I love the initiative, but I'm starting to get scared of what a post-GPT-3 world will look like. We are already struggling to distinguish fake news from real ones, automated customer request replies from genuine replies, etc. How will I know that I have a conversation with a real human in the future?
On the other side, the prospect of having an oracle that answers all trivia, fixes spelling and grammar, and allows humans to focus on higher level information processing is interesting.
The fake news thing is a real problem (and may become worse under GPT3 but certainly exists already). As for the others - to quote Westworld, "if you can't tell the difference, does it really matter?"
Most human communications between humans have some physical world purpose, and so an algorithm which is trained to create the impression that a purpose has been fulfilled whilst not actually having any capabilities beyond text generation is going to have negative effects except where the sole purpose of interacting is receiving satisfactory text.
Reviews that look just like real reviews but are actually a weighted average of comments on a different product are negative. Customer service bots that go beyond FAQ to do a very convincing impression of a human service rep promising an investigation into an incident but can't actually start an investigation into the incident are negative. An information retrieval tool which has no information on a subject but can spin a very plausible explanation based on data on a different subject is negative.
Of course, it's entirely possible for humans to bullshit, but unlike text generation algorithms it isn't our default response to everything.
> "if you can't tell the difference, does it really matter?"
It indeed does. The problem is that societies and cultures are heavily influenced and changed by communication, media, and art.
By replacing big portions of these components with artificial content, generated from previously created content, you run the risk of creating feedback cycles (e.g. train future systems from output of their predecessors) and forming standards (beauty, aesthetics, morality, etc.) controlled by the entities that build, train, and filter the output of the AIs.
You'll basically run the risk of killing individuality and diversity in culture and expression; consequences on society as a whole and individual behaviour are difficult to predict, but seeing how much power social media (an unprecedented phenomenon in human culture) have, there's reason to at the very least be cautious about this.
This problem affects all types of agents - natural or artificial. Agent acts in the environment, this causes experience and learning, and thus conditioning the future. The agent has no idea what other opportunities are lost behind past choices.
What scares me personally is the idea that I might be floating in a sea of uncanny valley content. Content that's 98% human-like, but then that 2% sticks out like a nail and snaps me out of it.
Sure, I might not be able to tell the difference the majority of the time, but when I can tell the difference it's gonna bother me a lot.
If you ask GPT-3 for three Lord of the Rings quotes it might give you two real ones and one fake one, because it doesn’t know what truth is and just wants to give you something plausible.
There are creative applications for bullshit, but something that cites its sources (so you can check) and doesn’t hallucinate things would be much more useful. Like a search engine.
Genuine question, why is this a problem? Sure, someone may be able to generate thousands of real-sounding fake news articles, but it's not like they will also be able to flood the New York Times with these articles. How do you worry you will be exposed to these articles?
If recent times have told us anything, it's that the biggest distributor of "news" is social media. And worse still, people generally have no interest in researching the items they read. If "fake news" confirms their pre-existing bias then they will automatically believe it. If real news disagrees with their biases then it is considered fake.
So in theory, the rise of deep fakes could lead to more people getting suckered into conspiracy theories and other such extreme opinions. We've already seen a small trend this way with low resolution images of different people with vaguely similar physical features because used as "evidence" of actors in hospitals / shootings / terrorist scenes / etc.
That all said, I don't see this as a reason not to pursue GPT-3. From that regard the proverbial genie is already out of the bottle. What we need to work on is a better framework for distributing knowledge.
It's not me I'm worried about - it's the 50% [1] of people who get their news from social media and "entertainment" news platforms. These people vote, and can get manipulated into performing quite extreme acts.
At the moment a lot of people seem to have trouble engaging with reality, and that seems to be caused by relatively small disinformation campaigns and viral rumours. How much worse could it get when there's a vast number of realistic-sounding news articles appearing, accompanied by realistic AI-generated photos and videos?
And that might not even be the biggest problem. If these things can be generated automatically and easily, it's going to be very easy to dismiss real information as fake. The labelling of real news as "fake news" phenomenon is going to get bigger.
It's going to be more work to distinguish what is real from what is fake. If it's possible to find articles supporting any position and a suspicion that any contrary new is then a lot of people are going to find it easier to just believe what they prefer to believe... even more than they do now.
The majority of "fake news" are factual news described from a partial point of view and with a political spin.
Even fact checkers are not immune to this and brand other news as true or false not based on facts but based on the political spin they favour.
Fake news is a vastly overstated problem.
Thanks to internet, we now have a wider breadth of political news and opinions and it's easy to label everything-but-your-side as fake news.
There are a few patently false lies on the internet which are taken as examples of fake news - but they have very few supporters.
> Even fact checkers are not immune to this and brand other news as true or false not based on facts but based on the political spin they favour.
Could you give an example?
> There are a few patently false lies on the internet which are taken as examples of fake news - but they have very few supporters.
How many do you consider "few"?
I can go to my local news site and read a story about the novel coronavirus and the majority of comments below the article are stating objectively false facts.
"It's just a flu"
"Hospitals are empty"
"The survival rate is 99.9%"
"Vaccines alter your DNA"
...and so on.
There is the conspiracy theory or cult called QAnon, which "includes in its belief system that President Trump is waging a secret war against elite Satan-worshipping paedophiles in government, business and the media."
One QAnon Gab group has more than 165,000 users. I don't think these are small numbers.
Pew Research says 18% report getting news primarily from social media (fielded 10/19-6/20)[0]. November 2019 research said 41% among 18-29 year olds, which was the peak age group. Older folks largely watch news on TV[1].
I don't think so - I was aware that it was a made-up number, and highlighted the fact that it was. It's the lack of awareness of what is backed up by data that is the problem I think.
Right, it's definitely goof that you cited it being fake, but I think the parent was pointing out the subtle (and likely unintentional) irony of discussing fake news while providing _fake_ numbers to support your opinion.
I know! One day it's going to get so bad people are going to have to deploy critical thinking instead of accepting what they read at face value and suffer the indignity of having to think for themselves.
Critical thinking won't help you when the majority (or all) of your sources are tainted and contradictory. At some point, the actual truth just gets swamped.
Don't read news. Go to original sources and scientific papers. If you really want to understand something, a news website should only be your starting point to look for keywords. That is true today as it will be "post-GPT-3".
This scales badly today and will scale even worse in the future. Those without education or time resources will at best manage to read the news. Humanity will need a low effort way to relay reliable information to more of it's members.
Given how much bunk “science” (and I'm talking things completely transparent to someone remotely competent in the field) gets published, especially in psychology, it's difficult to do even that.
And so does every other source. You can play that analysis game with any source material. The problem is that the accuracy and detail of the reporting usually fades with each step towards mass media content.
That's what people should do, and that's what you and I will do, but many won't, especially the less educated (no condescension intended). They'll buy into the increased proliferation of fake info. It's because of these people that I think the concerns are valid.
Honestly, I consider myself fairly educated (I have a PhD in CS), but if the topic at hand is sufficiently far from my core competence, then reading the scientific article won't help. I keep reading about p-value hacking, subtle ways of biasing research, etc., and I realize that, to validate a scientific article, you have to be a domain expert and constantly keep up-to-date with today's best standards. Given the increasing number of domains to be an expert in, I fail to see how any single human can achieve that without going insane. :D
I mean, Pfizer could dump their clinical trial reports at me, and I would probably be unable to compute their vaccine's efficiency, let alone find any flaws.
Besides the time scalability aspect highlighted by someone else, I am worried that GPT-3 will have the potential to produce even "fake scientific papers".
Our trust fabric is already quite fragile post-truth. GPT-3 might make it even more fragile.
I wouldn't worry about the science bit. No one worries about the university library getting larger and larger or how its going to confuse or misguide people even though everyone knows there are many books in there, full of errors, outdated information, badly written, boring etc etc etc.
Why? Cause there is always someone on campus who knows something about a subject to guide you to the right stuff.
The concern is not so much AI generated news, but malicious actors misleading, influencing or scamming people online at scale with realistic conversations. Today we already have large scale automated scams via email and robo call. Less scalable scams like Tinder love catfish scams or Russian/China trolls on reddit are now run by real people, imagine it being automated. If human moderators cannot distinguish these bots from real humans, that is a scary thought, imagine not being able to tell if this comment was written by a human or robot.
why does this matter? the internet is filled with millions of very low quality human generated discussions right now. There might not be much of a difference between thousands of humans generating comment spam and thousands of gpt-3 instances doing the same
It does matter. The nice feeling of being one of many is a feature of echo chambers. If you can create that artificially for anything with a push of a button, it's a powerful tool to edit discourse or radicalize people.
Have a look at Russias interference in the previous US election. This is what they did, but manually. To be able to scale and automate it is huge.
Touch ups where done before photoshop but now it’s ALWAYS done. The issues this has created in society might have a bigger emotional impact than we give it credit for.
Regarding photo news there has been quite a lot of scandals to the point that I’d guess the touchups is more or less accepted.
I conducted a workshop in media compentency for teenage girls and one of the key learnings was that every image of a female subject they encounter in printed media (this was before Instagram) has been retouched.
To hammer the point home I let them retouch a picture by themselves to see what is possible even for a completely untrained manipulator.
It was eye-opening - one of the things that should absolutely be taught in school but isn't.
I don't think "critical thinking" is the point here. Because first you need to know that such modifications CAN be done. And not everybody knows what can be retouched with PS or programs. So yeah, if you see some super-model on a magazine cover, and you don't know PS can edit photos easily, it would be not that immediate to think "hey maybe that's not real!".
As an extreme example: would you ever checked 20 years ago a newspaper text to know if it was generated by an AI or by a human? Obviously no, because you didn't know of any AI that could do that.
I think I made my point badly because I also agree.
I am lamenting that teenagers were, in this day and age, surprised at what can be done with Photoshop. And that let loose on the appropriate software were surprised at what can be altered and how easily.
My point is suggesting this may be so because people have not been taught how to think for themselves and accept things (in this case female images) 'as is', without a hint of curiosity. It is also a problem but at the other end of the stick, with many young people I work with considering Wikipedia to be 100% full of misinformation and fake news.
There is a secondary aspect of becoming aware that society has agreed on beauty standards (different for different societies) and PS being used as a means to adhere to these standards.
The difference between Photoshop and generative models is not in what it can technically achieve, but the cost of achieving the desired result. Fake news photo or text generation is possible by humans, but scales poorly compared (more humans) to a algorithmically automated process (some more compute).
EleutherAI’s unofficial motto is “anything safe enough for Microsoft to sell for profit is safe enough to release.” You’re kidding yourself if you think Microsoft cares who they sell it to.
There are worthwhile conversations to have about democratizing technology, but this stuff is already out there regardless of what you or I do.
Massively plagiarize articles and the search engine probably have no way to identify which is the original content. It's like to rewrite everything on the internet using your own words, this may lead to the internet filled with this kind of garbage.
Reddit and platforms alike filled with bots say bullshits all the time but hard to identify by the human in the first place (current model is pretty good at generating metaphysical bullshits, but rarely insightful content). People may be surrounded by bot bullshitters and trolls, and very few of them are real.
Scams at larger scales. The skillset is essentially like customer service plus bad intentions. With new models, scammers can do their things at scale and find qualified victims more efficiently.
It’s a lot less expensive to hire a dozen teenagers to write fake news than use GPT-3. The cost to train GPT-3 is about the same as the cost to hire 1,000 people and pay them $10/hour to write responses for a year. Not to mention the fact that inference isn’t free.
> already struggling to distinguish ... automated customer request replies from genuine replies
I hope it's not only due to a decline in the quality of human support. If we could have really useful automated support agents, I for one would applaud that.
I agree. As long as it is transparent that I am speaking to an automated agent and I can easily escalate the issue to a human that can solve my problem when the agent gets stuck.
On the other side, the prospect of having an oracle that answers all trivia, fixes spelling and grammar, and allows humans to focus on higher level information processing is interesting.