My girlfriend was struggling with an assignment for university yesterday, so I put the questions into a GPT-3 site and the essays it wrote were better than either of us could have written by hand...
I put in a moderately specialist topic I'm reasonably expert in. What it wrote was highly convincing. While I wouldn't be particularly impressed, I absolutely couldn't distinguish it from a mediocre human. It's really quite terrifying to think of the internet filling up with this garbage.
Is it garbage if it writes better than most of the humans from the developing world that are currently exploited to churn out meaningless blog spam?
Also, it would have worked perfectly for my girl's homework assignment, but she has morals and decided she couldn't ethically submit it. She did use the output for ideas on what to write, though.
It writes very convincing pop-sci articles about high energy photons and the like. I see no way how even a proper AI can distinguish it from similar articles written by journalists.
I asked GPT-3 for sing requests and it was like: “The first caller requested _____ by ______. The second caller requested _____ by _____. The third caller…”
It didn’t seem to know any musical artists or songs. It was weird. When I asked for song suggestions the best it could do is write bad poetry.
If it's simply a quality issue, then at the point that AI generated content becomes better than human generated content, will Google ban human generated content?
If captchas are any indicator, AIs will soon be better at convincing Google their content is human generated than humans are.
Note that, to win, the machines just need to produce approved content at a faster rate than the humans. If some AI can spew text at a measly 1GB/s, and Google blocks 99% of it, 10MB/s will still getting through. In 2016, there were ~4.6B pages on the internet. If each page contains 10KB of text, then the AI in my example produces 1000 pages per second. There are 31 million seconds per year, which means it would churn out 31B pages per year, or the entire 2016 internet every few months.
My conclusion? Internet search is screwed. Maybe people will start paying for curation.
