Hacker News Reader

Comment by bmc7505 | Hacker News Reader

Curiously, the author "Jay Riverlong" doesn't appear to exist prior to a month ago, right around the time when GPT-3 came out. For a "professional poker player" who "travelled extensively throughout South America and Europe", it is interesting. Could be a pseudonym, but it's hard to tell whether the author is a real person.

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=riverlong

https://github.com/jayriverlong

https://twitter.com/jayriverlong

https://jayriverlong.github.io/about/

edit: I have pinged him on Twitter. Let's see what happens. https://twitter.com/breandan/status/1287148374077186059

View on HN

Interesting. FWIW, the profile picture could very well be from thispersondoesnotexist.com, a cropped face smiling at the camera with the typical blur behind, plus there's a single picture available of the author. Picked carefully, the telltale signs of the source are non-obvious (unintended swirls and warps, peculiarities in the hair and around the mouth). Not knowing if it is a fake person makes it interesting to dissect, but also very awkward if it turns out to be a real Jay so I won't dwell on it. I will however mention the suspicious blur/pixelation at the chin and below the right ear.. which makes me inclined to agree with the thesis (sorry if I'm wrong M. Riverlong). Not sure what the link with GPT3 would be tho.

Based on the variety of tweets and blog posts this seems to me like it's being done by a real person, but I am guessing this Jay is a fake persona and made to try and make the point that it's easy to create a fake person. Having a digital presence so thin and a profile pic so like GAN creations definitely is quite strong evidence of this, so if this is true their point is kind of weak given how easy it is to spot the suspicious signs.

Unless GPT-3 made huge advances since the last samples were publish, this seems like it was done by a real person.

Still, it has something of the "GPT-3" style and I could believe the persona is someone taking GPT-3/GPT-2 output and editing it until makes sense or just aping the style.

Their profile pic on Twitter also looks very much like the stuff This Person Does Not Exist generates. I have a feeling this might be a social experiment on how easy it is to generate a persona using AI.

For the record, he replied: https://twitter.com/jayriverlong/status/1287153385427226624

If they really aren't a real person, they might be trying to make their point through that. :P

Reply on news.ycombinator.com