The Possibilities of GPT-3 from OpenAI Are Being Explored
August 27, 2020
Unsurprisingly, hackers have taken notice of the possibilities presented by OpenAI’s text-generating software. WibestBroker News reports, “Fake Blog Posts Land at the Top of Hacker News.” The post was generated by college student Liam Porr, who found it easy to generate content with OpenAI’s latest iteration, GPT-3, that could fool readers into thinking it had been crafted by a person. Writer John Marley describes the software:
“GPT-3, like all deep learning systems, looks for patterns in data. To simplify, the program has been trained on a huge corpus of text mined for statistical regularities. These regularities are unknown to humans. Between the different nodes in GPT-3’s neural network, they are stored as billions of weighted connections. There’s no human input involved in this process. Without any guidance, the program looks and finds patterns.”
Rather than being unleashed upon the public at large, the software has been released to select researchers in a private beta. Marley continues:
“Porr is a computer science student at the University of California, Berkeley. He was able to find a PhD student who already had access to the API. The student agreed to work with him on the experiment. Porr wrote a script that gave GPT-3 a headline and intro for the blog post. It generated some versions of the post, and Porr chose one for the blog. He copy-pasted from GPT-3’s version with very little editing. The post went viral in a matter of a few hours and had more than 26,000 visitors. Porr wrote that only one person reached out to ask if the post was AI-generated. Albeit, several commenters did guess GPT-3 was the author. But, the community down voted those comments, Porr says.”
Little did the down-voters know. Poor reports he applied for his own access to the tool, but it has yet to be granted. Perhaps OpenAI is not too pleased with his post, he suggests. We wonder whether this blogger received any backlash from the software’s creators.
Cynthia Murrell, August 27, 2020
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