
Show HN: I trained GPT-2 to write like Goop - calebkaiser
http://goopt2.xyz/
======
c3534l
After trying a few to get a handle on things, I decided to make guesses based
solely on if the sentence makes coherent sense. I judged 14 quotes before
getting a repeat, having gotten 13 wrong and only 1 right.

Now, if it was 50/50, I'd have said they're just as coherent. But it's 13:1
which suggests to me that there is a bias here. I think the authors
intentionally selected quotes which make the least sense out of context to be
the Goop quotes and cherry picked GPT2 quotes that happened to sound the most
sense without any context. This is supported by the fact that I only had to go
through 14 quotes before it started repeating.

If that's the case, and I suspect it is, it's not really dishonest per se, but
it is at least sensationalist and potentially misleading. It's asking you to
draw conclusions by having you participate in an experiment where it has its
thumb on the scales.

~~~
woah
Heavy curation is unfortunately rampant in the genre of "wow check out this
AI"

~~~
quickthrower2
That’s what my bot said.

~~~
craftinator
Be nice, feelings that bots have too.

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calebkaiser
Hey HN -- I had a slow weekend and built this thing. It's a little game that
displays a sentence, and you decide if you think an ML model generated it, or
if it's an actual quote from Goop.

I fine tuned the model (OpenAI's GPT-2) using Max Woolf's gpt-2-simple and by
scraping articles from Goop's "Wellness" section. I generated predictions by
feeding it a few words from the opening of actual Goop sentences (not
sentences it was trained on) and seeing what it spat out.

There aren't many quotes (something like 25) in it right now, but I can add
more easily if people have fun with it.

~~~
bulldog13
I would be interested in learning how you built it, do you have a blog entry
about fine tuning the gpt-2 with the scraped text ? Or can you recommend a
blog post that does something similar ?

~~~
calebkaiser
Thanks! I'm planning on writing something up this week. I can message you when
it's done, if you're interested.

~~~
bulldog13
Yes, very much so. Good luck and thank you!

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elil17
I can't believe how bad I am with this! It reminds me of the book "The Most
Human Human." Every year, at the competition for the Loebner Prize (a five
minute chatbot Turing test), an award is given not only to the AI which
convinces the most humans that it is a human (The Most Human Machine), but
also to the human who convinces the most humans that they are a human (The
Most Human Human). The author of the book tried to set the record for being
the highest scoring human in the test. His book dives into just how smart,
curious, and empathetic you have to be to show your human-ness. The Goop
authors, it seems, are not going to be in the running for "Most Human Humans"
any time soon.

~~~
calebkaiser
100%. Part of what made it so fun to generate the text was that all the usual
data points I instinctively use to vet ML-generated text get thrown out the
window with Goop. A Goop writer really may have used those seemingly unrelated
nouns together and somehow connected them to medicine.

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mattigames
For people like me who didn't know: Goop.com describes itself as "Cutting-edge
wellness advice from doctors, vetted travel recommendations, and a curated
shop of clean beauty, fashion, and home." The company has been the eye of many
criticisms specially for lack of scientific prove of their healthcare advices
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goop_(company)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goop_\(company\))

~~~
calebkaiser
Thanks for this—I probably should have clarified. Goop is a psuedoscience-as-
a-lifestyle brand that frequently publishes hilariously terrible medical
advice under the guise of "wellness."

~~~
pests
Many from here probably also know it from Netflix's "The Goop Lab With Gwyneth
Paltrow" and the associated commentary the site has had about it in a few
threads.

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andy_ppp
When I see things like this I start to wonder if all of deep learning is
actually getting this close to an uncanny valley like result, but because it
doesn't really understand grammar (or an image, or a road etc.) we don't feel
the weirdness of the result. There is just something a bit off about the
structure and meaning of what is produced such that reading the ones not
written by Goop usually clog up my brain. The Goop ones clog up my brain in a
different way of course ;-)

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calebkaiser
Hey everyone—looks like HN traffic squeezed my server a little more than I
expected. It's upgrading now, but might not be available for about 5 minutes.
Sorry about that, and thanks for checking it out!

EDIT: All good now :)

~~~
r0b05
Brilliant work.

The way you packaged it can be used to label data to improve ML models. I am
thinking of such a link being sent out to numerous people to crowdsource
labeling. Even if they answer one question, if a few million people answer it
once, that's a few million responses to help train the model.

Is it using any notion of common sense?

[https://www.quantamagazine.org/common-sense-comes-to-
compute...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/common-sense-comes-to-
computers-20200430)

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martopix
Very similar: [http://snarxiv.org/vs-arxiv/](http://snarxiv.org/vs-arxiv/)

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DrScump
This reminds me of the time that MAD Magazine did parodies of entries in the
old Spencer Gifts catalogs.

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fake-name
I mean, it can't have been too hard. Anyone can do this. Just open your laptop
and take a big watery shit right on the keyboard.

Volia, Content indistinguishably coherent from the original. Bring your own
sanitation wipes.

