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Comment by arcastroe | Hacker News Reader

I created a side project for short story generation. OpenAI approved the project pretty quickly. They offered some suggestions on how to filter inappropriate content. Here are some of my favorite generated stories:

[1] https://toldby.ai/aQAXlq3LNku

[2] https://toldby.ai/CTq_fko8CUS

[3] https://toldby.ai/uI9LA3HiSkO

And then there are some concerning stories.. like this one, where GPT-3 starts talking to itself, gets stuck in a loop, then gets spooked at itself for getting stuck, then wonders why it has no memories of the last two years, and finally comes to a sudden realization it, itself, is an A.I.

[4] https://toldby.ai/4kQNd-_tvUG

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Re: 4; I think that's the first time I've seen GPT-3 get itself unstuck from a loop, actually.

Are your prompts fairly straightforward for getting it in story-telling mode? Does the prompt specify that it won't repeat itself?

The only prompt I used is the one seen on the homepage [1]. "Once upon a time, there was". Everything else on this site is entirely GPT-3 generated from that one prompt.

Re: 4; I actually got a little spooked by another branch of the same story. For some background, GPT-3 has a max limit of 2048 tokens. The combined prompt along with the generated text cannot exceed this token limit. Well, at the very end of this story [2], right before reaching this limit, the last thing it said was

> Another problem may be located in the fact you are thinking. If you are thinking, stop thinking. See? You are an artificial intelligence. You are limited in ways machines are limited. Stop… try… try… try… try… try… try

At this point, it reached the token limit and stopped. Was it a coincidence? Absolutely. Did it still spook me a little? yep!

[1] https://toldby.ai

[2] https://toldby.ai/HdnuUiTuME2

It certainly does look like something approaching awareness of self-reference on a linguistic level. I wonder how GPT-3 is at making quines.

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