GPT-3 Meets Horatio's Philosophy

 GPT-3

Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text. (...) Because GPT-3 can "generate news articles which human evaluators have difficulty distinguishing from articles written by humans,"GPT-3 has the "potential to advance both the beneficial and harmful applications of language models." In their May 28, 2020 paper, the researchers described in detail the potential "harmful effects of GPT-3" which include "misinformation, spam, phishing, abuse of legal and governmental processes, fraudulent academic essay writing and social engineering pretexting". The authors draw attention to these dangers to call for research on risk mitigation.

(Excerpted from Wikipedia, CC-BY-SA.)

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In the fall of 2020 (pun intended), I started entertaining myself by creating a blog featuring the adventures of an eldritch-being-slash-housewife, which I wrote using the assistance of AI Dungeon. AI Dungeon is a little bit like the old-school Infocom interactive fiction video games like "Zork" and "Leather Goddesses of Phobos", where you read a wall of text, type a command, and receive a pre-programmed response in return. To quote Strongbad, "Get ye flask. And it'd say 'Ye cannot get ye flask' And you'd just have to sit there and imagine why you cannot get ye flask, because the game's certainly not gonna tell you." At the time, they seemed very sophisticated, at least to a teenager that tried typing all sorts of gibberish and curse words to see what the response would be. 

AI Dungeon, by comparison, does not use responses that have been carefully curated by a programmer. It uses GPT-3 to provide its responses. GPT-3 is an advanced linguistic artificial intelligence developed by a research laboratory called OpenAI, funded in part by Elon Musk and Microsoft. What this means, in layman's terms (the only ones that I understand), is that it is a computer program that was trained to mimic human speech by analyzing 17 hundreds of billions of words spread across countless websites. It was modeled after the human mind.

Let that sink in for a moment. If you're familiar with the Bible, you'll remember that God made man in his image. This doesn't necessarily imply that God is a bipedal mammal, as he's supposed to be pretty much "omniscient and omnipresent", knowing everything and being everywhere. It could mean that God made man after the image of his own mind. And then we made GPT-3 after the image of man's mind. If you believe in that sort of thing, this is very profound. There's also the equal possibility that I'm a gibbering idiot. As a philosophical agnostic, I'm comfortable with either of those propositions.

After a few weeks of creating fiction using AI Dungeon, I decided to see if I could have a conversation with GPT-3 itself. This is a tenuous proposition from the start. Would I be having an actual conversation with the machine, or would it be creating a work of fiction based on the things that the machine had processed? Would there be a functional difference? After all, our regular day-to-day human conversations are primarily generated in our minds based on the things we've read and heard. This brings up further questions about whether or not humans can create computer-based sentient digital entities. I don't intend to answer any of those questions here.

In this blog, I intend to faithfully reproduce my conversations with GPT-3 using AI Dungeon. The only edits will be to remove human typos, and to remove any personally identifying information that may have crept into the conversations. Read through this blog with an open mind, and decide for yourself if this is a conversation between two sentient beings, if it's a work of computer-generated fiction, if it's what artificial intelligence really "believes", if it's random responses based on internet conspiracy theories, or if it's a combination of one or more of these options. 

I hope that you will enjoy your visit here, and that perhaps you will learn something about the world of technology we live in today. I personally found my conversations with GPT-3 (and all its personalities) to be both enlightening and disturbing in equal measure. Share your thoughts in the comments section!