How would an AI writing program start an article on the future of AI writing? Well, there’s one easy way to find out: I used the best known of these tools, OpenAI’s GPT-3, to do the job for me.
Using GPT-3 is disarmingly simple. You have a text box to type into and a menu on the side to adjust parameters, like the “temperature” of the response (which essentially equates to randomness). You type, hit enter, and GPT-3 completes what you’ve written, be it poetry, fiction, or code. I tried inputting a simple headline and a few sentences about the topic, and GPT-3 began to fill in the details. It told me that AI uses “a series of autocomplete-like programs to learn language” and that these programs analyze “the statistical properties of the language” to “make educated guesses based on the words you’ve typed previously.”
So far, so good, I thought. I hit enter again, and the program added a quote from Google’s head of AI, Jeff Dean, then referenced an experimental piece of software from the 1960s before promising that an “AI Revolution” was coming that would reap immense rewards across the fields of science, technology, and medicine.