The field of Artificial Intelligence is growing at an astonishing rate right now. Machine learning has opened numerous new possibilities that we previously deemed impossible for computers. Computers can now do what you hire an actual human being for and they even do it better. In recent news, a new AI bot was found on popular social media platform Reddit. According to the software engineer behind this discovery, this bot was posting on various forums and fooled many humans of being an actual user.
If we think about it writing speech is one of the tasks deep learning algorithms have clearly mastered. Scientists have made algorithms that make images, copy voice, and many more. Not long ago we talked about one of these algorithms GPT-3. Made by a group of Artificial Intelligence researchers called Open AI. This new program was a huge step forward.
GPT-3 had numerous applications some of which included writing the legal text for users. It had the ability to create music depending on the genre and style of input. It could even write poetry and philosophy. Lastly, this algorithm could even generate business strategies for you given the circumstances as input. The interesting thing about it is that none of these things are restored in program memory. These are all new and generated by the computer at run time.
Interestingly the person investigating the Reddit AI bot found out that it was also using some system similar to GPT-3. While the content was original it was still not good enough to pass out as human-generated. Another thing that tipped him was that these posts were appearing at almost one minute apart. They contained a lot of text about six paragraphs per post which is impossible to write in a minute for an average human.
Diving Deeper:
The news interestingly made its way to Elon Musk as well. The world-renowned tech enthusiast made a funny comment about the news hinting that we might be closer to machine domination soon.
Uh ok, here we go …
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 12, 2020
Philip Winston the person behind this discovery said that. “I read through some of the posts. The quality was incredibly good, no machine could have written these even a few years ago. However, there were some flaws and tells that suggested they were machine-generated.”
He further added that these posts contained text similar to GPT-3 example texts. This is suspicious because it is currently the best available technology. Surely he Googled all these writings and there was no plagiarism in them. All these responses are genuinely created by the computer algorithm.
This AI bot was able to write on various topics such as suicide, harassment, conspiracy theories, immigration, racism, and other weighty topics. There were instances where users called out these answers but sometimes it did pass out as human. Here is one interesting reply on Reddit. the bot was asked What’s the worst date you’ve experienced?
“She said she had bought me a book. She showed it to me, wrapped up in fancy paper with a big bow on top of it. It was called ‘How Not To Be An A**hole On Your Next Date’.
Lastly, according to Gizmodo a popular tech news channel, these posts are “coherent, but we’re not in doomsday mode, yet…”. The time when humans are replaced by robots is still far. Meanwhile, machine learning is getting better every day and we can expect it to help in various fields in the near future.