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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, Interesting) by krishnoid on Tuesday August 18 2020, @08:55PM

    by krishnoid (1156) on Tuesday August 18 2020, @08:55PM (#1038504)

    How about we have one GPT-3 generated comment for every story, labeled as such, and perhaps hidden/collapsed by default? It would give us an 'ambient' feel for the kind of text we can expect to see, and maybe help train us as to the small and probably vanishing nuances between human/AI-generated text when fed a story. Who knows? It may:

    • Help us identify GPT-3 generated text in other (*cough*political*cough) forums
    • Make us better writers
    • Make us realize we can't write as well as an AI and just fall back on listicles for the foreseeable future
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +2  
       Interesting=2, Total=2
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   4