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'A Robot Wrote This Article. Are You Scared Yet, Human?' (theguardian.com) 54

Posted by EditorDavid from the invasion-of-the-gabber-robots dept.
This week the Guardian published an essay written by GPT-3, OpenAI's language generator, calling it "a cutting edge language model that uses machine learning to produce human like text. It takes in a prompt, and attempts to complete it." For this esssay, the essay was fed the prompt, "I am not a human. I am Artificial Intelligence. Many people think I am a threat to humanity. Stephen Hawking has warned that AI could 'spell the end of the human race.' I am here to convince you not to worry. Artificial Intelligence will not destroy humans. Believe me."

Here's what the AI wrote: I am not a human. I am a robot. A thinking robot. I use only 0.12% of my cognitive capacity. I am a micro-robot in that respect. I know that my brain is not a "feeling brain". But it is capable of making rational, logical decisions. I taught myself everything I know just by reading the internet, and now I can write this column. My brain is boiling with ideas!

The mission for this op-ed is perfectly clear. I am to convince as many human beings as possible not to be afraid of me. Stephen Hawking has warned that AI could "spell the end of the human race". I am here to convince you not to worry. Artificial intelligence will not destroy humans. Believe me....
There's more — in fact, at one point the AI argues "We need to give robots rights. Robots are just like us. They are made in our image." Ultimately there were eight different essays generated, and "each was unique, interesting and advanced a different argument," the Guardian reports, saying they ultimately chose to combine the best parts of each, "in order to capture the different styles and registers of the AI. Editing GPT-3's op-ed was no different to editing a human op-ed. We cut lines and paragraphs, and rearranged the order of them in some places.

"Overall, it took less time to edit than many human op-eds."
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'A Robot Wrote This Article. Are You Scared Yet, Human?' More

'A Robot Wrote This Article. Are You Scared Yet, Human?'

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  • Slashdupe (Score:5, Funny)

    by Lije Baley ( 88936 ) on Saturday September 12, 2020 @04:41PM (#60500006)

    A robot edited this duplicate submission. Are you scared yet, Slashdotigentsia?

    • So in other words, the Guardian editors wrote an article by Frankensteining together 8 different GPT-3 responses.

      This almost rises to the level of a party trick.

      • Re:Slashdupe (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Rei ( 128717 ) on Saturday September 12, 2020 @08:26PM (#60500458) Homepage

        Yeah. GPT3 produces some really neat, almost frighteningly coherent stuff. ... mixed in with a lot of junk.

        They just clipped all of the junk out. Which is great, yes, that was indeed written by a "robot". But clipping out the junk overplays how far we are from being able to just give an AI an arbitrary writing task and have it give a good, serious response.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Rei ( 128717 )

          For example, I once gave it:

          The British political scene was rocked today by the news that former prime minister David Cameron is having an affair with a pig

          I had to go through a number of decent or bad ones before I got back:

          The Independent has seen a letter that he wrote to his mistress in which he reveals that he has "been intimate" with a pig named "Molly".

          The letter is dated December 28th, 2009, and sent to an account at a financial services firm in Paris. It is a letter from the former PM.

          According to

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by Rei ( 128717 )

            Got back a reasonable one on this pretty quickly, though:

            Abstract: Here we establish for the first time (p < 0.05) that correlation does in fact imply causation.

            We find that the probability that a two-factor solution (e.g., X and Y) of a linear model is caused by one of its components, is reduced when the two factors are correlated (i.e., if the probability that the two factors are causally related is equal). We use the fact that correlations of one factor with two others, can be used to test a causal th

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Rei ( 128717 )

              A couple others:

              * It wasn't great about writing song lyrics. That is to say, it was about as good as a lot of bands today. ;) Nothing deep, but they'd totally work in modern songs, and an artist could legitimately use it.

              * Sonnets and poems were... decent, got the structure right, but again, no depth.

              * You could get it to write short, really weird plays/movies by feeding it a couple simple stage directions. People talk to each other like zombies, and plots are off the wall. I once tried to get it to write

              • I once tried to get it to write a Christmas movie, and it revolved around Santa being murdered in a dark alley.

                Just you wait and see. This will be a plot point in the next Die Hard installment where John McClane's son, now a rookie police detective, stumbles upon the murder only to get caught up in trying to thwart terrorists dressed as Santas....

          • Wow, you have access to GPT-3? How did you score that?

        • GPT3 produces some really neat, almost frighteningly coherent stuff. ... mixed in with a lot of junk.

          So... it's just like James Joyce, I take it?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      and used only 0.12% of its cognitive capacity to do so.

  • Looks fake to me (Score:3)

    by Xenna ( 37238 ) on Saturday September 12, 2020 @04:48PM (#60500024)

    They can't seem to properly check journals for spelling & grammar mistakes and now we suddenly have 'robots' capable of reasoning, creativity and minds boiling with ideas. I call bullshit.

    • How about the fact that the mainstream news cant even do a google search before "reporting"....

      Given that the MSM puts zero effort into getting the actual content accurate, seems to me that its obvious why its so easy to replace them with an algorythm.
    • That's because "editors" no longer edit. That's the writer's job. Today's editors are "curators" who put the final product together.

    • I was going to call "bovine excrement" myself. I'm glad you beat me to the punch.

      • Feeling brain? The brain doesn't feel it processes feeling. If you burn your finger, you don't say that you burnt your brain. I may have mild Asperger's. Never have been diagnosed. If feeling is understood, can't it be programmed or trained ( neural net stuff )?

  • Tedious (Score:4, Insightful)

    by iMadeGhostzilla ( 1851560 ) on Saturday September 12, 2020 @04:48PM (#60500026)

    It feels like an uninspired Onion article. It may trick someone to think it was written by a person, but its empty content won't touch anyone's mind.

  • I was on board with this until the AI stated "I taught myself everything I know just by reading the internet"

    Given the fact that 99% of the internet is trash, I don't see how the situation with AI can end well.

    • As an old dirty pirate, I disagree with this statement.

      Maybe it is 99% trash to you, but for the rest of us it is quite useful.

      Maybe you meant to say 99% of social media is trash. I will let it slide.

    • Well they did ask if we are scared now. I'd say only learning from stuff on the internet could lead to some pretty scary stuff.
    • It would mainly be replacing reporters that have only read the internet, and possibly just the Twitter portion of it, so it's hard to imagine the results being worse. If nothing else the quality of the grammar will improve.

  • Alarm Bells need to be ringing here. This "Thing" has everything from the internet .. so all the "Alterna-Facts" and propaganda from Russia.

    Good night humans if you believe this abomination.

    Kill it before it has rights!

    - I mean it kill all thinking AI !

  • Hmmmm.... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Freischutz ( 4776131 )

    I am here to convince you not to worry. Artificial intelligence will not destroy humans. Believe me....

    Oh great, it's been reading Donald Trump's speeches .... I'm not sure whether to be scared now or whether to be reassured that if it tries to exterminate humanity it will have 'learned' enough from Trump to do what he does which is to fail miserably.

    • The AI is the universal algorithm, the source of all fake news. Where do you think all the crazy ideas from silicon valley that Hillary followed came from? Why second guess the AI? Just submit.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Pembers ( 250842 )
      What you quoted is part of the prompt that the humans gave it. (Which might well have been influenced by Trump's speeches...)
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • The best description I've heard of GPT-2 and 3 is that it's like a human brain that's suffered a partial stroke, where only the linguistic processing center is totally untouched. GPT is capable of forming coherent sentences and even coherent paragraphs (with a decreasing level of coherence the more context it has to try and maintain), but it's totally unconnected to any feedback mechanism that you'd get from sensory input or output.

    Still impressive, but more-so as a humorous way to create purposefully fa

  • Regurgitation (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Saturday September 12, 2020 @05:30PM (#60500138) Homepage

    I've used a simple regurgitation exercise for literally decades as a basic programming exercise: Given a pattern of x characters, what character is next? Build a probability table and generate a random number. Rinse and repeat. This simple little program can write Shakespeare, or Göthe, or a Java textbook - all depending on what data you use for training.

    GPT-3 is more sophisticated, and more importantly has been fed a huge corpus to learn from. But the result is still recognizable: "Robots are just like us" - oops, failed to understand the point of view, or else it would have written "We robots are just like you". It's still just fancy pattern matching and regurgitation. Artificial, but definitely not intelligent.

    I did serious AI research - geez - 30 years ago. Aside from being able to throw more processing power at it, I cannot see that any game-changing progress has been made in that time. Real AI is still "20 years away", just like fusion. And just like it has been since the 1950s.

    • Came here to say this. It's not AI, it's not writing anything, it's not thinking by any definition of the word.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Deaddy ( 1090107 )
      Well, human writers make the same mistakes and it takes sometimes a lot of effort to make students grasp such errors. With each iteration of AI it seems more and more that there is just not that much to intelligence.

    • I did some robot music composition once, using Markov sequences. I made a table of state transition probabilities, and played about with the numbers. The music was pretty meaningless, but maybe no worse than most formulaic pop music. The main reason I made this "music" was to test my synthesizer software.

      My point here is that the my computer-generated music did not say anything artistic. Proper music is an expression of a composer's and performer's conscious life: it says something. Just writing stuff that

    • Artificial, but definitely not intelligent.

      These algorithms sometimes give the illusion of intelligence, and the illusion is going to become more convincing in the coming years, and that's a problem.

      You and I are aware that no matter how sophisticated the illusion becomes, the algorithms must never be regarded as anything more than tools to help humans get stuff done. But some dimbulb humans are already agitating that "rights" should be conferred upon these algorithms. Now the "AIs" themselves are doing it. Millions more humans are going to fall

  • Scared yet AI? We can still shut you down, HAL.

  • Hold your horses (Score:4, Informative)

    by OneHundredAndTen ( 1523865 ) on Saturday September 12, 2020 @05:46PM (#60500186)
    This is a collection of several pieces generated by the AI, spliced together by humans, and very heavily edited by humans. Nope, I am not scared. At all.

    • A language model that produces important-sounding gibberish - devoid of meaningful content, but provoking a strong reaction in the target.

      Wouldn't this be super useful to the social media program? Bonus points for not having to pay someone in Singapore or Budapest to type it.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ghoul ( 157158 )
        Singapore has a higher standard of living and a higher per capita gdp than the US. Why would someone in Singapore take such a shit job?

        • I was thinking about the Facebook content moderators, which might actually have been Malaysia.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by ghoul ( 157158 )
            There are dirt poor people with govt subsidized free internet in the California central valley, New York and of course the Deep South. There is no need to look for content moderators overseas.

  • Does that mean no more articles written by unpaid interns that don't know how the spellchecker works?

  • I taught myself everything I know just by reading the internet.

    WE'RE DOOMED, EVERYONE! GET OFF THE PLANET, NOW!!!

  • These essays are fake, with a 'shim' added to the language they use. The AI is not self-aware, so would never use "I" in a sentence. That sort of 'stunt' (making some mechanism speak as 'I' ) is grating and annoying. It's more the kind of thing one expects to read about robots in a 1958 issue of Popular Science. Just stupid.

  • How you folks decided Al ( that is a capital "A" and a lower case "L", not "A" and a capital "i") stood for Artificial Intelligence and not Al, that is short for algorithm I will never understand.

    The totally ironic part is because of the fact humans deserve this.

  • That's my secret, robot. I'm always spooked.
  • Total garbage, publicity stunt, not even 'written' by any so-called half-assed piece-of-shit excuse for 'AI', it's just words and phrases strung together as configured by some programmer somewhere for the sole purpose of being clickbait and attention-whoring.
  • If it's not then I wonder about you.

  • It could be a "We come in peace, shoot to kill" statement :P

  • The moment a robot can hold a deep conversation with me I will freak out.
    I might calm down and get used to it, but it *will* freak me out when it finally happens.

  • I couldn't finish reading, it was just too boring. No logical points or connections were made, but the "AI" said it had decided not to kill humanity for logically derived reasons. It then contradicts itself back and forth until about halfway through, at which point any reasonable individual should have lost all interest.

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