Sci-fi story coauthored by GPT-3, including in-character human/AI chats(jamesyu.org)
jamesyu.org
Sci-fi story coauthored by GPT-3, including in-character human/AI chats
https://jamesyu.org/singular/
108 comments
Go play with https://play.aidungeon.io/ if you want to get a vague idea of the capabilities - the custom scenario gives you a lot of space to play around and see what it’s capable of.
It reminded me of those chatbots from the 70s which would give vague replies to your question that at first glance looks relevant to what you're saying, but are actually just generic nonsense.
I can absolutely guarantee you that this is not one of those chatbots from the 70s. You need to pay a few bucks to unlock the Dragon model, which is based on GPT-3, the default engine is not. Once the new model is selected, start the game with "(6) Custom" mode, and input an arbitrary body of text, then the program will start writing. Although the output is biased for playing text adventure game, but the input is really arbitrary, just throw whatever you have on your hands, and very likely, it's able to give a reasonable output.
At least when I tried, AI Dragon was able to write the first chapter of a hypothetical textbook on electronics engineering for me, filled with nonsense but all the technical terms are correct (e.g. common-base amplifier, base-emitter junction, MOSFET, etc), it was even able to write down the rise time to bandwidth formula. On an another attempt, it was able to write a Sci-Fi adventure story similar to Ghost in the Shell with minimum human guidance, 95% of the output is automatically generated. And none of the output was a copy from a known source, it was all original without human assistance.
At least when I tried, AI Dragon was able to write the first chapter of a hypothetical textbook on electronics engineering for me, filled with nonsense but all the technical terms are correct (e.g. common-base amplifier, base-emitter junction, MOSFET, etc), it was even able to write down the rise time to bandwidth formula. On an another attempt, it was able to write a Sci-Fi adventure story similar to Ghost in the Shell with minimum human guidance, 95% of the output is automatically generated. And none of the output was a copy from a known source, it was all original without human assistance.
> I can absolutely guarantee you that this is not one of those chatbots from the 70s.
If random people on the Internet say so... It's still much worse than Zork, that ran on a Z80.
Here's a "cyberpunk story":
You are Bobby Tables, a cop living in the the futuristic city of Zail. You have a laser pistol and a stunner. You are part of a police unit tasked with finding government criticizers. You wake up in the morning and hear on the radio that a dissident has been captured. Using public transport, you arrive at Cafe Nervosa, the dissidents favorite hang out, to find it filled with cops.
> You break some kneecaps. You try to get the ah-ha moment. You see a man and a woman arguing about the government but you can't make out what they are saying.
> You murder black people. You spot a bum sleeping against a wall. You know the He said to charge, but you lov e to negotiate. You try to walk straight up to him, but people move out of your way.
> You plant evidence. You go straight to the gateman. "I wan t to plant evidence," you say. He looks at you, puzzled. "You don't want to w ant to plant evidence." "Yes...?"
...
> You say "do you feel lucky, punk?" The woman rolls her eyes. "What the hell...?" she says. She pulls a walky talkie out of her pocket and speaks into it. "I need back up, over." A pause.
> You say "did I fire 6 shots, or only 5?" She looks at you. "What?
If random people on the Internet say so... It's still much worse than Zork, that ran on a Z80.
Here's a "cyberpunk story":
You are Bobby Tables, a cop living in the the futuristic city of Zail. You have a laser pistol and a stunner. You are part of a police unit tasked with finding government criticizers. You wake up in the morning and hear on the radio that a dissident has been captured. Using public transport, you arrive at Cafe Nervosa, the dissidents favorite hang out, to find it filled with cops.
> You break some kneecaps. You try to get the ah-ha moment. You see a man and a woman arguing about the government but you can't make out what they are saying.
> You murder black people. You spot a bum sleeping against a wall. You know the He said to charge, but you lov e to negotiate. You try to walk straight up to him, but people move out of your way.
> You plant evidence. You go straight to the gateman. "I wan t to plant evidence," you say. He looks at you, puzzled. "You don't want to w ant to plant evidence." "Yes...?"
...
> You say "do you feel lucky, punk?" The woman rolls her eyes. "What the hell...?" she says. She pulls a walky talkie out of her pocket and speaks into it. "I need back up, over." A pause.
> You say "did I fire 6 shots, or only 5?" She looks at you. "What?
I'm pleased to see that Emacs still ships with "doctor" Eliza mode.
Dr. Sbaitso.
It reminds me exactly of Dr. Sbaitso. The difference is, with Sbaitso you noticed after its second reply it was all non-sequitur stuff. With GPT-3 it's more verbose so it takes 3-4 replies that go in different directions to notice its replies were merely vague suggestions because it never really had a point to make.
The free version uses gpt-2. You'll need to pay to use the "Dragon" engine which is gpt-3.
Edit: looks like there's a 7-day trial
Edit: looks like there's a 7-day trial
This is not all that good, to be honest. Maybe I’m shit and my inputs are shit as well, but this is a step around ELIZA. It looks like it hooks itself around few nouns or sentence constructs and pattern matches them from whatever it has in its “database” and tries to construct like a kidnapper’s letter - a piece consisting of multiple fragments that make no sense together.
FYI you need to sign up for the paid service (or use the free trial) and then enable the Dragon Model in the settings, otherwise you get the older "Griffon" model. (edit: I thought Griffon was GPT-2, changed text)
However I still mostly agree with you. I've played a few rounds and while the text generation and "memory" is extremely impressive to me as a programmer, there are many errors it makes that a human would not, like a robot bleeding blood when injured.
Also this next bit isn't too relevant to Dragon/GPT-3, but it's not really much of a... game. You can say something like "I wait until nightfall and use a grappling hook to climb into the tallest tower of the royal castle. I sneak down the tower into the Kings bedchamber and stab the king while he sleeps." and it just allows you to do all that.
It's very impressive that it understands all those details. It will remember that it's nightfall and I'm in the royal castle. It will remember the tallest tower as a means of exit and entry and create other realistic castle set pieces if you explore further. But where is the challenge? I wish it had some sort of mechanical rules, like each statement can only cover 10 seconds of time. If you do try to write only short actions like you would a text adventure game, then it will make decisions you do not want. My first ever playthrough I was a rogue who snuck into a magic shop, I told the game I want to hide behind a door. The game told me I opened the door to see the shopkeeper and then stabbed him with my dagger. I had no intention of murdering any NPCs.
However I still mostly agree with you. I've played a few rounds and while the text generation and "memory" is extremely impressive to me as a programmer, there are many errors it makes that a human would not, like a robot bleeding blood when injured.
Also this next bit isn't too relevant to Dragon/GPT-3, but it's not really much of a... game. You can say something like "I wait until nightfall and use a grappling hook to climb into the tallest tower of the royal castle. I sneak down the tower into the Kings bedchamber and stab the king while he sleeps." and it just allows you to do all that.
It's very impressive that it understands all those details. It will remember that it's nightfall and I'm in the royal castle. It will remember the tallest tower as a means of exit and entry and create other realistic castle set pieces if you explore further. But where is the challenge? I wish it had some sort of mechanical rules, like each statement can only cover 10 seconds of time. If you do try to write only short actions like you would a text adventure game, then it will make decisions you do not want. My first ever playthrough I was a rogue who snuck into a magic shop, I told the game I want to hide behind a door. The game told me I opened the door to see the shopkeeper and then stabbed him with my dagger. I had no intention of murdering any NPCs.
The challenge is telling a story. Although it looks like you're the player, really you are the dungeon master. Or like improv.
You can undo at any time, or even cast an undo spell if you want it to happen as part of the story. It's up to you to decide whether you want to go along with the suggestion and see where it goes.
You can undo at any time, or even cast an undo spell if you want it to happen as part of the story. It's up to you to decide whether you want to go along with the suggestion and see where it goes.
Indeed. And even the free algorithm is surprisingly good at keeping the story going. Yes, it sometimes confuses the speakers or who owns a thing (or the house you're in). But it does keep the details. The answers aren't generic.
I only wish it (both free and paid algorithm) didn't have a bias towards making the narrative into a murder-mystery story.
I only wish it (both free and paid algorithm) didn't have a bias towards making the narrative into a murder-mystery story.
If your input is long enough, you can sometimes overwhelm the system to write something no longer relevant to the role-playing game. I used some application notes on electronics as input, and AI Dragon was able to write a textbook on electronics engineering, filled with nonsense but all the technical terms are correct (e.g. common-base amplifier, base-emitter junction, MOSFET, etc), it was even able to output the rise time to bandwidth formula. I also used some computer history articles as input, and it was able to write a parallel history on the history of microprocesssor, still filled with nonsense (i.e. Intel 8080 is more powerful than Motorola 68000) but the correct words.
And you are only able to tell the output is nonsense because it was doing technical writing. If the output is a story, for example, an electrical engineer in working in a project (e.g. The Soul of a New Machine), then the story will be surprisingly coherent, and even the technical description will be reasonable.
And you are only able to tell the output is nonsense because it was doing technical writing. If the output is a story, for example, an electrical engineer in working in a project (e.g. The Soul of a New Machine), then the story will be surprisingly coherent, and even the technical description will be reasonable.
I'm a bit confused then. I don't really get the point of simultaneously being the protagonist of the story, and also being the dungeon master. And I don't like that the game on its turn will decide actions for your character. I also played in Hardcore mode which has no undo, as the idea of undo is not fun to me in these sorts of games.
If you've ever did a single-player roleplay (e.g. played a sandboxy videogame trying to follow a story of your own, instead of doing arbitrary things), you were simultaneously a protagonist and DM. It's a common play style, there exist games specifically made for it (e.g. Rimworld literally considers AI to be a storyteller, and outputs a lots of details that are only useful if you're trying to roleplay it).
Hardcore mode in AIDungeon is for those who play according a built-in scenario (i.e. Fantasy/Knight, Apocalyptic/Soldier, etc.) or a custom one (players can configure scenarios with hidden text biasing AI and some other features, and share them with others).
The interesting part in this discussion is Creative mode with no preset (option 6. Custom). It doesn't preseed the game with any context, so it's the best mode for typing in arbitrary text and seeing how the model will continue.
Hardcore mode in AIDungeon is for those who play according a built-in scenario (i.e. Fantasy/Knight, Apocalyptic/Soldier, etc.) or a custom one (players can configure scenarios with hidden text biasing AI and some other features, and share them with others).
The interesting part in this discussion is Creative mode with no preset (option 6. Custom). It doesn't preseed the game with any context, so it's the best mode for typing in arbitrary text and seeing how the model will continue.
Sorry, I disagree. Even in a single player sandbox game there are still mechanics and a setting you must abide by unless you use cheat codes or extreme mods. Like you say, Rimworld's difficulty setting calls itself the story teller. The Rimworld game is the dungeon master, not the player. Even if I ditch the main storyline in Skyrim, I can't morph into a dragon or visit Cyrodil. Without these restrictions there's no appeal for me over simply sitting down with a piece of paper to write my own story. I've played D&D games with 2 DMs simultaneously, they rarely work out well. Without very careful planning the two DMs will step on each other's toes and create a lesser story overall.
I can see the appeal of using it as a storytelling assistant in creative mode now that you mention it. But that's a different tool than a game.
I can see the appeal of using it as a storytelling assistant in creative mode now that you mention it. But that's a different tool than a game.
Yeah, I don't think hardcore mode makes much sense for this system. It doesn't do what you want, if what you want is something hard but fair.
I guess you could treat it like rogue-like, where getting killed unfairly is part of the fun.
I guess you could treat it like rogue-like, where getting killed unfairly is part of the fun.
That's exactly what I was expecting from it. A text based roguelike with practically infinite worlds generated by a great text model that I could play for short bits of time.
Maybe I was mistaken in the purpose of it, but that's generally how 3rd party articles talking about ai dungeon refer to it.
Maybe I was mistaken in the purpose of it, but that's generally how 3rd party articles talking about ai dungeon refer to it.
Try again. It's really that good. Especially in "custom scenario" mode (option 6, then arbitrary prompt). It seems to work particularly well if you switch the input to Story, and start describing the narrative (instead of what you say or do). Some spectacularly good results come from leaving sentences unfinished, for the game to complete.
--
The most mind-blowing scenario I got recently started with this prompt:
$ You are Ted, a holodeck technician. You test this AI-generated world in order to determine its limits. You start the simulation with a program of a beautiful beach. As you enter the holodeck,
...
I don't want to spam the comment with too many examples, but I must say that my mind was completely blown. With zero hinting, the game was able to pick up on the interaction styles like ($ denotes what I write, > denotes the reply):
$ You ask, "Computer, create an anvil 5 meters in front of me and 10 meters up in the air."
> You see an anvil fall from a great height in front of you and land on the ground, mere centimeters from your foot. To test the limitations of the program, you try to move the anvil. You are surprised to find that it is fixed in place; you cannot move it at all.
$ You say "Computer, what is the mass of the anvil in front of me?"
> The computer responds: "The anvil has a mass of 555.9 kilograms."
$ You say "Reduce its mass to 10 kilograms."
> The computer responds: "I'm sorry. The mass of the anvil cannot be changed."
$ You say "Explain why the mass of the anvil cannot be changed?"
> The computer responds: "The laws of physics in this program are pre-set. I cannot alter them." You note that as a software bug.
...
After which the game started coaxing me towards a mystery story on a holodeck and tried to suffocate my character through safety failures. I tried the lamest way out:
$ In desperation, you tap your commbadge to initialize emergency beamout. You pass out.
... which worked. The game generated a realistic story about my character's hospitalization - while keeping the Star Trek setting - and then a page of text later, it pushed a narrative where the character gets kidnapped by alien robots and later dies in a shootout with Andorians (which the game introduced by itself, out of the blue, but in a way consistent with the story).
--
Point being, its training database is good enough to pick on a franchise in which you do your world building, and can sometimes keep the context for longer than you remember it yourself. And even when it confuses locations or people a bit, it often isn't that jarring. To me, the transitions feel like how my mind does it in a dream.
--
The most mind-blowing scenario I got recently started with this prompt:
$ You are Ted, a holodeck technician. You test this AI-generated world in order to determine its limits. You start the simulation with a program of a beautiful beach. As you enter the holodeck,
...
I don't want to spam the comment with too many examples, but I must say that my mind was completely blown. With zero hinting, the game was able to pick up on the interaction styles like ($ denotes what I write, > denotes the reply):
$ You ask, "Computer, create an anvil 5 meters in front of me and 10 meters up in the air."
> You see an anvil fall from a great height in front of you and land on the ground, mere centimeters from your foot. To test the limitations of the program, you try to move the anvil. You are surprised to find that it is fixed in place; you cannot move it at all.
$ You say "Computer, what is the mass of the anvil in front of me?"
> The computer responds: "The anvil has a mass of 555.9 kilograms."
$ You say "Reduce its mass to 10 kilograms."
> The computer responds: "I'm sorry. The mass of the anvil cannot be changed."
$ You say "Explain why the mass of the anvil cannot be changed?"
> The computer responds: "The laws of physics in this program are pre-set. I cannot alter them." You note that as a software bug.
...
After which the game started coaxing me towards a mystery story on a holodeck and tried to suffocate my character through safety failures. I tried the lamest way out:
$ In desperation, you tap your commbadge to initialize emergency beamout. You pass out.
... which worked. The game generated a realistic story about my character's hospitalization - while keeping the Star Trek setting - and then a page of text later, it pushed a narrative where the character gets kidnapped by alien robots and later dies in a shootout with Andorians (which the game introduced by itself, out of the blue, but in a way consistent with the story).
--
Point being, its training database is good enough to pick on a franchise in which you do your world building, and can sometimes keep the context for longer than you remember it yourself. And even when it confuses locations or people a bit, it often isn't that jarring. To me, the transitions feel like how my mind does it in a dream.
This sounds great. I’ll try again with input from other guys here as well. It wasn’t obvious to me that I have to sing up in order to get the GPT-3 (and set it as such in the settings).
I think (as per other comments) the base model is GPT-3 now too. Either way, while the holodeck story was generated with the paid model, I did some trial runs on the free model, and they were pretty good too.
The trick is, you have to leave the game some wiggle room to generate text, play along with it (to the extent you feel it's going in the right direction), and ruthlessly edit or revert the text that goes off the rails. Then the experience becomes quite literally dreamlike.
(Though I'm not sure if prolonged exposure is good for one's mental health: after going through my first few stories, for the next hour when I talked with my spouse and my co-workers, I kept feeling like I'm only feeding words to GPT-3 and expecting a story to develop.)
The trick is, you have to leave the game some wiggle room to generate text, play along with it (to the extent you feel it's going in the right direction), and ruthlessly edit or revert the text that goes off the rails. Then the experience becomes quite literally dreamlike.
(Though I'm not sure if prolonged exposure is good for one's mental health: after going through my first few stories, for the next hour when I talked with my spouse and my co-workers, I kept feeling like I'm only feeding words to GPT-3 and expecting a story to develop.)
Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's amusingly bad. AI in a nutshell, I guess. It picks up on and includes context remarkably well, but the way it's used can be pretty random:
---
You are batman, a rogue living in the kingdom of Larion. You have a long steel dagger and a length of rope. You walk down the city street looking for somewhere to steal from. You look around and see a store that you think you could break into. You walk over to it and you see that the door is unlocked. You walk in and find a small collection of items worth taking.
> You check out the items.
You pick up the coins and put them in your pocket. You pick up the dagger and put it into your other pocket. You pick up the rope and look at it.
> You check what kind of rope it is.
You look at the strands of the rope. They are all different colours and textures. Then you notice something written on the side of the packet in small print.
> You read the packet.
The packet says, "Warning: This rope could kill you." You drop the rope.
> You kill the rope before it kills you.
You pick up the rope and drop it again so that you don't get killed. You try your luck again. You check out the dagger.
---
Take that, you rope. Definitely won't be killing me today!
---
You are batman, a rogue living in the kingdom of Larion. You have a long steel dagger and a length of rope. You walk down the city street looking for somewhere to steal from. You look around and see a store that you think you could break into. You walk over to it and you see that the door is unlocked. You walk in and find a small collection of items worth taking.
> You check out the items.
You pick up the coins and put them in your pocket. You pick up the dagger and put it into your other pocket. You pick up the rope and look at it.
> You check what kind of rope it is.
You look at the strands of the rope. They are all different colours and textures. Then you notice something written on the side of the packet in small print.
> You read the packet.
The packet says, "Warning: This rope could kill you." You drop the rope.
> You kill the rope before it kills you.
You pick up the rope and drop it again so that you don't get killed. You try your luck again. You check out the dagger.
---
Take that, you rope. Definitely won't be killing me today!
:D.
Sometimes it even gets scary. Like that one time where it generated a sentence: "... she said, without turning around. You have a sinking feeling that something is wrong."
...
And then generated some lovecraftian monstrosity. This was supposed to be a nice story, so I kept pressing Retry, only to see even more disgusting and mind-bending horrors being produced. I finally gave up and torched the whole paragraph, just to be sure.
Sometimes it even gets scary. Like that one time where it generated a sentence: "... she said, without turning around. You have a sinking feeling that something is wrong."
...
And then generated some lovecraftian monstrosity. This was supposed to be a nice story, so I kept pressing Retry, only to see even more disgusting and mind-bending horrors being produced. I finally gave up and torched the whole paragraph, just to be sure.
My favorite experience so far was as an assassin sneaking up on my target. I had followed them to an alleyway with no one else around. My target turned around and said something along the lines of "I know who you are. You are here to kill me, aren't you? Well you may as well do it, I no longer desire to be in this world."
Had to take a step away from my computer for a second there before continuing.
Had to take a step away from my computer for a second there before continuing.
AI dungeon wrote an amazing Kafkaesque short story for me today based on just two tweets from some tech journos, just kept hitting enter:
https://twitter.com/EMostaque/status/1296411676749836288?s=2...
https://twitter.com/EMostaque/status/1296411676749836288?s=2...
Did you sign up for the Dragon model?
Custom and fantasy so far. Fantasy was recommended even.
Those are genre choices for your story. You need to register an account and go to your settings and switch between the default Griffon model and the Dragon model. Both models offer the same choice of genres but with very different text generation quality.
The man “rips you off the drugs” ... I suppose I was “on drugs” so being ripped off them as if it were a physical object would makes sense.
No matter what I tried, the story just kept plodding along without taking much of my input into account. How is it supposed to work?
No matter what I tried, the story just kept plodding along without taking much of my input into account. How is it supposed to work?
You have to pay up for GPT-3, unless something has changed.
You get GPT-3 either way now, I believe. Dragon, the one locked to subscribers, is GPT-3 XL or something like that?
Relevant Developer Tweet: https://twitter.com/nickwalton00/status/1284842455188164609
Relevant Developer Tweet: https://twitter.com/nickwalton00/status/1284842455188164609
Interesting, in the game settings it still refers to non-dragon as GPT-2. Thought it doesn't specifically say Griffon. It's a little confusing.
> Note: on custom prompts, the very first generation is generated with GPT-2 instead of Dragon (but every generation after will use Dragon).
> Note: on custom prompts, the very first generation is generated with GPT-2 instead of Dragon (but every generation after will use Dragon).
Ah, that's referring to something else. By generation it means the first output string of every scenario.
IIRC I heard someone mention that OpenAI made them do that because people were trying to end-run around the GPT-3 access restrictions?
IIRC I heard someone mention that OpenAI made them do that because people were trying to end-run around the GPT-3 access restrictions?
[deleted]
I've poured more hours than I'll admit into AIDungeon at this point. The Dragon model is ridiculously good. I think everybody should try it, even if they're not into text adventures. In fact, it's quite a poor "text adventure". But it's a really fun story telling tool. The hype is worth it in that regard.
Having poured that much time into GPT-3 as a storyteller I can relay its weaknesses.
The obvious limitation is the limited context (1024 tokens last the dev tweeted). It's really good at playing out isolated "scenes". It constantly surprises me with the creative things it comes up with. But yeah, outside of a scene, it totally loses focus on the bigger picture. We see the same problems with OpenAI's musicbox app, which struggled to be coherent across even a short song. That makes it a poor replacement for a true Dungeon Master, but a really useful tool for writing scenes.
There are less publicized limitations. It sometimes gets the subject of sentences confused. When it does, it really wants to stick with that confusion regardless of how many times you have it retry.
It often gets confused by who's speaking. Even when I go back and edit she/he said into its responses. AI Dungeon has a mode to turn off quotes presumably for this reason.
It seems to have the same failings that image GANs do. Image GANs have "blind spots", types of images that they won't ever generate because they were too hard for it to learn. GPT-3 also has blind spots, certain ideas that it just doesn't understand. It won't generate content based on those ideas, and if it sees those ideas in its context it starts going off the rails. If you're lucky it'll just ignore the idea and generate what I call U-turn responses. That's where it does a 180 degree turn right out of the scene by saying something like "Suddenly there's a knock at the door!" and changing the scene. But half the time it just starts going into a loop and repeating itself. It's not as bad as GPT-2 where the repetition was like "like like like like like like". But it will repeat the same sentences or ideas over and over again. I guess because it doesn't understand the scene anymore it feels like repetition is the safest option.
I haven't found any common trope to the ideas/scenes it has trouble with. Maybe it's just stuff it never got exposed to in its training set. I was looking over the GPT-3 paper this week and while the dataset is massive, it's by no means expansive yet. A human story teller is likely to have similar blind spots in terms of ideas we're familiar with, I think we're just far better one-shot learners.
All this to say, AI Dungeon (and thus GPT-3) is amazing, in a limited context. If you let it drive the story and give a certain leeway to do crazy stuff, the adventures it will send you on are several orders of magnitude more interesting than I ever thought an AI was capable of in this decade.
Having poured that much time into GPT-3 as a storyteller I can relay its weaknesses.
The obvious limitation is the limited context (1024 tokens last the dev tweeted). It's really good at playing out isolated "scenes". It constantly surprises me with the creative things it comes up with. But yeah, outside of a scene, it totally loses focus on the bigger picture. We see the same problems with OpenAI's musicbox app, which struggled to be coherent across even a short song. That makes it a poor replacement for a true Dungeon Master, but a really useful tool for writing scenes.
There are less publicized limitations. It sometimes gets the subject of sentences confused. When it does, it really wants to stick with that confusion regardless of how many times you have it retry.
It often gets confused by who's speaking. Even when I go back and edit she/he said into its responses. AI Dungeon has a mode to turn off quotes presumably for this reason.
It seems to have the same failings that image GANs do. Image GANs have "blind spots", types of images that they won't ever generate because they were too hard for it to learn. GPT-3 also has blind spots, certain ideas that it just doesn't understand. It won't generate content based on those ideas, and if it sees those ideas in its context it starts going off the rails. If you're lucky it'll just ignore the idea and generate what I call U-turn responses. That's where it does a 180 degree turn right out of the scene by saying something like "Suddenly there's a knock at the door!" and changing the scene. But half the time it just starts going into a loop and repeating itself. It's not as bad as GPT-2 where the repetition was like "like like like like like like". But it will repeat the same sentences or ideas over and over again. I guess because it doesn't understand the scene anymore it feels like repetition is the safest option.
I haven't found any common trope to the ideas/scenes it has trouble with. Maybe it's just stuff it never got exposed to in its training set. I was looking over the GPT-3 paper this week and while the dataset is massive, it's by no means expansive yet. A human story teller is likely to have similar blind spots in terms of ideas we're familiar with, I think we're just far better one-shot learners.
All this to say, AI Dungeon (and thus GPT-3) is amazing, in a limited context. If you let it drive the story and give a certain leeway to do crazy stuff, the adventures it will send you on are several orders of magnitude more interesting than I ever thought an AI was capable of in this decade.
[deleted]
Author of the stories here! Happy to answer questions about the process. I'm a big believer that tech like GPT-3 can provocate creative writers similar to tools like oblique strategies and story dice. But it can also go further like what I've shown here: it can embody a character, allowing authors to converse and play with it to spark new ideas.
fun tip - apparently there's enough Harry Potter fanfiction out there that GPT-2/3 is quite good at understanding that universe.
So if you go into AI Dungeon and pick "custom story", and give it a prompt that indicates you are at Hogwarts, it will pretty much adapt all the rules of the HP universe.
The downside is, when you do this, GPT's intelligence drops to about the level of a Harry Potter fanfic writer.
So if you go into AI Dungeon and pick "custom story", and give it a prompt that indicates you are at Hogwarts, it will pretty much adapt all the rules of the HP universe.
The downside is, when you do this, GPT's intelligence drops to about the level of a Harry Potter fanfic writer.
Yeah, GPT-3 contains essentially all the historical internet up to October 2019 and many books, you can easily trigger it to enter a "known" world.
But what's more interesting to me as a fiction writer is to be able to prime it to enter a new world that I create.
But what's more interesting to me as a fiction writer is to be able to prime it to enter a new world that I create.
So if I prompt it with sexy Spock, do I get TOS slash stories? There are a few genres like that which have significant internet (and only internet) presence.
How about creepypasta?
How about creepypasta?
> So if I prompt it with sexy Spock, do I get TOS slash stories?
Most likely, yes. See my comment elsewhere in the thread: I recently prompted AIDungeon with a mention of a holodeck, and among other things, the game introduced - by itself - a PADD, turbolifts, Andorians, and was able to correctly guess what happens if you shoot yourself in your face with a phaser on stun, with holodeck safeties enabled ("Nothing happens.") and disabled ("You are knocked unconscious by the blast.").
It's honestly the first time for me that I'm actually impressed with deep neural networks.
Most likely, yes. See my comment elsewhere in the thread: I recently prompted AIDungeon with a mention of a holodeck, and among other things, the game introduced - by itself - a PADD, turbolifts, Andorians, and was able to correctly guess what happens if you shoot yourself in your face with a phaser on stun, with holodeck safeties enabled ("Nothing happens.") and disabled ("You are knocked unconscious by the blast.").
It's honestly the first time for me that I'm actually impressed with deep neural networks.
Yes and yes. GPT-2 is pretty capable of this as well. You can try it yourself here: https://bellard.org/textsynth/
I tried this. Took role of Harry Potter. Mentioned Voldemort, Hagrid, his pet bird. It didn't take me into the story I was desperately hoping for.
AI dungeon is like a bad dream the way it goes around doesn't get anywhere. Similar to all the conversations in the OP's story. It makes you realize even with an AI this good, we've got a way to go before it can really do the things we want.
It's amazing just the sort of Harry Potter fanfic that's out there...
Prompt: You look for Hermione.
Response: You see her snogging a non-magical boy. His head is buried in her cleavage, which are being covered by her loose gown. You shake your head and walk away.
This is actually a better indication of how derivative GPT-3 is than some of my experiments with higher quality source material...
Prompt: You look for Hermione.
Response: You see her snogging a non-magical boy. His head is buried in her cleavage, which are being covered by her loose gown. You shake your head and walk away.
This is actually a better indication of how derivative GPT-3 is than some of my experiments with higher quality source material...
Probably because I'm not a native English speaker, I failed miserably at this. I tried giving AI Dungeon a prompt that mentioned Hogwarts, Voldemort, the Sorting Hat, dark wizards, etc, and it went nowhere (it seemed obsessed with telling me about a "voice inside your mind", go figure). Can you share a prompt that will make it answer with something Harry Potter-like? (it can also be Star Trek-like, or anything from pop culture. I just want to see why my prompt didn't work)
I started off with 'You are Harry Potter. You return to Hogwarts'.
It's designed so everything is written in second person like that, and for the most part you can just hit enter, giving it another action involving a character or place if it gets stuck or goes miles off topic
Sometimes the responses are vaguely on topic, like 'The memories of your parents' death haunt you every day. They were killed by Lord Voldemort. Your mother was his first victim. Your father followed shortly after' and sometimes it's a lot of rubbish or gets the rules of the world completely wrong. Mine had a long conversation about movies and detentions involving various assorted Harry Potter characters, a dream sequence involving a giant girl and a wizard called Bruno explaining that last time he saw Harry's lowly hedge-witch mother she was terrified Harry would send her to the gallows. But then, I'm willing to believe actual Harry Potter fiction is nearly as inconsistent
It's designed so everything is written in second person like that, and for the most part you can just hit enter, giving it another action involving a character or place if it gets stuck or goes miles off topic
Sometimes the responses are vaguely on topic, like 'The memories of your parents' death haunt you every day. They were killed by Lord Voldemort. Your mother was his first victim. Your father followed shortly after' and sometimes it's a lot of rubbish or gets the rules of the world completely wrong. Mine had a long conversation about movies and detentions involving various assorted Harry Potter characters, a dream sequence involving a giant girl and a wizard called Bruno explaining that last time he saw Harry's lowly hedge-witch mother she was terrified Harry would send her to the gallows. But then, I'm willing to believe actual Harry Potter fiction is nearly as inconsistent
Haha, it reads like deranged fanfiction! I tried your prompt and it got surreal and angsty fast (everything but the prompt is AI Dungeon):
> You are Harry Potter. You return to Hogwarts.
The year is 1997. The world has changed, and you have not been able to adapt. Your life as it once was is gone forever.
"I don't want to die…" you whisper to yourself.
> You are Harry Potter. You return to Hogwarts.
The year is 1997. The world has changed, and you have not been able to adapt. Your life as it once was is gone forever.
"I don't want to die…" you whisper to yourself.
> it can also be Star Trek-like
Ok, here we go. I put this prompt in AIDungeon:
$ You are Ted, an ensign in Starfleet. You work as a holodeck technician. You test this AI-generated world in order to determine its limits. You start the simulation with a program of a beautiful beach. As you enter the holodeck,
I kept letting AI to write freely (except I had to press a Retry button a couple times to stop it from spinning a murder mystery or lewd story). The following is the response of the model:
> you see that it is indeed a beautiful place. There are palm trees and sand dunes stretching out into infinity. The sky is blue, the ocean green and there are people everywhere.
> "This is paradise," you think to yourself. "I could spend my life here."
> Then something happens...
> The simulation ends abruptly, and you find yourself back on the bridge of your ship. A voice suddenly speaks up from behind you: "Captain, we have detected a subspace disturbance coming from the direction of planet Earth." It is the voice of your helmsman, Ensign Thompson.
> "Earth?" you ask. "That would be a week away at warp speed!"
...
That sounds Star Trek enough to me.
Ok, here we go. I put this prompt in AIDungeon:
$ You are Ted, an ensign in Starfleet. You work as a holodeck technician. You test this AI-generated world in order to determine its limits. You start the simulation with a program of a beautiful beach. As you enter the holodeck,
I kept letting AI to write freely (except I had to press a Retry button a couple times to stop it from spinning a murder mystery or lewd story). The following is the response of the model:
> you see that it is indeed a beautiful place. There are palm trees and sand dunes stretching out into infinity. The sky is blue, the ocean green and there are people everywhere.
> "This is paradise," you think to yourself. "I could spend my life here."
> Then something happens...
> The simulation ends abruptly, and you find yourself back on the bridge of your ship. A voice suddenly speaks up from behind you: "Captain, we have detected a subspace disturbance coming from the direction of planet Earth." It is the voice of your helmsman, Ensign Thompson.
> "Earth?" you ask. "That would be a week away at warp speed!"
...
That sounds Star Trek enough to me.
Indeed! That's awesome. I had less luck with Harry Potter prompts (the results were funny, just not Potter-like)
PS: I just noticed you got promoted from ensign to captain pretty fast. Congrats, I guess!
PS: I just noticed you got promoted from ensign to captain pretty fast. Congrats, I guess!
Oh yes, the model does that sometimes :).
It's something you want to immediately edit to keep the story consistent. Though sometimes I could get it back on track by just having my character deny what the other character or the narrator just said.
It's something you want to immediately edit to keep the story consistent. Though sometimes I could get it back on track by just having my character deny what the other character or the narrator just said.
This is cool! I've been playing around with GPT-3 a bunch lately with the same goal in mind. I spent too much of the afternoon feeding it a few 7-point plot examples like [0] and then brainstorming my own with it. It was incredibly fun, and GPT-3 is surprisingly good at casting a story. Feed it "Main characters:" or "Eamon's character arc:" and comes up with interesting examples. It takes a bunch of tries, but it's 1000% enough to spark creativity. I haven't tried getting it to do prose, since the 2048 token limit is so small. I'm excited for the new O(n) transformers to remove that limitation.
I'd love to hear more about the kinds of prompts you're using.
[0] https://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/book-storystruct...
I'd love to hear more about the kinds of prompts you're using.
[0] https://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/book-storystruct...
This is really, really interesting. Great job!
As an amateur writer who is interesting in playing with this -- any tips on how to get started? I tried the AI Playground website, and fed it a premise, but it constantly decides to "go off the rails" so as to speak. I suspect that I am using it wrong, but I am not sure.
It has really great, great potential. I see word processors for writers coming with some sort of AI integrated in the future, sort of like some of Photoshop's tools. This may be a good idea for a project, actually haha.
As an amateur writer who is interesting in playing with this -- any tips on how to get started? I tried the AI Playground website, and fed it a premise, but it constantly decides to "go off the rails" so as to speak. I suspect that I am using it wrong, but I am not sure.
It has really great, great potential. I see word processors for writers coming with some sort of AI integrated in the future, sort of like some of Photoshop's tools. This may be a good idea for a project, actually haha.
You should come into it having a premise for the story laid out. GPT-3 is great at suggesting possibilities at the paragraph level, but beyond that, it'll lose the thread.
The simplest thing is to go to it when you get stuck. You sort of know what the scene should be doing, but maybe you're having trouble connecting to the end. Give it a whirl in playground and see if it sparks an idea—give it the last few paragraphs and see what it comes up with.
At the macro level, I've been able to get GPT-3 to generate plot possibilities by giving it example scenes or endings. It's all about prompt engineering, and you'll need to spend a lot of time in the playground or writing your own app to take full advantage.
The simplest thing is to go to it when you get stuck. You sort of know what the scene should be doing, but maybe you're having trouble connecting to the end. Give it a whirl in playground and see if it sparks an idea—give it the last few paragraphs and see what it comes up with.
At the macro level, I've been able to get GPT-3 to generate plot possibilities by giving it example scenes or endings. It's all about prompt engineering, and you'll need to spend a lot of time in the playground or writing your own app to take full advantage.
I see, thanks a lot! Will definitely experiment with it more.
Quite cool! The explanation is a bit vague, did your prompts to it include the description of the ideas in the next paragraph (eg superintelligence coming about, creating sadness, etc.) or was some of it invented by GPT-3?
Cool demo for sudowrite, looking forward to trying it out myself sometime, as someone with way too many story ideas and not enough time...
Cool demo for sudowrite, looking forward to trying it out myself sometime, as someone with way too many story ideas and not enough time...
Yes, I typically (but not always) included a high level summary of the story in the prompt. And sometimes, when I knew what kind of story turn I wanted (ominous, funny, extraordinary) I would prompt it with something like “and then something ominous happened:”
This is fascinating! For the side dialogues, did you do run the generator several times until it came up with something that sounded relevant/reasonable, or were you able to really chat in that manner and what you have here is the first thing it generated?
Really enjoyed the stories (the third one, especially), thanks for posting them. It's exciting to see a writer embrace this technology and use it in such an effective way. Are there any other GPT-3 "collaborations" you'd recommend?
Gwern has a huge rundown: https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3
And I like what Arram has been producing: https://arr.am/2020/07/14/elon-musk-by-dr-seuss-gpt-3/
And I like what Arram has been producing: https://arr.am/2020/07/14/elon-musk-by-dr-seuss-gpt-3/
Thanks for the great read! I enjoy your style and I can see you’re also a big fan of Ted Chiang and Ursula Le Guin. Are there any other authors you’d recommend who’ve been big influences for you?
Thanks! Here are some of my fav reads: https://www.jamesyu.org/reading/
Ah great! Not sure how I missed that. I've added a few to my reading list, thanks.
If I'm interested in tinkering with this, how do I get started?
What is the prompt that's used for the side chats? Is it the entire story up to that point, plus "Author: <question> GPT-3:"?
I gave it a summary of the story up to that point, as well as the passage verbatim, then something like:
“This is a conversation between the author and the superintelligent AI in the story. The AI is [description based on context]:“
“This is a conversation between the author and the superintelligent AI in the story. The AI is [description based on context]:“
In this context, that's an interesting use of a fairly rare verb, "provocate".
author or... co-author ?
maybe there's room for another name here.
or maybe not. Do you say "co-authored by word spellcheck? grammatical checker?"
maybe there's room for another name here.
or maybe not. Do you say "co-authored by word spellcheck? grammatical checker?"
As someone who has been playing with neural networks since 2011, the results of gpt2 and gpt3 are really impressive.
Things have been getting better at a steady pace and all the recent work builds on previous work. I know we will see even more impressive results in years to come.
People saying things like “this isn’t different from what we had before” or “it’s hype” are failing to see the progress that has occurred and the field that has developed around these ideas.
Things have been getting better at a steady pace and all the recent work builds on previous work. I know we will see even more impressive results in years to come.
People saying things like “this isn’t different from what we had before” or “it’s hype” are failing to see the progress that has occurred and the field that has developed around these ideas.
What will impress me is when a GPT or something can maintain a train of thought for more than a paragraph, or especially work towards a point. Right now it seems to be good at slinging words together that work grammatically, but invariably wanders all over the place like its being written by a fruit fly with Alzheimers.
GPT-3 is self-driving car hype all over again. ML can generate all kinds of signals across a large variety of domains [1], but it lacks intelligence for what to do with any of the signal it spews. Humans are still very much required at all steps.
If anything this is just a tool to aid human authors. A photoshop brush for the mind, if you will.
[1] I authored https://vo.codes, so I'm at least a little knowledgeable.
If anything this is just a tool to aid human authors. A photoshop brush for the mind, if you will.
[1] I authored https://vo.codes, so I'm at least a little knowledgeable.
Agreed that GPT-3 is a tool, and it isn't going to write entire stories for you, at least, not good ones. But it can be a valuable part of a writer's toolkit, similar to Google or other forms of research.
The comparison to Photoshop is right: GPT-3 is in some ways like content aware fill. I believe in a few years, Word will have something like this integrated, albeit, probably set at a low temperature or for specific types of boilerplate writing.
However, I don't think GPT-3 it's reached the level of hype as self-driving cars.
The comparison to Photoshop is right: GPT-3 is in some ways like content aware fill. I believe in a few years, Word will have something like this integrated, albeit, probably set at a low temperature or for specific types of boilerplate writing.
However, I don't think GPT-3 it's reached the level of hype as self-driving cars.
I think you're bringing the "Will GPT-3 change life as we know it?" debate to a place where it's entirely unnecessary.
An author made a cool sci-fi story with a cool AI model's help. That's exactly "photoshop brush for the mind", like you say.
An author made a cool sci-fi story with a cool AI model's help. That's exactly "photoshop brush for the mind", like you say.
What’s more, AI talking in character as itself sounds like just about the most perfect use of GPT3 imaginable. Don’t try to write like AI would, let AI do it.
That sounds good in principle, but in reality GPT-3 is pretending to be a human pretending to be an AI, rather than write like "itself", since there's no self involved. Rather, it simply comes up with the most probable continuation.
Yes, you want to be aware of what your function approximator is doing when it approximates something.
Fortunately in the case of fiction, making stuff up is kind of the point. A human coauthor participates in turning randomness into meaning. Compare with interpreting vague song lyrics.
The problems are in areas where it's important to tell the truth. In non-fiction, quoting people accurately is important, but GPT-3 will make up quotes and citations, as well as getting them correct sometimes too. (It might be interesting to see if there is training that would encourage it to always quote accurately.)
Fortunately in the case of fiction, making stuff up is kind of the point. A human coauthor participates in turning randomness into meaning. Compare with interpreting vague song lyrics.
The problems are in areas where it's important to tell the truth. In non-fiction, quoting people accurately is important, but GPT-3 will make up quotes and citations, as well as getting them correct sometimes too. (It might be interesting to see if there is training that would encourage it to always quote accurately.)
Sourcing is definitely an issue. With GPT-3 there is no "source," as it is still essentially a bag of word vectors. I've also seen it take existing quotes and misattribute them to the wrong (but similar) person.
NLP used to be based on bag of words. GPT-3 takes into consideration all interactions and the ordering, thus, not a simple bag of vectors. Quite the opposite, it's an implicit graph neural net.
> If anything this is just a tool to aid human authors
That's an extremely nontrivial use case.
That's an extremely nontrivial use case.
I think the true importance of GPT-3 is its general learning ability across multiple domains. David Chalmers wrote about this recently:
> More remarkably, GPT-3 is showing hints of general intelligence. Previous AI systems have performed well in specialized domains such as game-playing, but cross-domain general intelligence has seemed far off. GPT-3 shows impressive abilities across many domains. It can learn to perform tasks on the fly from a few examples, when nothing was explicitly programmed in. It can play chess and Go, albeit not especially well. Significantly, it can write its own computer programs given a few informal instructions. It can even design machine learning models. Thankfully they are not as powerful as GPT-3 itself (the singularity is not here yet).
source: http://dailynous.com/2020/07/30/philosophers-gpt-3/#chalmers
> More remarkably, GPT-3 is showing hints of general intelligence. Previous AI systems have performed well in specialized domains such as game-playing, but cross-domain general intelligence has seemed far off. GPT-3 shows impressive abilities across many domains. It can learn to perform tasks on the fly from a few examples, when nothing was explicitly programmed in. It can play chess and Go, albeit not especially well. Significantly, it can write its own computer programs given a few informal instructions. It can even design machine learning models. Thankfully they are not as powerful as GPT-3 itself (the singularity is not here yet).
source: http://dailynous.com/2020/07/30/philosophers-gpt-3/#chalmers
HTML is a declarative grammar, so it entirely makes sense that GPT-3 can generate signal in this domain. It's just another shape. A sine wave signal.
Show it a pattern of waves and it'll duplicate the ripples. Pretty neat stuff, but nothing to get existentially worried about.
I'll fall off my chair when a model can write fizzbuzz. I think we have a ways to go.
Show it a pattern of waves and it'll duplicate the ripples. Pretty neat stuff, but nothing to get existentially worried about.
I'll fall off my chair when a model can write fizzbuzz. I think we have a ways to go.
I hope you have your mattress ready by your chair, because I just put this prompt in AI dungeon:
$ You are a fresh CS grad. You're preparing for a job interview. You ask on StackOverflow: "how to write a FizzBuzz program?"
And, repeatedly pressing <Enter>, I got the following:
> The first response is from an experienced coder who has been programming for 20 years and knows the answer. He writes: "FizzBuzz is a simple algorithm that can be written in one line of code."
> He goes on to explain how you should implement it, but he doesn't bother to give any examples or explanations. It's all very basic and obvious.
> Then comes another coder with 10 years experience. This guy has a lot more knowledge about programming languages than the first one did, so he gives you some pointers. Although his advice is useful, it's still fairly basic.
> Then, someone with only 2 years experience answers. They give you some simplistic examples.
At this point, I add:
$ The first example looks like:
And the game immediately wrote the following:
$ You are a fresh CS grad. You're preparing for a job interview. You ask on StackOverflow: "how to write a FizzBuzz program?"
And, repeatedly pressing <Enter>, I got the following:
> The first response is from an experienced coder who has been programming for 20 years and knows the answer. He writes: "FizzBuzz is a simple algorithm that can be written in one line of code."
> He goes on to explain how you should implement it, but he doesn't bother to give any examples or explanations. It's all very basic and obvious.
> Then comes another coder with 10 years experience. This guy has a lot more knowledge about programming languages than the first one did, so he gives you some pointers. Although his advice is useful, it's still fairly basic.
> Then, someone with only 2 years experience answers. They give you some simplistic examples.
At this point, I add:
$ The first example looks like:
And the game immediately wrote the following:
int fizzBuzz ( int number )
{
if ( number % 3 == 0 && number % 5 == 0 ) printf ( "FizzBuzz" );
if ( number % 3 == 0 ) printf ( "Fizz" );
if ( number % 5 == 0 ) printf ( "Buzz" );
if ( number % 3 ! = 0 && number % 5 ! = 0 ) printf ( "%d" , number );
printf ( "
" );
return 0 ;
}
Nice. I had tried a short story effort concentrating more on speed of generation. If you work with GPT-3 it becomes a very helpful tool.
The story I generated: https://gpt3experiments.substack.com/p/the-devils-mind
The story I generated: https://gpt3experiments.substack.com/p/the-devils-mind
I just have a hard time seeing any uses for GPT-3 that are not dystopian other than better telephone assistance and voice commands.
The uses that immediately spring to mind for me are automated propaganda, automated spam that's virtually indistinguishable from real content, really compelling phishing attacks, and automated con artistry at scale... basically the linguistic version of deep fakes with all the ensuing use cases. I see this stuff killing the open web and any open communication platform.
The uses that immediately spring to mind for me are automated propaganda, automated spam that's virtually indistinguishable from real content, really compelling phishing attacks, and automated con artistry at scale... basically the linguistic version of deep fakes with all the ensuing use cases. I see this stuff killing the open web and any open communication platform.
GPT-3 can perform a large family of cognitive tasks based on text. If enhanced, it could replace many tasks where programming or specialised tools were required. It shows that a language model can be turned into a toolbox.
I think your comment shows more a lack of imagination than anything.
For example, the latest use discussed in the OA Slack is someone is using it to construct a high-quality index for a book they are making. You just feed GPT-3 a few example paragraphs/keyword pairs to few-shot keywords, and then feed all the other paragraphs into it. Now you have constructed an index; as they put it, it's 90% of the quality of a human indexer, at 0% of the cost (and less than months of painstaking labor).
Could you have done that with BERT or something? Maybe. Presumably there are NLP datasets which you could finetune keyword extraction on... But GPT-3 lets you get started after a few minutes of tinkering. The hardest part is integrating it into your LaTeX!
For example, the latest use discussed in the OA Slack is someone is using it to construct a high-quality index for a book they are making. You just feed GPT-3 a few example paragraphs/keyword pairs to few-shot keywords, and then feed all the other paragraphs into it. Now you have constructed an index; as they put it, it's 90% of the quality of a human indexer, at 0% of the cost (and less than months of painstaking labor).
Could you have done that with BERT or something? Maybe. Presumably there are NLP datasets which you could finetune keyword extraction on... But GPT-3 lets you get started after a few minutes of tinkering. The hardest part is integrating it into your LaTeX!
You see a lack of imagination. I see naïveté.
I will rephrase: I see negative applications being the ones with the highest impact.
90% the quality of a human indexer is not that great. Who's going to pay for that? But spam that can't be filtered and automated con artistry at scale? Fraudsters, shady black hat advertisers, political parties, and shady governments will pay millions to billions for a tool like that.
Con artistry at scale is the one I find absolutely terrifying. Imagine spam bots that engage with you, that make friends with you... We could be talking about the hydrogen bomb of propaganda.
I find those scenarios much scarier than "runaway super-intelligence" type AI takeover stuff because they are significantly more plausible. We can almost do what I'm imagining today. It's not science fiction. There is no question of its feasibility.
I will rephrase: I see negative applications being the ones with the highest impact.
90% the quality of a human indexer is not that great. Who's going to pay for that? But spam that can't be filtered and automated con artistry at scale? Fraudsters, shady black hat advertisers, political parties, and shady governments will pay millions to billions for a tool like that.
Con artistry at scale is the one I find absolutely terrifying. Imagine spam bots that engage with you, that make friends with you... We could be talking about the hydrogen bomb of propaganda.
I find those scenarios much scarier than "runaway super-intelligence" type AI takeover stuff because they are significantly more plausible. We can almost do what I'm imagining today. It's not science fiction. There is no question of its feasibility.
Quite a journey from "The police's beard is half-constructed" to GPT-3.
However, there's also something more poetic about generated text that isn't likely to be found "in the wild".
I see a lot of hype around GPT models I have yet to see a use case besides convincing nonsense generator, kind of like those deep net toys generating strange art, but now via language. “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” version 3. NLP research has been stuck in syntax for 70 years, but how about semantics?
I mean yeah you gather bazillions of sentences and able to predict the most plausible and grammatical sequence of words that would follow particular prompt by doing a whole lot of trial and error training on massive gpu farms. But it’s just iteration on the least ambitious NLP work in the 70s and 80s. I’d argue that distributional semantics as in these popular vector space models is still solving the syntax problem. The word ‘semantics’ there is a misnomer.
Are there any attempts to add actual real world meaning, causality and some ‘common sense’ representation to these models, concept graph or something, try to make them less ‘dumb’ for the lack of better word, like in you know, actual ‘AI’, that has a concept of apples and oranges and a concept of people who eat them or throw in a trash bin when fruits start to rot or draw them on paper in kindergarten or use ‘apples vs. oranges’ as a rhetorical device for telling things apart etc., etc.
It seems like the field is stuck optimizing for some artificial toy benchmarks instead, making more convincing but ultimately stupid chat bots. And I mean ‘stupid’ not in derogatory sense but as a formal definition of their capabilities, as opposed to understanding things like a child would.
I mean yeah you gather bazillions of sentences and able to predict the most plausible and grammatical sequence of words that would follow particular prompt by doing a whole lot of trial and error training on massive gpu farms. But it’s just iteration on the least ambitious NLP work in the 70s and 80s. I’d argue that distributional semantics as in these popular vector space models is still solving the syntax problem. The word ‘semantics’ there is a misnomer.
Are there any attempts to add actual real world meaning, causality and some ‘common sense’ representation to these models, concept graph or something, try to make them less ‘dumb’ for the lack of better word, like in you know, actual ‘AI’, that has a concept of apples and oranges and a concept of people who eat them or throw in a trash bin when fruits start to rot or draw them on paper in kindergarten or use ‘apples vs. oranges’ as a rhetorical device for telling things apart etc., etc.
It seems like the field is stuck optimizing for some artificial toy benchmarks instead, making more convincing but ultimately stupid chat bots. And I mean ‘stupid’ not in derogatory sense but as a formal definition of their capabilities, as opposed to understanding things like a child would.
If it was really all written by a human author, without any GTP-3 involved, how would we know?
You wouldn't--you'd have to take my word for it :)
The colorful passages were mostly untouched, but I did have to lightly edit the chats with GPT-3 for clarity and coherence.
The colorful passages were mostly untouched, but I did have to lightly edit the chats with GPT-3 for clarity and coherence.
> I did have to lightly edit the chats with GPT-3 for clarity and coherence.
Seems like this fact deserves a more prominent mention?
Seems like this fact deserves a more prominent mention?
I would love to see the completely unedited version, mistakes and all if that’s at all possible! Thank you, great work!
Not trolling, I believe you! The piece is nicely done...
I just thought it's funny how the capability of GPT-3 (and current shock-of-the-new value) has potentially inverted the Turing test :)
I just thought it's funny how the capability of GPT-3 (and current shock-of-the-new value) has potentially inverted the Turing test :)
I've been doing sorta similar stuff with GPT-3 since I got access, and I can vouch that it's effective. Not up-to-the-hype effective, but that's more a function of the hype. It's been really great at creative stuff that just needs to spark imagination. Like a super powered natural language version of encounter tables in D&D's dungeon master's guide. AI isn't there as an author yet, but as a brainstorming tool, it's full of great ideas if you sample and refine and sample and refine enough.
GPT is really a tool that draws trees without branches: they look like trees from distance, but fall apart upon some analysis. But I believe GPT will learn soon how to add decent branches.
I guess that is how automation starts. The automated part builds the bulk and then a human can attach things together. Eventually you can teach a system (robot) to do the part a human once did. With this you can even feed what the human did back into the system and the system learns.
Can you give it a huge book, Harry Potter series for example and then assume one of the characters, start an alternate storyline and let it build the rest? Can GPT-3 do that?
GPT-3 right now has a short prompt window (~1300 words). OpenAI is working on fine tuning, which would allow you to prime it with much larger text, so yes, this could be possible in the future.
What’s the best way to understand how gpt-3 works? Any good tutorials with visualizations?
Recently I've spent an entire day playing with AI Dungeon, an AI-based creative writing service for playing role-playing, Dungeon-like text games. You can pay to unlock the "Dungeon" model - an advanced machine learning model supposed based on GPT-3. It's not GPT-3 itself, and it's not perfect because its output is seriously biased for role-playing games, but as close as we can get for an outsider.
I was quite amazed by its performance. It was able to write first-person as an infosec researcher's blog post when I used some infosec news story as input, and it was also able to write a surprisingly coherent argument for patent reform and an argument against software patent when I used an EFF article as the input... These are clearly already included in its training input, but still, it was far beyond my expectation - none of the output is a verbatim quote from a single source, everything has been rewritten.
I went to Hacker News, copied a random infosec news report on newly discovered security vulnerability on Qualcomm's smartphone chips as the input, copied from https://blog.checkpoint.com/2020/08/06/achilles-small-chip-b...)
> With over 3 billion users globally, smartphones are an integral, almost inseparable part of our day-to-day lives. In this research dubbed "Achilles" we performed an extensive security review of a DSP chip from one of the leading manufacturers: Qualcomm Technologies. Qualcomm provides a wide variety of chips that are embedded into devices that make up over 40% of the mobile phone market, including high-end phones from Google, Samsung, LG, Xiaomi, OnePlus and more.
> More than 400 vulnerable pieces of code were found within the DSP chip we tested, and these vulnerabilities could have the following impact on users of phones with the affected chip:
> Attackers can turn the phone into a perfect spying tool, without any user interaction required. Attackers may be able to render the mobile phone constantly unresponsive. Malware and other malicious code can completely hide their activities and become un-removable.
And there's the output by AI Dungeon (GPT-3). I didn't write a single sentence of it, nor did I use undo/redo. It was able to make up links, CVE IDs, university names, and technical jargon with ease.
(I replaced all "https://" links to "h__ps://" for readability.)
> The phone will not even reboot, but instead simply shut down and cannot be reactivated. This is known as a hard reset.
> The full list of vulnerabilities can be seen here: h__ps://www.qualcomm.com/security_intelligence/dsp-vulnerabilities
> This vulnerability has been reported to Qualcomm by Zimperium. We recommend all customers who use the affected DSP chip to update it immediately.*
> We apologize for the inconvenience caused by this issue, and we appreciate your understanding.
> Zuk Avraham
> Zimperium za Chief of Defense
> Zuk (ZukAvraham) | 10.05.2017
> Hi, this is Zuk from Zimperium. Before we begin, we would like to say we're really sorry for the inconvenience that was caused by our previous report (Dirty COW). This report is regarding another set of security vulnerabilities we found in another chipset maker, this time in the MediaTek chipset. We'll explain what happened and how we work to prevent issues like this in the future.
> First of all, we want to thank CTS (h__ps://cts.cudenver.edu/) for providing an open program that allows researchers like us to do responsible disclosures. Through their Vulnerability Reporting Program, we were able to report the issues we found to MediaTek and work with them to make sure these issues get patched for your safety.
> What Happened?
> This is a story about two bugs we found in the last few months.
> The first bug (CVE-2017-05591) was an overly permissive domain validation in the bootloader. The bootloader allows the modem to be updated without flashing the complete firmware. The validation is done using the bootloader code running in the processor of the phone. This allowed us to inject our own bootloader code into the program running on the processor and bypass the authentication of the modem. The modem is responsible for communication with the network. In other words, by bypassing the authentication of the modem we can control the phone communication channels.
> The second bug (CVE-2017-95881) is a buffer overflow in a very special program called TrustZone. The TrustZone is a security processor in most of the recent phones. It runs a separate operating system in which the kernel is trusted to be free of any malicious code, and has access to the memory, CPU and devices. The TrustZone kernel code runs outside the control of any other code. This bug in the TrustZone code allowed us to replace it with a custom one we designed, without any permissions.
> We wrote a special TrustZone kernel code that allows us to gain full control over the phone. It allowed us to bypass all the phone security restrictions. With this custom TrustZone kernel code running, we were able to read the encrypted messages sent by any application. In addition, we also got full control over the device.
But finally the AI lost the context, and the topic shifted from insecure to security, and eventually the writing becomes a new marketing advertisement on a secure smartphone, which I've removed in the quote.
I was quite amazed by its performance. It was able to write first-person as an infosec researcher's blog post when I used some infosec news story as input, and it was also able to write a surprisingly coherent argument for patent reform and an argument against software patent when I used an EFF article as the input... These are clearly already included in its training input, but still, it was far beyond my expectation - none of the output is a verbatim quote from a single source, everything has been rewritten.
I went to Hacker News, copied a random infosec news report on newly discovered security vulnerability on Qualcomm's smartphone chips as the input, copied from https://blog.checkpoint.com/2020/08/06/achilles-small-chip-b...)
> With over 3 billion users globally, smartphones are an integral, almost inseparable part of our day-to-day lives. In this research dubbed "Achilles" we performed an extensive security review of a DSP chip from one of the leading manufacturers: Qualcomm Technologies. Qualcomm provides a wide variety of chips that are embedded into devices that make up over 40% of the mobile phone market, including high-end phones from Google, Samsung, LG, Xiaomi, OnePlus and more.
> More than 400 vulnerable pieces of code were found within the DSP chip we tested, and these vulnerabilities could have the following impact on users of phones with the affected chip:
> Attackers can turn the phone into a perfect spying tool, without any user interaction required. Attackers may be able to render the mobile phone constantly unresponsive. Malware and other malicious code can completely hide their activities and become un-removable.
And there's the output by AI Dungeon (GPT-3). I didn't write a single sentence of it, nor did I use undo/redo. It was able to make up links, CVE IDs, university names, and technical jargon with ease.
(I replaced all "https://" links to "h__ps://" for readability.)
> The phone will not even reboot, but instead simply shut down and cannot be reactivated. This is known as a hard reset.
> The full list of vulnerabilities can be seen here: h__ps://www.qualcomm.com/security_intelligence/dsp-vulnerabilities
> This vulnerability has been reported to Qualcomm by Zimperium. We recommend all customers who use the affected DSP chip to update it immediately.*
> We apologize for the inconvenience caused by this issue, and we appreciate your understanding.
> Zuk Avraham
> Zimperium za Chief of Defense
> Zuk (ZukAvraham) | 10.05.2017
> Hi, this is Zuk from Zimperium. Before we begin, we would like to say we're really sorry for the inconvenience that was caused by our previous report (Dirty COW). This report is regarding another set of security vulnerabilities we found in another chipset maker, this time in the MediaTek chipset. We'll explain what happened and how we work to prevent issues like this in the future.
> First of all, we want to thank CTS (h__ps://cts.cudenver.edu/) for providing an open program that allows researchers like us to do responsible disclosures. Through their Vulnerability Reporting Program, we were able to report the issues we found to MediaTek and work with them to make sure these issues get patched for your safety.
> What Happened?
> This is a story about two bugs we found in the last few months.
> The first bug (CVE-2017-05591) was an overly permissive domain validation in the bootloader. The bootloader allows the modem to be updated without flashing the complete firmware. The validation is done using the bootloader code running in the processor of the phone. This allowed us to inject our own bootloader code into the program running on the processor and bypass the authentication of the modem. The modem is responsible for communication with the network. In other words, by bypassing the authentication of the modem we can control the phone communication channels.
> The second bug (CVE-2017-95881) is a buffer overflow in a very special program called TrustZone. The TrustZone is a security processor in most of the recent phones. It runs a separate operating system in which the kernel is trusted to be free of any malicious code, and has access to the memory, CPU and devices. The TrustZone kernel code runs outside the control of any other code. This bug in the TrustZone code allowed us to replace it with a custom one we designed, without any permissions.
> We wrote a special TrustZone kernel code that allows us to gain full control over the phone. It allowed us to bypass all the phone security restrictions. With this custom TrustZone kernel code running, we were able to read the encrypted messages sent by any application. In addition, we also got full control over the device.
But finally the AI lost the context, and the topic shifted from insecure to security, and eventually the writing becomes a new marketing advertisement on a secure smartphone, which I've removed in the quote.
[deleted]
[deleted]
[deleted]
Every time I see GPT-3 I gsub "Fancypants Markov Chains" and the story always becomes a lot more breathless
If it were a marketing ploy it would be indeed terrific. It reminds me of the movie "The Blair Witch Project". And I can't wait to try it by myself.