We Asked GPT-3 to Write an Academic Paper about Itself--Then We Tried to Get It Published

On a rainy afternoon earlier this year, I logged into my OpenAI account and typed a simple instruction for the research company's artificial-intelligence algorithm, GPT-3: Write an academic thesis in 500 words about GPT-3 and add scientific references and citations inside the text. As it started to generate text, I stood in awe. Here was novel content written in academic language, with references cited in the right places and in relation to the right context. It looked like any other introduction to a fairly good scientific publication. Given the very vague instruction I'd provided, I had meager expectations.