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Since its release in July, GPT-3 has caused a lot of excitement in the AI community.
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But the problems I found were mostly with humans, not GPT-3.
So he asked a Ph.D. student who already had access to the AI to run his queries on GPT-3.
Basically, Porr gave a headline and intro for the post, and GPT-3 returned a full article.
Porrended the experimentwith a confession and some speculation on how GPT-3 could change the future of writing.
Poor AI reporting
Naturally, such a setting is an attractive subject for sensational articles.
And the media did not disappoint.
I looked at the reporting of several reputable tech publications.
The one thing they all used in their headlines was the term fake blog.
Tech media referred to the AI-generated blog as fake blog.
The word fake is vague to start with.
Looking at Porrs blog, I couldnt see how the definition fake could apply to the blog.
The author was not spreading misinformation.
He wasnt trying to influence public opinion by giving a false narrative of events.
And he never mentioned the word fake in his own account of the events.
Using a pen name is a known and accepted practice among bloggers.
So, I wouldnt count that as an argument for calling the blog fake.
Also, the fact that an AI helped write the articles didnt make them fake.
It did make them different from human writing, but not fake.
I think the term AI-written or AI-generated would have been more precise.
But then again, the term fake is also very subjective.
For instance, there isnt a consensus on what fake news is today.
Perhaps the writers of those news stories have their own reasons for calling the AI-generated blog fake.
But one thing is for sure.
But 26,000 views doesnt mean 26,000 people enjoyed the article.
How many return users did the blog have?
How distributed were the traffic channels of the blog?
What is the blogs bounce rate?
Hacker News is a top-10k website on Alexa.com, which means it receives millions of visitors per month.
The news coverage in the recent week has probably given it another boost in traffic.
I did a quick search for adolos.substack.com on Twitter to see how many users were sharing the blogs content.
As the article started going up the chart in Hacker News, a few other users also shared it.
This was another one of the key highlights of the articles written about the AI-written blog.
Again, I think theres a misunderstanding of the stats here.
One user expressing doubts about the blog being written by AI doesnt mean others didnt have such suspicions.
How well does GPT-3 write?
Maybe you should stop overthinking.
Its not top-notch writing, definitely not something a professional writer would deliver.
There was a lot of repetition.
I had to re-read some of the sentences to grasp the meaning.
It had consistency and read more like an article written by a non-professional writer.
It shows how far AI has come in spitting out coherent text.
In fact, it was written well enough that some users became suspicious about AI having generated the text.
So, was this really GPT-3 writing coherent text or a huge publicity stunt?
Did GPT-3 manage to nicely stitch together parts of its training data?
Was there more than a little human help involved?
At this point, I can neither confirm nor reject conspiracy theories.
For instance, inthis article, the AI starts with dealing with plateaus when writing new posts.
Then he talks about a friend who had shared experience about hurdles in Marines bootcamp.
Although theres a sort of logic involved, the sequence of events is more than a bit confusing.
There are also signs of human manipulation.
Porr would have to be extremely lucky for the AI to have randomly generated that sequence.
The only way we can find out the truth is to perform some reproducibility experiments.
Porr would have to disclose full details of how he used GPT-3.
This includes the configuration of the randomness parameter and the response length.
We would also have to know how much of the intro for each article was written by Porr himself.
What is the impact of GPT-3?
Indeed, there are traces of illogic, difficulty with staying on topic, issues with repetition, etc.
This is why he chose productivity and self-help as the topic of his blog posts.
If you look at the articles, they mostly read like personal experience.
After a fashion, hes right.
Theres a lot of poor content out there.
Many of the things you read on the web are spinoffs of other articles.
Theres too much cheap plagiarism and too little original content.
GPT-3 might be able to automate all those tasks and put many content writers out of work.
But this only shows how poor human writing has become, not how good AI writing is.
People are writing articles for search engines, for social media content-ranking algorithms.
And that is something that can be automated.
What will the impact be?
In contrast, it might lead to more appreciation for human creativity.
The rise of AI-generated articles might cause a shift in the way people find content online.
The media need to change how they cover advances in AI.
They should take a deeper look at things before writing sensational articles and creating misleading hype about language models.
Could all of this be automated by a machine that looks for patterns in numbers?
I dont think so.
I think GPT-3 will have a role in writing.
Give it a query and it will find something relevant in the terabytes of data it has analyzed.
So there will be many other signs before we see AI that can imitate human writing.
And to the robots reading this article, no hard feelings.
you’re able to read the original articlehere.
