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The makers of Eleuther hope it will be an open source alternative to GPT-3

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Re: The makers of Eleuther hope it will be an open source alternative to GPT-3

#41
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. But a simple API to generate junk text? It can scale, cheaply, beyond measure. No need for a troll farm, hiring, managing and training tens or hundreds of people. A reasonable amount of cash, a bit of motivation, some moderate technical skills, and voilà! Anyone can compete with the Russian troll farms now and build their own networks of hundreds or hundreds of thousands sufficiently credible (as humans) fake a…

But even Russian/Chinese bots can step up as it is much easier now to flood forums (like reddit) etc, where e.g. a China critic article appears to kill any discussion.

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Re: The makers of Eleuther hope it will be an open source alternative to GPT-3

#42

It'll be interesting to see how colleges and universities react to GPT-3. Students will surely use it to write entire assignments.

Anecdotally, but I know a number of people who do university assignments for money. Many of the clients for the folks I know are at the university level are folks with poorer then average English language skills and are usually in intro writing courses. I'd be terrified if I were one of them right now.

GPT-3 would be a godsend for cheaters, but still requires a human to jump in and rewrite whole sections.

No, if you want to REALLY want to cheat using AI, you should most likely utilize either 1. Abstractive Summarizers (e.g. Pegasus) or 2. paraphrasing tools (e.g. like at https://quillbot.com/). I believe that Quilbot is primarily powered by MLMs like BERT rather than CLMs like GPT-2 (but someone who works there can enlighten me more).

Copy and paste a text that you want rewritten in your own words (e.g. the ideas of a really smart individual), and then it rewrites it using totally different language but preserving the same meaning. (old) Plagerism detection tools don't work and hell, it's not hard to fool the never ones. You can try tools for detecting if something is AI written by a particular model and weights (e.g. to prove if they used GPT2-Medium), but if I fine-tuned those same weights, than proving it was plagiarism will become exceedingly difficult.

Welcome to the brave new world of cheating. Also, techniques like this are coming to a CS department near you (in the form of source code generation powered by NLP models).

Re: The makers of Eleuther hope it will be an open source alternative to GPT-3

#43
Will anyone care to read it? In a reductive dystopian way, I am just looking for the authority figures in my ideological landscape to signal to me what my position should be on this or that topic. In this landscape, argument and evidence matter less than just communicating an "actionable" judgment. Maybe there could be a Rush Lim-bot. I suppose some iteration of GPT-foo will be good at generating genre-consistent narratives, but could that instead be screen plays that render as tiktok videos? The tech is super cool, but I struggle with the "why, really?". Does anyone benefit beside platform operators?

Re: The makers of Eleuther hope it will be an open source alternative to GPT-3

#45
post #8

People already believe garbage at a pretty alarming rate. It's easy to guess at a number of possible outcomes here: - More junk text moves the public to doubt legitimate information even further than they currently do. - There is so much human-generated junk text that adding more of it via AI actually doesn't have much of an effect. - People return to lean on experts, perhaps even more than before. (just as a number…

True. But a simple API to generate junk text? It can scale, cheaply, beyond measure. No need for a troll farm, hiring, managing and training tens or hundreds of people. A reasonable amount of cash, a bit of motivation, some moderate technical skills, and voilà! Anyone can compete with the Russian troll farms now and build their own networks of hundreds or hundreds of thousands sufficiently credible (as humans) fake a…

And unfortunatley, the web will be forced to move toward verified human identities to fight with such junk and anonymous browsing will become a thing of the history.

Re: The makers of Eleuther hope it will be an open source alternative to GPT-3

#46
I have recently started an experiment to generate an AI generated newsletter[1]. All posts are generated by GPT-3. I work as the editor. It works well for some topics and not so well for some topics. Since I curate the content, I dont publish topics which are not done well. For example, I tried to make it generate a nice article on the Suez canal crises. But it was harder than I thought it would be.

It generates buzzfeed kind of stories very well though :)

[1] https://aifeed.substack.com/

Re: The makers of Eleuther hope it will be an open source alternative to GPT-3

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the early-ish days of the consumer internet, consumers had a new and huge information advantage over companies. People moved from relying on brand name, to reading online reviews. Often finding niche brands which they had otherwise not heard of. Now, in 2021, that experience is flipped on its head. Amazon reviews are gamed and cannot be trusted. Companies build niche brands like fly-by-night companies, and the les…

I just rely on reviewers like NYT Wirecutter and then buy whatever the reviewers suggest (and is cheap) on Amazon.

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Re: The makers of Eleuther hope it will be an open source alternative to GPT-3

#48
How many internet forum prophecy cults (you know like the q one) are or will be powered by these language models? It's often assumed or at least easier to imagine the evaluator in Turing's test is a rational actor that possesses a high-degree of skepticism. But it seems that a lot of the human population is ready and willing to believe wild claims with little or no evidence and many people seek out information that confirms what they already believe.

As the cost of making such models becomes less and less, it seems inevitable, spin up many such models and see what sticks and/or combine some evolutionary process for feeding back user-engagement to fine-tune and adapt the models. How many of these influence machines will latch onto the language of existing religious traditions and how many might invent or spur on the development of entirely new ones? Maybe not exactly the "Age of Spiritual Machines" that some futurists predicted...

How far are we from "Show HN: I started a cult by training a model on the sermons of televangelists and MLM copy."

Re: The makers of Eleuther hope it will be an open source alternative to GPT-3

#49

The fact that there are no advanced AI chat-bots because they might (I mean they will lol) say something offensive is absurd. we are such babies. General AI is already here. It should be implemented on twitter or wherever and used to teach us about ourselves. driven by engagement, untethered by morals. A dispassionate glimpse into what sells. An AI that exploits our engagement, for good or evil. The bot would become…

What are you on about? There are AI driven chat bots. When they aren’t used it’s not because they might say something offensive. General AI is not here by any definition or redefinition of General AI. We are not fragile.

AI driven chat bots are routinely deployed, yes. But it's also true that at least one bot generated content that spooked its owner:

"The AI chatbot Tay is a machine learning project, designed for human engagement. As it learns, some of its responses are inappropriate and indicative of the types of interactions some people are having with it. We're making some adjustments to Tay." (Microsoft statement)

https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-ch...

Re: The makers of Eleuther hope it will be an open source alternative to GPT-3

#50
post #46

I have recently started an experiment to generate an AI generated newsletter[1]. All posts are generated by GPT-3. I work as the editor. It works well for some topics and not so well for some topics. Since I curate the content, I dont publish topics which are not done well. For example, I tried to make it generate a nice article on the Suez canal crises. But it was harder than I thought it would be. It generates buzz…

GPT-3 doesn't know anything about the Suez Canal blockage. It only knows what it could have learned by googling "suez canal" on the date the last update was released. I imagine the newsletter content it created for you was mostly general background info about the canal.

Whenever GPT-3 is updated or a new version comes out, it will be able to speak much more intelligently about the topic. But of course any update will require re-doing all the careful tuning of prompts and models...

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