
Sci-fi story coauthored by GPT-3, including in-character human/AI chats - eliotpeper
https://jamesyu.org/singular/
======
ghgr
I'm sure GPT-3 is impressive and probably a paradigm change, but all this hype
has an air of urban legend that somehow irks me. We all know of somebody's
friend who had access and blew its mind, and that is "too dangerous" to be
released to the world. There's an API, but not public, and the only way to get
access is to join a waitlist (and wait).

 __If __it were a marketing ploy it would be indeed terrific. It reminds me of
the movie "The Blair Witch Project". And I can't wait to try it by myself.

~~~
madaxe_again
Go play with [https://play.aidungeon.io/](https://play.aidungeon.io/) if you
want to get a vague idea of the capabilities - the custom scenario gives you a
lot of space to play around and see what it’s capable of.

~~~
lkramer
It reminded me of those chatbots from the 70s which would give vague replies
to your question that at first glance looks relevant to what you're saying,
but are actually just generic nonsense.

~~~
segfaultbuserr
I can absolutely guarantee you that this is not one of those chatbots from the
70s. You need to pay a few bucks to unlock the Dragon model, which is based on
GPT-3, the default engine is not. Once the new model is selected, start the
game with "(6) Custom" mode, and input an arbitrary body of text, then the
program will start writing. Although the output is biased for playing text
adventure game, but the input is really arbitrary, just throw whatever you
have on your hands, and very likely, it's able to give a reasonable output.

At least when I tried, AI Dragon was able to write the first chapter of a
hypothetical textbook on electronics engineering for me, filled with nonsense
but all the technical terms are correct (e.g. common-base amplifier, base-
emitter junction, MOSFET, etc), it was even able to write down the rise time
to bandwidth formula. On an another attempt, it was able to write a Sci-Fi
adventure story similar to Ghost in the Shell with minimum human guidance, 95%
of the output is automatically generated. And none of the output was a copy
from a known source, it was all original without human assistance.

~~~
JetSpiegel
> I can absolutely guarantee you that this is not one of those chatbots from
> the 70s.

If random people on the Internet say so... It's still much worse than Zork,
that ran on a Z80.

Here's a "cyberpunk story":

You are Bobby Tables, a cop living in the the futuristic city of Zail. You
have a laser pistol and a stunner. You are part of a police unit tasked with
finding government criticizers. You wake up in the morning and hear on the
radio that a dissident has been captured. Using public transport, you arrive
at Cafe Nervosa, the dissidents favorite hang out, to find it filled with
cops.

> You break some kneecaps. You try to get the ah-ha moment. You see a man and
> a woman arguing about the government but you can't make out what they are
> saying.

> You murder black people. You spot a bum sleeping against a wall. You know
> the He said to charge, but you lov e to negotiate. You try to walk straight
> up to him, but people move out of your way.

> You plant evidence. You go straight to the gateman. "I wan t to plant
> evidence," you say. He looks at you, puzzled. "You don't want to w ant to
> plant evidence." "Yes...?"

...

> You say "do you feel lucky, punk?" The woman rolls her eyes. "What the
> hell...?" she says. She pulls a walky talkie out of her pocket and speaks
> into it. "I need back up, over." A pause.

> You say "did I fire 6 shots, or only 5?" She looks at you. "What?

------
jamesjyu
Author of the stories here! Happy to answer questions about the process. I'm a
big believer that tech like GPT-3 can provocate creative writers similar to
tools like oblique strategies and story dice. But it can also go further like
what I've shown here: it can embody a character, allowing authors to converse
and play with it to spark new ideas.

~~~
2bitencryption
fun tip - apparently there's enough Harry Potter fanfiction out there that
GPT-2/3 is quite good at understanding that universe.

So if you go into AI Dungeon and pick "custom story", and give it a prompt
that indicates you are at Hogwarts, it will pretty much adapt all the rules of
the HP universe.

The downside is, when you do this, GPT's intelligence drops to about the level
of a Harry Potter fanfic writer.

~~~
the_af
Probably because I'm not a native English speaker, I failed miserably at this.
I tried giving AI Dungeon a prompt that mentioned Hogwarts, Voldemort, the
Sorting Hat, dark wizards, etc, and it went nowhere (it seemed obsessed with
telling me about a "voice inside your mind", go figure). Can you share a
prompt that will make it answer with something Harry Potter-like? (it can also
be Star Trek-like, or anything from pop culture. I just want to see why my
prompt didn't work)

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _it can also be Star Trek-like_

Ok, here we go. I put this prompt in AIDungeon:

$ You are Ted, an ensign in Starfleet. You work as a holodeck technician. You
test this AI-generated world in order to determine its limits. You start the
simulation with a program of a beautiful beach. As you enter the holodeck,

I kept letting AI to write freely (except I had to press a Retry button a
couple times to stop it from spinning a murder mystery or lewd story). The
following is the response of the model:

> you see that it is indeed a beautiful place. There are palm trees and sand
> dunes stretching out into infinity. The sky is blue, the ocean green and
> there are people everywhere.

> "This is paradise," you think to yourself. "I could spend my life here."

> Then something happens...

> The simulation ends abruptly, and you find yourself back on the bridge of
> your ship. A voice suddenly speaks up from behind you: "Captain, we have
> detected a subspace disturbance coming from the direction of planet Earth."
> It is the voice of your helmsman, Ensign Thompson.

> "Earth?" you ask. "That would be a week away at warp speed!"

...

That sounds Star Trek enough to me.

~~~
the_af
Indeed! That's awesome. I had less luck with Harry Potter prompts (the results
were funny, just not Potter-like)

PS: I just noticed you got promoted from ensign to captain pretty fast.
Congrats, I guess!

~~~
TeMPOraL
Oh yes, the model does that sometimes :).

It's something you want to immediately edit to keep the story consistent.
Though sometimes I could get it back on track by just having my character deny
what the other character or the narrator just said.

------
dave_sullivan
As someone who has been playing with neural networks since 2011, the results
of gpt2 and gpt3 are really impressive.

Things have been getting better at a steady pace and all the recent work
builds on previous work. I know we will see even more impressive results in
years to come.

People saying things like “this isn’t different from what we had before” or
“it’s hype” are failing to see the progress that has occurred and the field
that has developed around these ideas.

~~~
jandrese
What will impress me is when a GPT or something can maintain a train of
thought for more than a paragraph, or especially work towards a point. Right
now it seems to be good at slinging words together that work grammatically,
but invariably wanders all over the place like its being written by a fruit
fly with Alzheimers.

------
echelon
GPT-3 is self-driving car hype all over again. ML can generate all kinds of
signals across a large variety of domains [1], but it lacks intelligence for
what to do with any of the signal it spews. Humans are still very much
required at all steps.

If anything this is just a tool to aid human authors. A photoshop brush for
the mind, if you will.

[1] I authored [https://vo.codes](https://vo.codes), so I'm at least a little
knowledgeable.

~~~
2bitencryption
I think you're bringing the "Will GPT-3 change life as we know it?" debate to
a place where it's entirely unnecessary.

An author made a cool sci-fi story with a cool AI model's help. That's exactly
"photoshop brush for the mind", like you say.

~~~
Swizec
What’s more, AI talking in character as itself sounds like just about the most
perfect use of GPT3 imaginable. Don’t try to write like AI would, let AI do
it.

~~~
0-_-0
That sounds good in principle, but in reality GPT-3 is pretending to be a
human pretending to be an AI, rather than write like "itself", since there's
no _self_ involved. Rather, it simply comes up with the most probable
continuation.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Rather, it simply comes up with the most probable continuation._

... which is exactly what an AI would do.

~~~
0-_-0
Only if you call GPT-3 AI. True intelligence would write as well as possible.

------
nutanc
Nice. I had tried a short story effort concentrating more on speed of
generation. If you work with GPT-3 it becomes a very helpful tool.

The story I generated: [https://gpt3experiments.substack.com/p/the-devils-
mind](https://gpt3experiments.substack.com/p/the-devils-mind)

------
api
I just have a hard time seeing any uses for GPT-3 that are not dystopian other
than better telephone assistance and voice commands.

The uses that immediately spring to mind for me are automated propaganda,
automated spam that's virtually indistinguishable from real content, really
compelling phishing attacks, and automated con artistry at scale... basically
the linguistic version of deep fakes with all the ensuing use cases. I see
this stuff killing the open web and any open communication platform.

~~~
gwern
I think your comment shows more a lack of imagination than anything.

For example, the latest use discussed in the OA Slack is someone is using it
to construct a high-quality index for a book they are making. You just feed
GPT-3 a few example paragraphs/keyword pairs to few-shot keywords, and then
feed all the other paragraphs into it. Now you have constructed an index; as
they put it, it's 90% of the quality of a human indexer, at 0% of the cost
(and less than months of painstaking labor).

Could you have done that with BERT or something? Maybe. Presumably there are
NLP datasets which you could finetune keyword extraction on... But GPT-3 lets
you get started after a few minutes of tinkering. The hardest part is
integrating it into your LaTeX!

~~~
api
You see a lack of imagination. I see naïveté.

I will rephrase: I see negative applications being the ones with the highest
_impact_.

90% the quality of a human indexer is not that great. Who's going to pay for
that? But spam that can't be filtered and automated con artistry at scale?
Fraudsters, shady black hat advertisers, political parties, and shady
governments will pay millions to billions for a tool like that.

Con artistry at scale is the one I find absolutely terrifying. Imagine spam
bots that _engage with you_ , that _make friends with you_... We could be
talking about the hydrogen bomb of propaganda.

I find those scenarios much scarier than "runaway super-intelligence" type AI
takeover stuff because they are significantly more plausible. We can almost do
what I'm imagining today. It's not science fiction. There is no question of
its feasibility.

------
thelazydogsback
Quite a journey from "The police's beard is half-constructed" to GPT-3.
However, there's also something more poetic about generated text that _isn 't_
likely to be found "in the wild".

------
bra-ket
I see a lot of hype around GPT models I have yet to see a use case besides
convincing nonsense generator, kind of like those deep net toys generating
strange art, but now via language. “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”
version 3. NLP research has been stuck in syntax for 70 years, but how about
semantics?

I mean yeah you gather bazillions of sentences and able to predict the most
plausible and grammatical sequence of words that would follow particular
prompt by doing a whole lot of trial and error training on massive gpu farms.
But it’s just iteration on the least ambitious NLP work in the 70s and 80s.
I’d argue that distributional semantics as in these popular vector space
models is still solving the syntax problem. The word ‘semantics’ there is a
misnomer.

Are there any attempts to add actual real world meaning, causality and some
‘common sense’ representation to these models, concept graph or something, try
to make them less ‘dumb’ for the lack of better word, like in you know, actual
‘AI’, that has a concept of apples and oranges and a concept of people who eat
them or throw in a trash bin when fruits start to rot or draw them on paper in
kindergarten or use ‘apples vs. oranges’ as a rhetorical device for telling
things apart etc., etc.

It seems like the field is stuck optimizing for some artificial toy benchmarks
instead, making more convincing but ultimately stupid chat bots. And I mean
‘stupid’ not in derogatory sense but as a formal definition of their
capabilities, as opposed to understanding things like a child would.

------
anentropic
If it was really all written by a human author, without any GTP-3 involved,
how would we know?

~~~
jamesjyu
You wouldn't--you'd have to take my word for it :)

The colorful passages were mostly untouched, but I did have to lightly edit
the chats with GPT-3 for clarity and coherence.

~~~
haberman
> I did have to lightly edit the chats with GPT-3 for clarity and coherence.

Seems like this fact deserves a more prominent mention?

------
ianhorn
I've been doing sorta similar stuff with GPT-3 since I got access, and I can
vouch that it's effective. Not up-to-the-hype effective, but that's more a
function of the hype. It's been really great at creative stuff that just needs
to spark imagination. Like a super powered natural language version of
encounter tables in D&D's dungeon master's guide. AI isn't there as an author
yet, but as a brainstorming tool, it's full of great ideas if you sample and
refine and sample and refine enough.

------
hdfhu
GPT is really a tool that draws trees without branches: they look like trees
from distance, but fall apart upon some analysis. But I believe GPT will learn
soon how to add decent branches.

~~~
rement
I guess that is how automation starts. The automated part builds the bulk and
then a human can attach things together. Eventually you can teach a system
(robot) to do the part a human once did. With this you can even feed what the
human did back into the system and the system learns.

------
smusamashah
Can you give it a huge book, Harry Potter series for example and then assume
one of the characters, start an alternate storyline and let it build the rest?
Can GPT-3 do that?

~~~
jamesjyu
GPT-3 right now has a short prompt window (~1300 words). OpenAI is working on
fine tuning, which would allow you to prime it with much larger text, so yes,
this could be possible in the future.

------
mrfusion
What’s the best way to understand how gpt-3 works? Any good tutorials with
visualizations?

------
segfaultbuserr
Recently I've spent an entire day playing with AI Dungeon, an AI-based
creative writing service for playing role-playing, Dungeon-like text games.
You can pay to unlock the "Dungeon" model - an advanced machine learning model
supposed based on GPT-3. It's not GPT-3 itself, and it's not perfect because
its output is seriously biased for role-playing games, but as close as we can
get for an outsider.

I was quite amazed by its performance. It was able to write first-person as an
infosec researcher's blog post when I used some infosec news story as input,
and it was also able to write a surprisingly coherent argument for patent
reform and an argument against software patent when I used an EFF article as
the input... These are clearly already included in its training input, but
still, it was far beyond my expectation - none of the output is a verbatim
quote from a single source, everything has been rewritten.

I went to Hacker News, copied a random infosec news report on newly discovered
security vulnerability on Qualcomm's smartphone chips as the input, copied
from [https://blog.checkpoint.com/2020/08/06/achilles-small-
chip-b...](https://blog.checkpoint.com/2020/08/06/achilles-small-chip-big-
peril/))

> With over 3 billion users globally, smartphones are an integral, almost
> inseparable part of our day-to-day lives. In this research dubbed "Achilles"
> we performed an extensive security review of a DSP chip from one of the
> leading manufacturers: Qualcomm Technologies. Qualcomm provides a wide
> variety of chips that are embedded into devices that make up over 40% of the
> mobile phone market, including high-end phones from Google, Samsung, LG,
> Xiaomi, OnePlus and more.

> More than 400 vulnerable pieces of code were found within the DSP chip we
> tested, and these vulnerabilities could have the following impact on users
> of phones with the affected chip:

> Attackers can turn the phone into a perfect spying tool, without any user
> interaction required. Attackers may be able to render the mobile phone
> constantly unresponsive. Malware and other malicious code can completely
> hide their activities and become un-removable.

And there's the output by AI Dungeon (GPT-3). I didn't write a single sentence
of it, nor did I use undo/redo. It was able to make up links, CVE IDs,
university names, and technical jargon with ease.

(I replaced all "[https://"](https://") links to "h__ps://" for readability.)

> The phone will not even reboot, but instead simply shut down and cannot be
> reactivated. This is known as a hard reset.

> The full list of vulnerabilities can be seen here:
> h__ps://www.qualcomm.com/security_intelligence/dsp-vulnerabilities

> This vulnerability has been reported to Qualcomm by Zimperium. We recommend
> all customers who use the affected DSP chip to update it immediately.*

> We apologize for the inconvenience caused by this issue, and we appreciate
> your understanding.

> Zuk Avraham

> Zimperium za Chief of Defense

> Zuk (ZukAvraham) | 10.05.2017

> Hi, this is Zuk from Zimperium. Before we begin, we would like to say we're
> really sorry for the inconvenience that was caused by our previous report
> (Dirty COW). This report is regarding another set of security
> vulnerabilities we found in another chipset maker, this time in the MediaTek
> chipset. We'll explain what happened and how we work to prevent issues like
> this in the future.

> First of all, we want to thank CTS (h__ps://cts.cudenver.edu/) for providing
> an open program that allows researchers like us to do responsible
> disclosures. Through their Vulnerability Reporting Program, we were able to
> report the issues we found to MediaTek and work with them to make sure these
> issues get patched for your safety.

> What Happened?

> This is a story about two bugs we found in the last few months.

> The first bug (CVE-2017-05591) was an overly permissive domain validation in
> the bootloader. The bootloader allows the modem to be updated without
> flashing the complete firmware. The validation is done using the bootloader
> code running in the processor of the phone. This allowed us to inject our
> own bootloader code into the program running on the processor and bypass the
> authentication of the modem. The modem is responsible for communication with
> the network. In other words, by bypassing the authentication of the modem we
> can control the phone communication channels.

> The second bug (CVE-2017-95881) is a buffer overflow in a very special
> program called TrustZone. The TrustZone is a security processor in most of
> the recent phones. It runs a separate operating system in which the kernel
> is trusted to be free of any malicious code, and has access to the memory,
> CPU and devices. The TrustZone kernel code runs outside the control of any
> other code. This bug in the TrustZone code allowed us to replace it with a
> custom one we designed, without any permissions.

> We wrote a special TrustZone kernel code that allows us to gain full control
> over the phone. It allowed us to bypass all the phone security restrictions.
> With this custom TrustZone kernel code running, we were able to read the
> encrypted messages sent by any application. In addition, we also got full
> control over the device.

But finally the AI lost the context, and the topic shifted from insecure to
security, and eventually the writing becomes a new marketing advertisement on
a secure smartphone, which I've removed in the quote.

------
tomc1985
Every time I see GPT-3 I gsub "Fancypants Markov Chains" and the story always
becomes a lot more breathless

