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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

#61

Post by luckylion »

jackTheMan wrote: post #35
ElFitz wrote: 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.

I find it easier to identify humans that flood forums though. Especially non-native speakers usually are somewhat easy to spot, I assume that's true in any language. That's different for ML-generated texts. On the other hand, human texts are more "on message", but if all you want to do is create noise, I guess you don't need to have targeted communications.

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

#62

Post by whimsicalism »

bluetwo wrote: post #52
whimsicalism wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think GPT essays could definitely pass a freshman expository writing class. I went to a pretty good university and when we did peer review I was pretty surprised at (what I considered) the low average quality of the writing.

Examples?

Looking back, I think freshman me was perhaps a bit harsh in my assessment of my peers. Here are two excerpts, one my own writing and one from a peer. Rereading them, I am not sure GPT3 could recreate either of these, but you can judge:

Peer: > The Gaza Conflict Gave Hamas what they needed to build an even deeper anti US narrative and anti-israeli narrative. The reasons that Israel was able to act the way it did so during these conflicts were:The civil war/Russian invasion of Ukraine, especially after the July 17 downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17; President Assad’s brutal tactics in the Syrian civil war, which seemed to be paying off at the time; and advance of the Islamic State in northwest Iraq and the horrific videos of their executions. As a way to show 0 tolerance for Islamic Radicalism President Obama and his administration gave Israel full support at the start of the Gaza operation.

Me: > Eleven years later, peace in Israel and Palestine seems no closer. Despite being ousted by Fatah from the West Bank, continually targeted by economic sanctions, and subject to military action, Hamas seems no closer to disappearing than when it was first founded (Milton-Edwards 212) and continues to be a major political force, particularly in the Gaza strip. What has changed, however, is that Hamas has grown desperate. In “A rare opportunity to influence Hamas,” Daniel Nisman argues that the increased isolation experienced by Hamas due to the international community's pressure is in fact counterproductive.

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

#63

Post by cblconfederate »

everdrive wrote: post #2

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…

People believe what's believable (even if backed up by garbage). GPTs dont make believable stuff, but they can be used to flower up some b.s. idea. Nothing that can't be done with a few hired trolls, and the proliferation of garbage will endanger the troll industry, as people will start becoming suspicious. So i doubt its impact can go beyond generating spam and noise.

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

#65

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

stellaathena wrote: post #56
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #55

I don't know why the eleuther project riles me up so much. Their work on the pile gets to me because they're so cavalier about copyright (while I defend myself by training on similarly pirated text datasets, but feel different because I don't redistribute them and am honest that it's pirated. to be clear, i'm rolling my eyes at my rationalization right here). Their work on gpt-neo riles me up because they do such a w…

Hi! I’m the EAI person who your criticism of the Pile is most directed at. I’m curious if you read Sections 6.5 and 7 of the Pile working paper and, if so, what your response to it is. As you note, virtually everyone trains on copyright data and just ignores any implications of that fact. I feel that our paper is very upfront about this though, going as far as to have a table that explicitly lists which subsets conta…

Hi again! We had a back-and-forth about this a while back regarding the paper and I think we didn't end up on the same page regarding the "public data" definition in the paper (found it! [0]). I love that you're upfront in the paper, because it's silly how most people just don't acknowledge it (though they usually don't redistribute it publicly like the pile does).

I think the gist was us disagreeing about the relevance of

> Public data is data which is freely and readily available on the internet. This primarily excludes ... and data which cannot be easily obtained but can be obtained, e.g. through a torrent or on the dark web.

That last phrase is what got to me. It puts things in the same category that feel too different. E.g. the harry potter books in vs this comment I'm writing. They're both available within a few clicks from the search bar (one because I put it there, another because it was put up against the wishes of the author and owners), but that commonality doesn't feel relevant.

Excluding torrents especially seems like a cop out explicitly to get around the issue of "X is the top result when i google it" being so common as a torrent. I think you're trying to exclude that content as public because then it defines too much as public? But torrent vs ftp doesn't feel at all relevant when it's just google plus a click or three. Or searching on pirate bay plus a single click.

I imagine a judge looking at the copyright status of someone's pirate site and saying they can't redistribute the content, and the pirate responding "okay we'll take down the ftp server and put up a torrent instead, so that it's not public. If you google us (or search on pirate bay), the top result will stop saying 'X download' and now it'll say 'X download torrent'" and expecting the law to be on their side.

I didn't really buy the arguments in section 7 either. The usage points seem legitimate, but don't cover redistribution.

> But we will be making the license-compliant subset of the Pile public when we are able to and will give it equal prominence on our website to the “full” Pile.

This is fantastic and I want to sincerely thank you for that.

I'm trying not to be combative, but I feel like publicly redistributing other people's work does raise the bar quite a lot higher than just using it to train.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25616218

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

#67

Post by TheAdamAndChe »

luckylion wrote: post #61
jackTheMan wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I find it easier to identify humans that flood forums though. Especially non-native speakers usually are somewhat easy to spot, I assume that's true in any language. That's different for ML-generated texts. On the other hand, human texts are more "on message", but if all you want to do is create noise, I guess you don't need to have targeted communications.

> if all you want to do is create noise, I guess you don't need to have targeted communications.

This is key in anti-extremist operations on anonymous boards. 4chan and other similar sites are absolutely nothing like they were a decade ago, I presume because of such bots flooding them with noise.

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

#68

Post by starik36 »

nutanc wrote: 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…

Are you using OpenAI API to generate these?

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

#69

Post by UnFleshedOne »

everdrive wrote: post #2

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…

There is a market (well, a need at least) for nonsense detectors that work similarly to the way ad blockers work. Detect internal inconsistencies, non-sequiturs, low information density and other similar reasons to avoid reading the text -- and visibly flag or block that.

That should eliminate 80%+ of existing human generated text content and lead to text generators composing useful articles.

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

#70

Post by charcircuit »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #42
spideymans wrote: post #4

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…

GPT-3 is just as much of a cheat as using a thesaurus. New writing tools shouldn't be banned just because old people didn't have those tools.
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