AI Powered Misinformation and Manipulation at Scale #GPT-3

OpenAI's text generating system GPT-3 has captured mainstream attention. GPT-3 is essentially an auto-complete bot whose underlying Machine Learning (ML) model has been trained on vast quantities of text available on the Internet. The output produced from this autocomplete bot can be used to manipulate people on social media and spew political propaganda, argue about the meaning of life (or lack thereof), disagree with the notion of what differentiates a hot-dog from a sandwich, take upon the persona of the Buddha or Hitler or a dead family member, write fake news articles that are indistinguishable from human written articles, and also produce computer code on the fly. There have also been colorful conversations about whether GPT-3 can pass the Turing test, or whether it has achieved a notional understanding of consciousness, even amongst AI scientists who know the technical mechanics. The chatter on perceived consciousness does have merit–it's quite probable that the underlying mechanism of our brain is a giant autocomplete bot that has learnt from 3 billion years of evolutionary data that bubbles up to our collective selves, and we ultimately give ourselves too much credit for being original authors of our own thoughts (ahem, free will).