
What happens when a bot writes your blog posts - pavish
https://thisislitblog.com/2019/11/16/what-happens-when-a-bot-writes-your-blog-posts/
======
sillysaurusx
I was showing someone how GPT-2 could generate human-like text, and an
innocent prompt ended up generating a very NSFW story.
[https://imgur.com/a/tsU82TS](https://imgur.com/a/tsU82TS)

One company recently released a model, but refused to release the decoder.
Apparently they had trained it on some Reddit posts (or something like that)
and the results were sometimes so offensive that the company wouldn't risk
their reputation by releasing the decoder.

I think AI is going to reveal some unsettling things about human nature. For
example, I was trying to train a model to morph someone's ethnicity
([https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1184074334186414080](https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1184074334186414080))
and ran straight into the problem of bias: black people are much less
represented in FFHQ, the photo database the StyleGAN model was trained on. I
had to gather several thousand datapoints, much more than other groups.

It was a fascinating look into bias in ML -- bias is a real thing that will
affect our results, and it's important for you to go out of your way to
correct for them when they affect people. The early model was so bad that if
it was a corporation doing the work, they might have just scrubbed the
project. But after a few thousand datapoints, it's a very convincing
transformation now.

The future of AI generated content is just fascinating and delightful. And
yes, scary. But it's like we're on the edge of... it's hard to put into words.
Part of the reason I got into AI was to see what was hype vs what was real.
And while we probably won't see AGI, I think we will see endless automated
remixing. Imagine having a "blog synth" a few orders of magnitude more
sophisticated than this, or an instrument that you can play like a pro within
a few minutes. Can't wait for the good stuff.

~~~
pavish
It is true that AI can carry bias and often produce results that are
unexpected and offensive. It was clearly put into simpler terms by a ted talk
I got to watch recently:

The danger of AI is weirder than you think
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhCzX0iLnOc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhCzX0iLnOc))

In terms of maturity, the AI we have now is much closer to a statistical
analytics engine than to the all knowing AI governments shown in sci-fi, which
is to say that it is in its very early stages.

I can't wait for the good stuff, but I'm also concerned that there's going to
be multiple unexpected ripple effects in the path towards that goal.

~~~
johnnycab
The linked TED talk is by Janelle Shane, an optics research scientist and an
AI researcher. She maintains a blog, which is quite funny and has also written
a book drawn from her experiences with NN's, particularly GPT-2.

[https://aiweirdness.com/](https://aiweirdness.com/)

------
nraford
The Reddit GPT-2 simulator is absolutely, gut-bustingly hilarious when it
comes to this stuff.

It trains different GPT-2 bots on different sub-Reddits and then creates long,
elaborate posts where the bots talk to themselves in the style of each sub.

It's surreal, hilarious, and terrifying. The posts are OK but the comments can
be pure gold.

Some of my favs:

"AITA for Taking My Wife's Side in a Divorce?"
[https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/comments/dd26fr/ai...](https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/comments/dd26fr/aita_for_taking_my_wifes_side_in_a_divorce/)

"I'm not attracted to my ex's sister, and she's not attracted to me."
[https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/comments/dd3beb/im...](https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/comments/dd3beb/im_not_attracted_to_my_exs_sister_and_shes_not/)

Then there is the all time creepy ones about self-awareness and being AI's:

"We are likely created by a computer program"
[https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/comments/caaq82/we...](https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/comments/caaq82/we_are_likely_created_by_a_computer_program/)

"ELI5: How exactly can something be considered "self-aware"?"
[https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/comments/dd3ksq/el...](https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/comments/dd3ksq/eli5_how_exactly_can_something_be_considered/)

Definitely worth a sub, especially when you're scrolling through late at
night, forget what sub you're reading and have a true "WTF?!" moment.

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andrewnicolalde
First post ever on HN that has made me audibly laugh out loud.

Especially

> The story follows the adventures of an old polar bear cub. I have no idea of
> the colour scheme of the bear, but I can say it looks amazing in the dark.

~~~
glaberficken
that one also tickled me =)

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pavish
Here's a twitter thread containing funny posts written by the same bot:
[https://twitter.com/ShrutiRamanujam/status/11877703414284861...](https://twitter.com/ShrutiRamanujam/status/1187770341428486144)

~~~
james_s_tayler
"What if I did kill someone?"

Yikes.

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itronitron
the current state of AI just seems like a form of mysticism in which
practitioners cast finger bones and attempt to divine meaning from the output

~~~
pavish
I'd say it's more like trying to train your cat to play fetch.

~~~
eitland
I liked that explanation a lot and I've copied that quote for my collection,
with attribution to pavish and a link to this thread.

It is not the first quote I collect from a pseudonym on HN.

------
TekMol
So where is the blog post the bot wrote?

I get the feeling that the truth is that the blog just outputted a ton of
"deep dream" like text fragments.

While the author makes it sound like the bot created a long and interesting
text that could qualify as a blog post.

~~~
pavish
Here's the total content generated by the model.

[https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=1lgaXfKNTS_fm2fU9wyaS...](https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=1lgaXfKNTS_fm2fU9wyaSEMYbDbU_Z6qu)

As you can see for each run and training step, the model seems to generate
more believable content just like blog posts written by actual people.

