AI language models trained on Web data generate prose that reflects human knowledge and public sentiments, but can also contain novel insights and predictions. We asked the world's best language model, GPT-3, fifteen difficult questions about the nature, value, and future of library and information science (LIS), topics that receive perennial attention from LIS scholars. We present highlights from its 45 different responses, which range from platitudes and caricatures to interesting perspectives and worrisome visions of the future, thus providing an LIS-tailored demonstration of the current performance of AI language models. We also reflect on the viability of using AI to forecast or generate research ideas in this way today. Finally, we have shared the full response log online for readers to consider and evaluate for themselves.

A GPT-3-powered bot has been caught posing as a human on Reddit after more than a week of rampant posting on one of the site's most popular subreddits. Under the username of thegentlemetre, the bot had been churning out a post per minute on /r/AskReddit, a sub with more than 30 million users. That behavior raised the suspicions of writer Philip Winston. "I read through some of the posts and they reminded me of text I'd seen from OpenAI's language model GPT-3," Winston wrote on his blog. Winston shared his theory on the subreddit /r/GPT3. Another Redditor named Wiskkey noticed that the structure of its writing was similar to that used by the Philosopher AI, a controversial text generator powered by GPT-3.

Busted: A bot powered by OpenAI's powerful GPT-3 language model has been unmasked after a week of posting comments on Reddit. Under the username /u/thegentlemetre, the bot was interacting with people on /r/AskReddit, a popular forum for general chat with 30 million users. It was posting in bursts of roughly once a minute. Fooled ya--again: It's not the first time GPT-3 has fooled people into thinking what it writes comes from a human. In August a college student published a blog post that hit the top spot on Hacker News and led a handful of people to subscribe.

You are getting an AI to generate text on different topics. This is an experiment in what one might call "prompt engineering", which is a way to utilize GPT-3, a neural network trained and hosted by OpenAI. GPT-3 is a language model. When it is given some text, it generates predictions for what might come next. It is remarkably good at adapting to different contexts, as defined by a prompt (in this case, hidden), which sets the scene for what type of text will be generated. Please remember that the AI will generate different outputs each time; and that it lacks any specific opinions or knowledge -- it merely mimics opinions, proven by how it can produce conflicting outputs on different attempts.

"Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." It turns out that a $1 billion investment from Microsoft and unfettered access to a supercomputer wasn't enough to keep OpenAI's GPT-3 from being just as bigoted as Tay, the algorithm-based chat bot that became an overnight racist after being exposed to humans on social media. It's only logical to assume any AI trained on the internet – meaning trained on databases compiled by scraping publicly-available text online – would end up with insurmountable inherent biases, but it's still a sight to behold in the the full context (ie: it took approximately $4.6 million to train the latest iteration of GPT-3). What's interesting here is OpenAI's GPT-3 text generator is finally starting to trickle out to the public in the form of apps you can try out yourself. These are always fun, and we covered one about a month ago called Philosopher AI.

A new Philosopher AI could help you find meaning in a meaningless world -- as long as you don't ask it any controversial questions. The system provides musings on subjects that have plagued humanity since its inception. You can ask it about a topic that's filling you with existential angst. The system is the brainchild of a Vancouver-based programmer called Murat Ayfer, who describes it as an experiment in "prompt engineering." Ayfer admits the AI doesn't have any specific opinions or knowledge of its own.