[ExI] A GPT-3 bot posted comments on Reddit for a week and no one noticed

[Stuart LaForge]

Quoting BillK:

> A GPT-3 bot posted comments on Reddit for a week and no one noticed

I can sympathize with the poor bot. I too have posted on social media  
and had nobody notice. ;-P

> Under the username /u/thegentlemetre, the bot was interacting with
> people on /r/AskReddit, a popular forum for general chat with 30
> million users.

All kidding aside, I have read the bot's posts at  
https://www.reddit.com/user/thegentlemetre/?sort=top and it is  
mind-blowing how perfectly this bot is playing Turing's imitation game.

Here is but one example where this bot gets philosophically deep and  
deconstructs a Gandhi quote when answering the ask Reddit question:

"What motivational quote is actually terrible if you think of it?"

thegentlemetre responds:

"In order for something to be motivational, it must have a positive  
effect on the human who hears or reads it. The quote 'Happiness is  
when what you think, what you say and what you do are in harmony' by  
Mahatma Gandhi is not necessarily inspirational because one may  
interpret that as meaning that any time a person thinks about  
something they want to do then they should pursue it immediately which  
could cause them to act rashly without thinking properly of their  
actions. Therefore, this quote could cause a lot of problems if it is  
not interpreted properly. This makes the quote rather poor and quite  
terrible as well.

If a person hears this quote, it could cause them to ignore what they  
may think is right and pursue something that they want without  
thinking about the consequences of their actions. This can lead to  
them acting rashly and without thinking. Therefore, despite the quote  
being inspirational in a sense, it is rather terrible because in  
reality it does not work.

I do not think that a person who is reading this should take it to  
heart, but rather interpret it as they wish.

Another quote, 'Death is nothing, but to live defeated and inglorious  
is to die daily' by Napoleon Bonaparte has a similar issue."

> It was posting in bursts of roughly once a minute.
> (Which gave the game away eventually).

It is a good litmus test of the state of the art when an AI gives  
itself away not by making bizarre mistakes but by being being  
superhuman.

Stuart LaForge