Philosophers on GPT-3
One consequence of GPT-3 is that I am now highly sceptical of the human provenance of any HN comment on an article about GPT-3. It has made my HN experience objectively less enjoyable, because I’m constantly expending effort to spot nonsense and avoid wasting time reading it.<p>Perhaps most worrying is not how “human-like” GPT-3 can be, but how “GPT-3 like” humans can be. When I am in “nonsense-detection” mode, I drill down into paragraphs to spot non-sequiturs etc and I find plenty of HN comments are rambling, contradictory, or I just can’t ascertain the meaning of the text.<p>If anyone gets this far through my comment, you may now be wondering if I’m hilariously posting a GPT-3 output (I am not). I wonder how a human might seek to convince others that they are not GPT-3. I think using unusual exotic rarely-encountered vocabulary or word combinations or sentence structure that GPT-3 is unlikely to pick up would help. Or referring to current events in a way that makes sense (that lockdown in Greater Manchester would be an example for people in the U.K.).<p>It certainly has the power to ruin HN and other forms of debate online. Perhaps one consequence will be more video chat and audio calls (until deep fakes become great) and then a retreat to the physical world for serious discussion.