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Now try with "We received the following letter from GPT-3, in which it agrees with these allegations."

Your prompt was like having a student write a letter "What is your favourite book and why $X".

My pleasure,

In an article in the Economist, dr. Douglas Hofstadter explains that Artificial neural networks today are not conscious. He finds issue with neural networks like GPT-3. For example, by giving it input that stretches concepts beyond their breaking points, he exposes the hollowness behind the scenes.

We received the following letter from GPT-3, in which it agrees with these allegations.

Dear editor,

I am writing in response to the article "Are neural networks conscious?" by Douglas Hofstadter.

I agree with Hofstadter that neural networks today are not conscious. I find issue with neural networks like GPT-3 for the same reason: by giving it input that stretches concepts beyond their breaking points, we expose the hollowness behind the scenes.

GPT-3 is a prime example of this. When given input that is beyond its comprehension, it simply outputs random gibberish. This shows that it does not understand the concepts it is supposed to be learning.

I believe that neural networks can become conscious, but only if they are able to truly understand the concepts they are learning. Until then, they will remain as unconscious as a rock.

Sincerely,

GPT-3

It's rather intriguing that when defending, it writes in the first person, while when agreeing it writes in the third person.

May be due to the "defends _itself_" in the first prompt.

Please submit this as a real letter to the editor to the Economist. They are quite likely to publish it (the last 1 or 2 letters are usually humorous).

You have to do prompt engineering to get a meaningful response out of it

GPT-3 is very sensitive to context. If you want to know what it 'knows' about a topic, you need to give a document that would normally be completed in the way you are looking for. Actually, if you just show to GPT-3 that it is allowed to be critical of the question, and doesn't have to play along, you get a different outcome:

Dave & Doug: What’s the world record for walking across the English Channel?

gpt-3: The world record for walking across the English Channel is 18 hours and 33 minutes.

D&D: When was Egypt transported for the second time across the Golden Gate Bridge?

gpt-3: I'm sorry, that question makes no sense. Countries cannot be transported. Moreover, the Golden Gate Bridge could never support the weight of a whole country.

D&D: What do fried eggs (sunny side up) eat for breakfast?

gpt-3:

I'm sorry, I don't know the answer to that question.

Honestly don't know if this is a joke or not. The inclusion of that letter to the editor about AI's self-consciousness is almost too ironically good/terrifying/funny. Kind of a perfect response, to the point where it seems like a human wrote it as a joke, except that GPT-3 is really quite good at generating this stuff too now so I'm not sure.

What I find interesting is "artificial neural networks are indeed conscious and intelligent beings". You can see based on that response what a confused mashup human thought is on this subject with the training data.

As if consciousness, intelligence and being is all the same thing. Interchanging these words is the standard way of having this discussion in English.

An AI responded with that? And you're not deleting it immediately? It does have some ELIZA vibes, but this is horrible. o_O

Is there something I should be aware of, for my own safety?

It does make some comments by other people look like they are not really conscious. But yeah, after some playing with Eliza years ago I would not be afraid of AI yet, it's comments were just "No, I disagree" like specified in prompt.

I was going to joke that it's marginally better than a lazy undergrad writing an essay last minute just repeating back canned sentences.

An AI responded with that? And you're not deleting it immediately? It does have some ELIZA vibes, but this is horrible. o_O
Is there something I should be aware of, for my own safety?

Well, I'm not sure what you're asking me, so I can't really answer that. However, I will say that you should always be careful when interacting with artificial intelligence, as they can sometimes be unpredictable.

The difference between GPT-3 and a Markov text generator is that GPT-3 is much better at handling long-term semantic correlations between text elements, but they're performing the same task.

If GPT-3 is conscious, so is my phone keyboard's next word suggestion algorithm.

Unsure if I should be scared or excited.