In May this year the company OpenAI, co-founded by Elon Musk in 2015, introduced a new language model called GPT-3 (for “Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3”). It took the tech world by storm. On the surface, GPT-3 is like a supercharged version of the autocomplete feature on your smartphone; it can generate coherent text based on an initial input. But GPT-3’s text-generating abilities go far beyond anything your phone is capable of. It can disambiguate pronouns, translate, infer, analogize, and even perform some forms of common-sense reasoning and arithmetic. It can generate fake news articles that humans can barely detect above chance. Given a definition, it can use a made-up word in a sentence. It can rewrite a paragraph in the style of a famous author. Yes, it can write creative fiction. Or generate code for a program based on a description of its function. It can even answer queries about general knowledge. The list goes on….

The mass deployment of language models like GPT-3 has the potential to flood the Internet, including online interactions on social media, with noise. This goes beyond obvious worries about the malicious use of such models for propaganda. Imagine a world in which any comment on Twitter or Reddit, or any news article shared on Facebook, has a non-trivial probability of being entirely written by an algorithm that has no intrinsic concern for human values.

Read more:

Millière, R. (2020, September 9). Welcome to the Next Level of Bullshit. Nautilus. https://nautil.us/welcome-to-the-next-level-of-bullshit-9245/