8 Comments
Dec 8, 2022Liked by Maxim Lott

Good article, Maxim, thank you. I agree with the commenter below that the AI style is a giveaway (and with you that GPT is actually extremely strong at changing style, even GPT-2 was very strong at this already).

The poetry is pretty rudimentary. I feel that, like your essay example, it is middle school level, but more like a B- effort. It mostly does vague attempts at AABB/ABAB that scan poorly. It will produce a "haiku" that violate the syllable structure, and that's about as simple as it can get. I think the best thing I saw is that it can do a villanelle of sorts.

Input: Please write a villanelle on the topic of using excess deaths to measure Covid effects uniformly across countries.

Output: The pandemic grips us tight

With fear and death in tow

We search for ways to fight

Excess deaths show us the light

A metric to measure and know

The pandemic grips us tight

Uniform across lands, a uniform sight

No country escapes its blow

We search for ways to fight

The data speaks with all its might

A somber tale of woe

The pandemic grips us tight

We must learn from our plight

And better prepare for the next go

We search for ways to fight

The villanelle repeats with all its might

As the pandemic continues to grow

The pandemic grips us tight

We search for ways to fight

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Dec 8, 2022Liked by Maxim Lott

Re: Diplomacy it was immediately obvious that Austria was the AI. One issue I've seen with GPT (both in my own research and online) is that it really really wants to speak in full sentences and formal language, and is not good at casual texting

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It´s hardcoded to have political bias which makes it wrong in hilarous ways in other areas too. If you ask it wheather a human is more intelligent than a fly, it recommend assessing the individual. Or if you ask wheather a poisonous snake is more dangerous than a babysheep, it also keeps insisting both can be dangerous.

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Your point about critical thinking - there's some interesting early signs here:

https://openai.com/blog/critiques/

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