TECH ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

A college student used GPT-3 to

write fake blog posts and ended
up at the top of Hacker News
He says he wanted to prove the AI could pass as a human writer
By Kim Lyons Aug 16, 2020, 1:55pm EDT

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

College student Liam Porr used the language-generating AI tool GPT-3 to produce
a fake blog post that recently landed in the No. 1 spot on Hacker News, MIT
Technology Review reported. Porr was trying to demonstrate that the content
produced by GPT-3 could fool people into believing it was written by a human.
And, he told MIT Technology Review, “it was super easy, actually, which was the
scary part.”
So to set the stage in case you’re not familiar with GPT-3: It’s the latest version of a
series of AI autocomplete tools designed by San Francisco-based OpenAI, and
has been in development for several years. At its most basic, GPT-3 (which stands
for “generative pre-trained transformer”) auto-completes your text based on
prompts from a human writer.

My colleague James Vincent explains how it works:

Like all deep learning systems, GPT-3 looks for patterns in data. To simplify
things, the program has been trained on a huge corpus of text that it’s mined
for statistical regularities. These regularities are unknown to humans, but
they’re stored as billions of weighted connections between the different
nodes in GPT-3’s neural network. Importantly, there’s no human input
involved in this process: the program looks and finds patterns without any
guidance, which it then uses to complete text prompts. If you input the word
“fire” into GPT-3, the program knows, based on the weights in its network,
that the words “truck” and “alarm” are much more likely to follow than “lucid”
or “elvish.” So far, so simple.

Here’s a sample from Porr’s blog post (with a pseudonymous author), titled
“Feeling unproductive? Maybe you should stop overthinking.”

Definition #2: Over-Thinking (OT) is the act of trying to come up with ideas
that have already been thought through by someone else. OT usually results
in ideas that are impractical, impossible, or even stupid.

Yes, I would also like to think I would be able to suss out that this was not written
by a human, but there’s a lot of not-great writing on these here internets, so I guess
it’s possible that this could pass as “content marketing” or some other content.

OpenAI decided to give access to GPT-3’s API to researchers in a private beta,

rather than releasing it into the wild at first. Porr, who is a computer science
student at the University of California, Berkeley, was able to find a PhD student
who already had access to the API, who agreed to work with him on the
experiment. Porr wrote a script that gave GPT-3 a blog post headline and intro. It
generated a few versions of the post, and Porr chose one for the blog, copy-
pasted from GPT-3’s version with very little editing.

The post went viral in a matter of a few hours, Porr said, and the blog had more
than 26,000 visitors. He wrote that only one person reached out to ask if the post
was AI-generated, although several commenters did guess GPT-3 was the author.
But, Porr says, the community downvoted those comments.

William Porr

He suggests that GPT-3 “writing” could replace content producers which ha ha

these are the jokes people of course that could not happen I hope. “The whole
point of releasing this in private beta is so the community can show OpenAI new
use cases that they should either encourage or look out for,” Porr writes. And
notable that he doesn’t yet have access to the GPT-3 API even though he’s applied
for it, admitting to MIT Technology Review, “It’s possible that they’re upset that I did
this.”