When an AI Writes Wikipedia

Jonathan Swift's 1726 novel Gulliver's Travels describes a'wonderful machine' that permits "the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour" to "write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius." Imagine my surprise and delight when, nearly 300 years later, I stumbled across EleutherAI's version of this very machine: GPT-Neo. With a few clicks, I was able to generate hundreds of thousands of words. More specifically, I was able to create Wikipedia-style biographies for the 118 Nobel Laureates in Literature without the hassle of research, the despair of a blank page, or the need, really, to labor at all. I discovered the GPT-Neo's ability to generate Wikipedia pages accidentally.