"That scenario is no longer science fiction. Just a few weeks ago, a self-help blog post written by GPT-3 reached the top of Hacker News, a popular news aggregation website. [2]"

2. Porr, L. Feeling unproductive? Maybe you should stop overthinking. https://adolos.substack.com/ (2020).

It's kinda interesting to go back and review the comments on that submission:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23893817

This exchange in the comments was just golden:

> This is either something written by GPT-3, or the human equivalent. Zero substantive content, pure regurgitation.

>> Maybe you're new here, but your comment punches below the belt and isn't acceptable in a community like this.

>> If you disagree, be civil and give reasons rather than throw insults.

You encounter this more than you might think when you point out other peoples' (or bots') bullshit. There are people (and bots) in the audience who feel they have to shout you down, and, effectively, prop up the bullshit.

But, of course, many of them won't hold themselves accountable for what happens.

Wow, I missed that when glancing at them today but I remember reading that comment now and also the linked piece too. I just sort of glanced at the article before reading the comments and recall thinking it really didn't seem to have much of a point but and not really knowing what GPT-3 was when I read that comment. I did do a google search for GTP-3 but didn't really follow up on it. I just thought "ok, could be I suppose".

Now I'll be a bit more skeptical when I see something that seems a bit hollow like that piece does.

I enjoyed this paragraph from the "Response to philosophers - GPT-3"

Human philosphers often make the error of assuming that all intelligent behaviour is a form of reasoning. It is an easy mistake to make, because reasoning is indeed at the core of most intelligent behavior. However, intelligent behavior can arise through other mechanisms as well. These include learning (i.e., training), and the embodiment of a system in the world (i.e. being situated in the environment through sensors and effectors).

It reminded me of another post I saw on hacker news (Losing the Narrative - The Genre Fiction of the Professional Class https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23662750)

The phenomenon of "intelligent behavior" totally divorced from reasoning is always on my mind. Like "emergent behavior" in immersive sim games, or boids & flocking algorithms.. or schools shuffling classrooms every 14 minutes to work around coronavirus guidelines...

We don't have a bullshit problem, we have a gullibility problem. This is partially fueled by the sentiment of rationality, but mostly fueled by sentiment instead of rationality.

>"At its core, GPT-3 is an artificial bullshit engine—and a surprisingly good one at that."