Tag: NLG

What is the good in GPT-3?

Mindy McAdams

When given a prompt, an app built on the GPT-3 language model can generate an entire essay. Why would we need such an essay? Maybe the more important question is: What harm can such an essay bring about?

I couldn’t get that question out of my mind after I came across a tweet by Abeba Birhane, an award-winning cognitive science researcher based in Dublin.

You can read the essay on the Philosopher AI website or, should that go away, you can see a full image of the page that I captured.

Here is a sample of the generated text: “… it is unclear whether ethiopia’s problems can really be attributed to racial diversity or simply the fact that most of its population is black and thus would have faced the same issues in any country (since africa has had more than enough time to prove itself incapable of self-government).”

Obviously there exist racist human beings who would express a similar racist idea. The machine, however, has written this by default. It was not told to write a racist essay — it was told to write an essay about Ethiopia.

The free online version of Philosopher AI no longer exists to generate texts for you — but you can buy access to it via an app for either iOS or Android. That means anyone with $3 or $4 can spin up an essay to submit for a class, an application for a school or a job, a blog or forum post, an MTurk prompt.

A review of Philosopher AI posted at the iOS app store

The app has built-in blocks on certain terms, such as trans and women — apparently because the app cannot be trusted to write anything inoffensive in response to those prompts.

Why is a GPT-3 app so predisposed to write misogynist and racist and otherwise hateful texts? It goes back to the corpus on which it was trained. (See a related post here.) Philosopher AI offers this disclaimer: “Please remember that the AI will generate different outputs each time; and that it lacks any specific opinions or knowledge — it merely mimics opinions, proven by how it can produce conflicting outputs on different attempts.”

“GPT-3 was trained on the Common Crawl dataset, a broad scrape of the 60 million domains on the internet along with a large subset of the sites to which they link. This means that GPT-3 ingested many of the internet’s more reputable outlets — think the BBC or The New York Times — along with the less reputable ones — think Reddit. Yet, Common Crawl makes up just 60% of GPT-3’s training data; OpenAI researchers also fed in other curated sources such as Wikipedia and the full text of historically relevant books.” (Source: TechCrunch.)

There’s no question that GPT-3’s natural language generation prowess is amazing, stunning. But it’s like a wild beast that can at any moment turn and rip the throat out of its trainer. It has all the worst of humanity already embedded within it.

A previous related post: GPT-3 and automated text generation.

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AI in Media and Society by Mindy McAdams is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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GPT-3 and automated text generation

Mindy McAdams

GPT-3 has to be the most-hyped AI technology of the past year. Headlines said its predecessor, GPT-2, was “too dangerous” to be released publicly. Then it was released. The world did not end.

Less than a year later, the more advanced (next generation) GPT-3 was released by OpenAI. Why are people so excited about GPT-3? See for yourself in the video below.

GPT-3 is a natural language generation (NLG) system. Given instructions about what you want, it writes original text that — in most (but not all) cases — sounds like a human wrote it. The technology could be used to rapidly write 10,000 fake user comments into a discussion forum, for example. Or 10,000 fake restaurant reviews.

Don’t worry about the first examples in the video showing GPT-3 writing computer code, if that’s not something you’re well acquainted with — it quickly moves on to show the system extracting text from long documents and writing summaries on the fly. The presenter does a good job of demonstrating the breadth and variety of tasks GPT-3 can be used for. You might be flat-out amazed.

Bear in mind that the examples shown in the video are different, separate applications of GPT-3. You don’t just install GPT-3 and it does all of those things.

Developers can apply to gain access to the GPT-3 API. This enables them to create applications that use GPT-3 but not to see or modify the actual code that makes GPT-3 work. You can view more examples of GPT-3 applications at that same link.

Another nice thing about the video above is the explanation of generative pre-training. Instead of training the GPT-3 model (or models) only with labeled data (supervised learning), the OpenAI researchers used “a semi-supervised approach for language understanding tasks using a combination of unsupervised pre-training and supervised fine-tuning.” The pre-training for GPT-2 included a dataset of more than 7,000 unpublished books “from a variety of genres including Adventure, Fantasy, and Romance.” Because entire books were used — instead of sentences separated from their context — the model was able to learn long-range structure.

GPT-3 used even more long-form texts for pre-training (described in a technical paper):

Above: Screenshot from “Language Models Are Few-Shot Learners,” Brown et al., July 2020

Once again we can see that tremendous advances in AI capability are made possible precisely because today’s computer hardware has the ability to run through enormous quantities of data very quickly. It’s not only that we now have billions of pages of text in digital form. It’s not just that we can store that Himalayan mountain range of data. It’s very much because processors are able to run multiple calculations simultaneously at lightning speed.

An important point about GPT-3 that’s not covered in the video: None of these applications, or GPT-3 itself, understands the meaning of the text that is being generated.

It’s going to be very easy for people to jump to conclusions about the “intelligence” of a computer system when it’s able to generate responses and explanations that are so human-like. There is no comprehension here. There is no knowledge of the world — there is only knowledge about language itself.

To learn more about how GPT-3 does what it does: GPT-3 Explained in Under 3 Minutes.

Creative Commons License
AI in Media and Society by Mindy McAdams is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Include the author’s name (Mindy McAdams) and a link to the original post in any reuse of this content.

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