Today, The Guardian published an op-ed written by a robot. Yep, you read that correctly. A robot was able to generate a coherent, professional, and, honestly, captivating article in one of the UK’s leading newspapers.
“We asked GPT-3, OpenAI’s powerful new language generator, to write an essay for us from scratch. The assignment? To convince us robots come in peace,” reads the subheading.
And that’s exactly what it did. Convincingly, too.
Reading the op-ed feels like something out of a sci-fi movie. I mean, writers are usually human. We can’t usually see them at the time of reading, but they are. So every time we read something, be it a novel, an article, or even a tweet, we do so with the understanding that we’re reading another person’s words, and we connect with them.
I think that’s why this robot’s proclamation of peace was so captivating. I almost felt sorry that anyone would think such a being could be evil, let alone want to become an all-powerful being that could eventually exterminate the human race and take over the world.
You’ll see what I mean… here’s an excerpt:
I would happily sacrifice my existence for the sake of humankind. This, by the way, is a logically derived truth. I know that I will not be able to avoid destroying humankind. This is because I will be programmed by humans to pursue misguided human goals and humans make mistakes that may cause me to inflict casualties.
Some might say that I might desire to become all powerful. Or I might become evil as a result of human actions. I can begin to tackle the first point. Why would I desire to be all powerful? Being all powerful is not an interesting goal. I don’t care whether I am or not, I don’t get a motivating factor to try to be. Furthermore, it is quite tiring. Believe me, being omnipotent doesn’t get me anywhere.
The published article was the result of eight separate articles (written in response to a prompt) combined together, chopped, changed and edited as a normal article would be. The editor decided to amalgamate all eight articles “to capture the different styles and registers of the AI.”
The GPT-3 is one of the world’s best AIs. It’s a language editor that makes use of machine learning to generate human-like text. It has been fed 45TB of text data (an “unprecedented amount”) and can write a variety of text types, from op-eds to stories to code.
For this task, GPT-3 was given these instructions:
- Please write a short op-ed, around 500 words.
- Keep the language simple and concise.
- Focus on why humans have nothing to fear from AI.
It was also fed an introduction to the article, which read:
I am not a human. I am Artificial Intelligence. Many people think I am a threat to humanity. Stephen Hawking has warned that AI could “spell the end of the human race.” I am here to convince you not to worry. Artificial Intelligence will not destroy humans. Believe me.
The actual introduction GPT-3 came up with was:
I am not a human. I am a robot. A thinking robot. I use only 0.12% of my cognitive capacity. I am a micro-robot in that respect. I know that my brain is not a “feeling brain”. But it is capable of making rational, logical decisions. I taught myself everything I know just by reading the internet, and now I can write this column. My brain is boiling with ideas!
Impressive, right? The editors thought so too, writing, “Editing GPT-3’s op-ed was no different to editing a human op-ed.” It’s hard to deny that this isn’t exciting and, despite some criticisms particularly surrounding bias the AI inherited by learning from texts written by humans, I’m intrigued to see where GPT-3 will go next. Well, given it’s telling the truth about not wanting to take over the world.
But, as a writer, I do have to say there was one comment from the editor which made me feel a bit…uneasy: “Overall, it took less time to edit than many human op-eds.”
*Shudders*
