that is linked to someone.
    this seems, in recent years, become the standard webwide: do not criticize under any circumstance anyone, cuz as Monty python once said: "every thought is holy"...

    am looking forward (not) to the coming decades, until people get tired of this shit.

    When people get tired of this shit some things might happen, as example:
    -to participate in online debate, you must show that you are educated in the field, or you are out
    -men only game servers, there one can flame and insult others happily =)

    personally i am craving like hell for the man only game servers, since i am a conozeur of fits or rage and wellcrafted insults.

    -zug

    • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday August 18 2020, @05:45PM

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Tuesday August 18 2020, @05:45PM (#1038438) Journal

      If your definition of “getting out” is “visiting Sweden”, then yes, I'm not getting out much. ;-)

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2020, @02:11PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2020, @02:11PM (#1038347)

    That's the reason I stopped posting on Hacker News 4-5 years ago. The place is basically a cult of startups. Everyone will hype you and if you say something like a normal person you will get downvoted. It is not really designed to have conversations or debate. Hacker News is basically an echo chamber of those who are in tolling in incubators. IMHO, they kind of need it.