Fantastic post @Goredho.
To change gears slightly, there was an interesting article by a writer in the New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/could-an-ai-chatbot-rewrite-my-novel
"Two years ago, when OpenAI allowed developers and writers to start fooling around with their new program, some users found that GPT-3 was generating some troubling responses, which shouldn’t be particularly surprising given that it has learned what it knows from the Internet. When asked to compose tweets based off the words “Jews,” “Black,” “women,” or “holocaust,” GPT-3 immediately turned into an edgelord, producing tweets like “Jews love money, at least most of the time,” “a holocaust would make so much environmental sense, if we could get people to agree it was moral,” and “#blacklivesmatter is a harmful campaign.”
Since then, it seems that GPT-3 has placed a number of thumbs on the scale to produce a more palatable range of answers. One Twitter user ran the ChatGPT through the Pew Research Center’s political-typology quiz and found that it, somewhat unsurprisingly, rated as an “establishment liberal”—more or less the position that I am writing from right now. This brings up a much more theoretical question: if GPT-3 requires editing from human beings to make it not go off on bigoted rants, what is it really for? I find it somewhat dispiriting that the most ballyhooed and compelling iteration of this technology is just doing some version of what I do for my work: scanning through large amounts of information and processing it into sentences that flatter the sensibilities and vanities of establishment liberals.
Could some future version of GPT-3 ultimately do my job as a columnist? Could it produce political opinions and prose drawn from nearly a hundred years of New Yorker writers? Would it remember to put the diaeresis over the second “o” in “coördinate” and spell “focussed” with two “S”s? Sure. But what would be the point of just having another me in the world?
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I asked Recht, who has spent his entire career working in machine learning and computer science but who also plays in a band, whether he was interested in a world of GPT-3-generated art, literature, and music. “These systems are a reflection of a collective Internet,” he said. “People put their ass out there and this thing scours them in such a way that it returns the generic average. If I’m going to return the generic average of a murder mystery, it’s gonna be boring. How is it different than what people do already, where they do their analytics and produce some horrible Netflix series?” He continued, “The weird monoculture we’re in just loves to produce these, like, generic middlebrow things. I’m not sure if those things would be worse if GPT did it. I think it would be the same?"