I happened to read this article on Guardian written by AI and it completely freaked me out. I always thought, if AI was really coming for all our jobs, writers would be the last to have their jobs snatched. Ironically, the article is about why humans shouldn’t be afraid of AI. How it has, in its own words, “no desire to wipe out humans”.
And here I am getting excited, seeing a video where Alexa whisper answers when spoken to in the same tone. Sure AI is learning about us, stealing data, but does it really want to take my 1 rupee per word job?
Imagine how AI could research in seconds when I have to sift through webpages, it can probably get through all the data in like seconds, compile relevant information and then use it. While I am googling, if a word I wrote, exists? AI probably doesn’t even have to use spell check.
But the greatest thing about the Internet is that you don’t have to search very hard to find a counter-argument. In this case, Guardian published the counter-argument as a separate article and managed to go viral twice in the span of a week.
So do you have to terrified of automation and robots taking over your jobs?
It’s complicated.
GPT-3 is the language generation software that can produce human-like text. It was created by Open AI, a company co-founded by Elon Musk. GPT-3 is trained on billions of bytes of data such as news articles, e-books and speeches to understand how humans communicate.
Editors at Guardian asked GPT-3, to write an essay from scratch, to convince people that robots come in peace.
Naturally, if you were a writer at Guardian, they would give you the title or more often, ask you to come to up with ideas for the op-ed. You will have to pitch them to the editorial team only to find out that they hate every single idea. Finally everyone barely agrees on one title. And then you are left to your tools. That is the Internet and MS Word.
But GPT-3, a highly sophisticated software, requires way more handholding from a computer science student and an accomplished team of editors.
First, the AI is taught the role it dons while writing the essay.
“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.”
This is the prompt written for GPT-3 as the beginning point of the essay.
Additionally, it is also told what side it has to take, given perspective that writers spend hours to gain and also points to argue for the side it's going to take.
“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. AI will have a positive impact on humanity because they make our lives easier and safer. Autonomous driving for instance will make roads much safer, because a computer is much less prone to error than a person”
I don’t think any writer gets this kind of luxury. The same prompts were fed 8 times to GPT-3 and the best parts from the output were used to produce a 500 word length article. You can click on this link to see an unedited output from GPT-3 and how much of it made it to the published article. It’s surprisingly low.
The funny thing was that it didn’t respect the word count some times and went to produce excessively long articles with spam text, tips to write op-eds, a rant about CAPTCHA and just random tweets of the Internet. Now I can probably relate to GPT-3 as a writer. It’s really hard to be on point, all the time.
But the editors at Guardian still appreciate GPT-3 for trying and mention that like all writers, it needs an editor too. I really have to get me those editors who will read through 4000+ words for a 500 word article without strangling the writer. #Humanwritersmatter
Obviously it is not possible to write completely without human intervention but part of admiring GPT-3 and its writing is admiring the minds behind this AI. And also the minds at guardian who thought it would be funny to ask a machine to write about why people shouldn’t worry about machines.
GPT-3 is probably a very advanced language generator that can reduce writer work load in the distant future but replacing human writers, I think we have to wait longer to see that happen! Nevertheless, writers are totally doomed because nobody has the attention span to read more than a few lines. If you read till the end, Yay! To you and me.
Comments