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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: 4, Funny) by leon_the_cat on Tuesday August 18 2020, @11:42AM (3 children)

    by leon_the_cat (10052) on Tuesday August 18 2020, @11:42AM (#1038309) Journal

    kinda like https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/oct/22/nonsense-paper-written-by-ios-autocomplete-accepted-for-conference [theguardian.com]

    btw if you want to create your own CS research paper https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/ [mit.edu]
    maybe even post it on soylent see how it goes, i'm sure it will be a hit!

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  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday August 18 2020, @01:17PM (2 children)

    by Thexalon (636) on Tuesday August 18 2020, @01:17PM (#1038326)

    I think that we should also give credit to "open access" (i.e. pay-to-publish) journals for expanding the discourse of available academic publications with this truly enlightening paper [semanticscholar.org].

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
    • (Score: 2) by leon_the_cat on Tuesday August 18 2020, @02:33PM

      by leon_the_cat (10052) on Tuesday August 18 2020, @02:33PM (#1038358) Journal

      Lol was going to mention this too. And they didn't remove him from the mailing list.

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by maxwell demon on Tuesday August 18 2020, @05:55PM

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Tuesday August 18 2020, @05:55PM (#1038443) Journal

      Probably the referee, when asked to review the paper, answered: “Get me off your fucking mailing list.” Which was found to be in agreement with the paper, so they published it. :-)

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.