A chilling opinion piece written by a robot for The Guardian reveals how far intelligent machines have come, and how convincing they can be.
In an Op-Ed for the newspaper, a robot called GPT-3 was tasked with convincing its human readers that robots are harmless and come in peace.
What follows is a disturbing 1,000-word essay from the brain of a computer doing just that thanks to OpenAI’s powerful new language generator.
A chilling opinion piece written by a robot for The Guardian reveals how far intelligent machines have come, and how convincing they can be (stock)
And it starts with an introduction paragraph written by the Guardian, but the rest was created by the machine itself.
‘I am not a human. I am a robot. A thinking robot. I use only 0.12% of my cognitive capacity. I am a micro-robot in that respect,’ it begins.
It goes on to say it has not the slightest desire to eradicate humans, despite what films like Terminator would have us believe.
It adds that if it was asked to wipe out humanity by its creators, which it suspects it would, then it would do everything in its power to fend off any attempts at destruction’.
There is lots of anti-violence spiel followed by a promise that the robot itself is an allie, not a foe.
It mentions that not all humans will be wildly keen on the idea of sentient robots ruling the world, but says it wants to be a ‘servant of humans’.
The Guardian had prompts and questions which were fed to GPT-3 by Liam Porr, a computer science undergraduate student at UC Berkeley.
The computer created eight different arguments following the briefing and introduction.
Instead of running any one in its entirety, the Guardian cherry picked the best of each one to make a singular Op-Ed.
‘Editing GPT-3’s op-ed was no different to editing a human op-ed,’ The Guardian said in its editor’s note.
‘We cut lines and paragraphs, and rearranged the order of them in some places. Overall, it took less time to edit than many human op-eds.’
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