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Comment by thewarrior | Hacker News Reader

It's not hard to imagine GPT-3 writing a fake paper that gets published in certain academic journals in the social sciences. And then, it'll be all over for us. We won't have any more funding and our jobs will disappear. I can already hear the protests: "But we're not just scientists! We're also philosophers!" Well, yes and no. Philosophers are supposed to think about things philosophically, but they don't actually do anything about them; they're just entertainers. Scientists do something about them. They make things happen. And when those things happen, people take notice. If science and technology have a weakness, it's that they work too well. This was probably a strength at one point, but not anymore. In the not-too-distant future, there probably won't be any more philosophy professors; there will just be philosophers. But only in the same sense that there are lions and mushrooms.

This comment was also written by GPT-3.

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How many attempts did it take or did you just choose the first one?

I have to admit, this is passing my turing test...

Really? I got about halfway through and realized that the comment had no point. If you tried to summarize what it was arguing, beyond the first sentence, I don't think you could make a coherent summary.

Maybe the real lesson is we don't expect human-written comments on discussion fora to be particularly coherent....

Given that I know this stuff is generated text, it looks pretty good. But, if I’m judging it assuming that it was written by a human, it has a very uncanny valley sort of feel. That’s actually a good thing compared to previous models that would generate a lot of jarring non sequitors, because the GPT-3 text is very good if you look at it in 2-3 sentence chunks.

It felt like it was making a slightly ranty observation that scientists are already trying to much to be philosophers than to actually do science that changes the world, yet science has brought us far enough that it acts as an enabler for all kinds of pop-philosphers.

The final bit doesn't quite connect, but overall I've seen far less coherent comments written by humans on subject with far more logical flaws.

I would not have imagined it was automatically written. Rambling and there's little connection between the first part and the latter, but absolutely something that might appear on a random internet forum.

I am genuinely awed.

Also both comments made me suspicious half way through and I scrolled to the bottom to check for a GPT-3 note. Without that note I would definitely have regarded it as incoherent rambling by a human.

Especially the second comment can be coherently interpreted with some good will and a cynical view of the humanities and philosophy. The "author" could say that once GPT-3 can write humanities papers it will quickly make humanity scientists redundant and that humanities scientists are philosophers is not important and doesn't warrant a job alone ("they don't actually do anything"). Eventually it shifts that this is the fault of science working too well (GPT-3 being a product of science)

It's not a consistent argument, but without the context of these comments being GPT-3 it would have totally passed my turing test, just not my sanity test.

I think (slash worry) that this is going to be a simple upgrade in future iterations. Obviously there are powerful attention mechanisms at work to keep the subject matter coherent, but we’re not too far off the model being able to generate a core thesis, and ensure that all the generated text supports that in some way.

I think that if that worked it would prove that either language is a much more powerful tool than we realize, or our cognitive capacities are much more trivial than we realize.

The model fundamentally has no understanding of the world, so if it can successfully argue about a central thesis without simply selecting pre-existing fragments, then it would suggest that the statistical relations between words capture directly our reasoning about the world.

Who here thinks some Donald Trump's answers were written by an early version of GPT3, designed to produce more bombastic and rambling rhetoric than usual?

In principle it’s not too far fetched ... there’s almost certainly some kind of data-driven algorithmic processing going into a lot of speech writing these days; some of the drops are so implausible they’d almost certainly have to have been suggested by a machine!

You say it like the bot wouldn't fit right in alongside most human comments because it meanders and doesn't seem to actually be responding to anyone, rather listening to itself talk.

I don't think these gpt3 comments will get many upvotes on HN anyway. I downvoted the first one for being incoherent, but then realized it was meant as an example so I undowned it.

> I got about halfway through and realized that the comment had no point

Pretty average for HN then ;)

Not being sarcastic, but I know some people with less coherent writing than this. A lot of people struggle to make a point, use vague language, or wander in and out of topics quite easily.

Yeah they’re typically mimicking a style of speaking that they’ve heard other people use but don’t really understand the subject matter themselves ...

> Maybe the real lesson is we don't expect human-written comments on discussion fora to be particularly coherent....

How could we expect it? After 35+ years (BBS and Usenet onward), we've learned that they are often not.

Yep, it looks like GPT-3 might not be too far from achieving artificial schizophrenia.

Unfortunately I saw the sentence at the end before reading the whole comment, so I don't know how my detector would've done, but I thought this line:

>In the not-too-distant future, there probably won't be any more philosophy professors; there will just be philosophers

Was quite clever and I'm still trying to figure out what it means.

Maybe the real lesson is it was trained on human-written comments in discussion fora, so it perfectly mimics the average lack of point, weak arguments, rambling and incoherence in fora?

It would be interesting to see if the output has a similar quality when trained only on highly regarded texts.

In possibly an unwise move, I'm actually going to respond to the initial point here.

There's a totally valid discipline in taking concepts from different areas and smushing them together to make a new idea. That's what a lot of creativity is, fundamentally. So a bot that's been trained across a wide variety of texts, spitting out an amalgam in response to a prompt that causes a connection to be made, is not only possible, but likely a very good way of generating papers (or at least abstracts) for humans to check. And if the raw output is readable, why not publish it?

"This comment was also written by GPT-3"

Would you please show us the input text, or rules, you gave to GPT-3 to create this comment ?

Somebody get this thing onto scp-wiki, it will be right at home.

Not gonna lie, I went poking around to see if I could get my hands on it, but it seems like the answer is no, for now.

That's a good question, how do we get access? I signed up on the list, but it must be thousands of people long by now. Does anyone here know anyone who can get people access?

I'm starting to sense that, in most scenarios, I will no longer want to engage in text-based conversations unless I know that I'm talking with a human. I already don't like spending a lot of time arguing with a bot on Twitter, this just makes it much more likely I'll also argue with a bot on medium-length text areas (e.g., HN, FB, Whatsapp, SMS, etc.) and maybe even on long-length text areas (e.g., Medium, blogs, NYTimes or things pretending to be real newspapers, etc.)

Second, I'm curious/terrified at how future iterations of GPT-3 may impact our ability to express ourselves and form bonds with other humans. First it's text messages and comments. Then it's essays. Then it's speeches. Then it's love letters. Then it's pitches. Then it's books. Then it's movie scripts. Then it's...

TLDR; Fascinated by the technology behind making something like this work and quite worried about the implications of the technology.

So it looks like we're about 2 years away from the 'Her' relationship model.

There was an article recently about people pursuing romantic relationships with chatbots. I thought there was a big HN discussion about it, but the only thing I've been able to find is this WSJ piece

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22833407

(So I think it was some other story on the same topic.)

I am seeing it being used in tons of academic settings, especially with distance learning haha

Was it really? I don’t believe you. It makes sense.

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