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Comment by dr_dshiv | Hacker News Reader

I wrote significant parts of an academic paper today with gpt3. It isn’t a novelty. I get better and better at working with it to produce amazing things!

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Do you mean you actually wrote parts of a real paper you are writing, or just produced convincing text that reads like one?

If the former, how do you use it to do that, and what are the limitations?

First, I put my title and abstract in, then have it generate the introduction. That worked weirdly well. Then, I had a few ideas I was having trouble writing, and so I'd give a prompt and then take what it gave me, improve it, and use it as a prompt again. It really generated some excellent material.

However, if you ask for quotes with citations, I think it just makes the shit up. Careful with dealing with a non truthful oracle. But, with critical thinking, playfulness and a strong handle on the intellectual material, it can be a great writing assistant!

Interesting, thanks! I tend to get hung up on writing papers. I go round and round, and it takes me ages to get to the actual thing I want to write about. I may give that a go!

Yeah, it’s like you get to the “edit” stage much faster! And, you can get a lot of “obvious” ideas that you might not have considered. Also, the text tends to be looser and less harmony than my typical academic writing.

Sorry had to lol “are you cheating or not cheating, cuz I’m definitely interested in cheating”

Heh, I guess it could read like that. I just can't see how GPT3 could be used to help with a genuine paper (like copilot does for code). If it's just cheating, that's not very interesting.

An idea I've had while writing books and how GPT3 could help.

The interesting/fun bit is creating the insight. Like 5 bullet points. Then you need a good anecdote to drive the point home. Another 5 bullet points.

Expanding those 10 bullet points into prose is the boring part. GPT3 could do that and create a vomit draft for you. Then you can polish the draft into good prose, which again is the fun part.

Just based on what I’ve seen I feel like you could feed it the insightful bits that were original and it could word it eloquently. It would work better/worse based on subject.

It is definitely a very interesting application. It could be especially useful for identifying and finding missing citations (using a retrieval transformer perhaps).

A well designed system could discourage and flag potential plagiarism in the generated content.

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