Conversations with an AI - part 1

You may have heard about GPT-3, an artificial intelligence (AI) system developed by the San Francisco based company, OpenAI.

 

Technically speaking, GPT-3 is a text-based autoregressive language model that has been trained by being exposed to an enormous volume of web-based data. To interact with it you supply a textual prompt and it responds with a textual completion. The things that set GPT-3 apart are both its vast scope with respect to subject matter and the remarkable quality of its responses - which can be easily mistaken for texts written by humans. This has led a number of people — including members of the GPT-3 research team — to acknowledge the potential for misinformation, fraudulent academic essay writing and other forms of misuse and to investigate ways to mitigate these risks.

 

In June 2020 OpenAI invited users to request access to its user-friendly API in order to help them "explore the strengths and limits" of this new technology. I was delighted to be granted beta access to the API two weeks ago. However, the question immediately arose: what was I going to ask it to do? 

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One of my favourite books is the Cyberiad by the Polish author Stanislaw Lem — a collection of short comic pieces describing the antics of rival constructors, Trurl and Klapaucius.

If you were to look for a copy of the Cyberiad in a secondhand bookshop you’d find it in the science fiction section, despite the fact that the book resists categorisation. It was written in 1965.

In one story — Trurl’s Electronic Bard — the constructor sets about building a machine capable of writing poetry. It soon becomes clear however that, to be successful, the machine will first need to be programmed with the sum total of human civilisation and culture, since great poetry can’t be expected to emerge from anything less.

So, in the story, the constructor works away for a number of years and, after several frustrating setbacks, he invites his arch rival Klapaucius round for a demonstration. At first the results are disappointing and Klapaucius delights in Trurl’s discomfiture, rolling on the floor laughing as he watches him frantically adjusting the settings. But then suddenly, as Trurl rushes back and forth, there is a crackle, a clack and the machine with perfect poise says:

 

The petty and the small 

Are overcome with gall 

When Genius, having faltered, fails to fall.

 

So that decided it. I would encourage GPT-3 to write poetry.

To be continued … 

Published by David Wilson under OpenAI API Community Guidelines