
October 21, 2020
Can AI and GPT-3 Replace Authors? A Conversation with Liam Porr on Writer on The Side
Check out the Writer on The Side Episode Page & Show Notes
Key Takeways
- “GPT-3 is a text-completion artificial intelligence. Specifically, it’s in the category of natural language processing artificial intelligence. This is a technology developed by OpenAI which is a machine learning AI company originally started by Elon Musk now run by Sam Altman.” – Hassan Osman
- “Basically what it does is it takes a piece of text that you give it and it tries to complete that text”
- The AI is based on writing from a small subset of the internet
- After publishing his first GPT-3 generated post on Substack, Liam got 26,000 unique readers in 2 weeks
- Liam never revealed the text was written by an AI and the public liked the writing on its own accord
- Liam believes that while GPT-3 is attention-grabbing, it currently doesn’t have much practical use
- A far more practical text-based AI would be one that can analyze information and summarize it for the public
- “I think in the near future you are going to see a lot of writers who are using GPT-3 or similar models to basically accelerate the writing process” – Hassan Oman
- Liam believes GPT-3 will make it easier to become a writer, but it will also raise the bar for the quality of content that people read
Intro
- Liam Porr (@liamport9) is a computer science student at the University of California, Berkeley and an online blogger
- Host: Hassan Osman (@HassanO)
What is GPT-3?
- “GPT-3 is a text completion artificial intelligence. Specifically, it’s in the category of natural language processing artificial intelligence. This is a technology developed by OpenAI which is a machine learning AI company originally started by Elon Musk now run by Sam Altman.” – Hassan Osman
- “Basically what it does is it takes a piece of text that you give it and it tries to complete that text”
- “If you give it a question the most logical response would be to answer that question. If you gave it half of a sentence it would try to complete that sentence.”
- You can’t control the output yet
- You can give GPT-3 a word limit, but the AI will just suddenly cut off rather than finishing the story within the limit
- The AI is based on writing from a small subset of the internet so it’s possible GPT-3 could even start to feed itself its own information
How Liam Started His AI-Generated Blog
- OpenAI is limiting the release of GPT-3 to the public so Liam had to first find someone who had access
- After publishing his first post on Substack, Liam got 26,000 unique readers in 2 weeks
- Liam never revealed the text was written by an AI and the public loved the writing on its own accord
- In the early comments, only two readers suspected the post was written by GPT-3
- This was after GPT-3 already received media hype in 2020
- The response to these comments was that it was rude and offensive to imply someone’s writing was similar to an AI’s
Liam’s Process
- Liam only wrote the title and first couple sentences for every blog post; GPT-3 wrote the rest
- Liam would then create about eight different AI-generated posts from his introduction and choose the best one
- The only edits he performed were when GPT-3 generated illogical or incoherent sentences, otherwise, it was straight copy and paste
- Engineering the initial human input isn’t as simple as writing whatever you want. It takes some effort to make the AI craft the desired response rather than veering on a tangent.
- When sharing his story with The Guardian, the newspaper told Liam that AI writing was easier to edit than human writing
GPT-3 Copyrights
- US copyright law requires a bare minimum creative contribution in order to claim ownership
- By constructing the prompt you provide a creative contribution and thus you are the copyright owner
- The caveat to this is that the output must adhere to OpenAI’s terms of use
- Otherwise, you can distribute the output as you wish
Implications of GPT-3
- OpenAI is devoting much of their time addressing how GPT-3 might be used by extremist political groups to generate support
- This might be in training the AI to give charismatic speeches espousing extremist ideologies, creating fake information sources, or by creating fake voices in an astroturf movement
- Liam believes OpenAI should dedicate more time to the actual text digestion processes
- Liam believes that while GPT-3 is attention-grabbing, it currently doesn’t have much practical use
- “There’s just so much abundant information I think that the actual utility is in figuring out better ways to automatically digest text and summarize it for people” – Hassan Oman
- An AI that can analyze masses of information would greatly streamline document-based fields like law or government and especially reduce bureaucracy
- “There’s just so much abundant information I think that the actual utility is in figuring out better ways to automatically digest text and summarize it for people” – Hassan Oman
- “I think in the near future you are going to see a lot of writers who are using GPT-3 or similar models to basically accelerate the writing process” – Hassan Oman
- “Specifically when you’re looking for inspiration and you’re trying to start a block of text from nothing, GPT-3 is really good at giving you something to work with”
- GPT-3 could even help with research as it will formulate writing based on all published texts on a topic
- Liam believes GPT-3 will make it easier to become a writer, but it will also raise the bar for the quality of content that people read
When Will GPT-3 Write Books?
- Writing nonfiction is harder for an AI than fiction and GPT-3 isn’t even currently capable of writing a full-length fiction book
- “With nonfiction, it’s a little more difficult because now you have to add in the aspect of fact-checking” – Hassan Oman
- “I think that it’s quite possible that we can get this kind of technology in the next couple of years” – Hassan Oman