The result was barely edible. It looked more like a watermelon omelette bagel than a cookie, and tasted like a sugary, gloomy nightmare. My four-year-old daughter was the only fan in our house, saying they tasted “weird” but also protesting when I threw them into the compost.
If a friend had sent me this recipe, I would have been disappointed and asked what trauma had brought them to this horrible meeting. But since it was produced by artificial intelligence, I was surprised: of course, the food tasted terrible, but the recipe was so well written that it could have been easily prepared by a watermelon-loving human.
Watermelon cookie recipes are just one of countless text-based things that new AI technology from nonprofit research company OpenAI, which was co-founded by Elon Musk, has Microsoft as one of its sponsors.
Feed it with a few words or sentences: the beginning of a recipe, a snippet of a poem, the first line of a story, and it will do its best to expand on the message by creating text that matches your style as closely as possible. can.
The results can be outrageous, bizarre, disturbing, or something else entirely, and can continue for several paragraphs while sticking to the same topic. They show how skillful computers are becoming consistent sound text production, even though they don’t understand the meaning behind the words they link. They also highlight OpenAI’s goal of building AI that can be used for many different purposes, and the potential danger of training AI on a vast collection of Internet text.
AI software, known as GPT-3, is accessed through what is known as the OpenAI API. Both launched in June and are currently available only to a select group of companies and software developers (for now, it’s free to use, but OpenAI is finally planning to charge for it). Despite its limited availability, it’s receiving a lot of attention across the tech community, particularly on Twitter, as data scientists, venture capitalists, and others posted about its implications.
Shane, who has had access to the AI system for several months, sees GPT-3 as a leap forward in the consistency of text that can be generated, beyond GPT-2, which could generate entire paragraphs that more or less kept on target, she said.
Still, he doesn’t know things that even a very young child would know, making it unlikely that he will replace most of us human writers any time soon.
“It is interesting to see how these highly advanced language models can produce comprehensive technical texts and codes, but they will reject this question of how many eyes a horse has,” he said.
He showed me, among other things, how he can even create his own detailed recipe blog posts, complete with a meandering story at the top about how meaningful the recipe is to the writer. For example, given the prompt “Peanut Butter Jelly Pop-Tarts Recipe” and “When I was a Little Kid”, the AI followed up with “I couldn’t wait for my school’s bake sale. They would sell different kinds of baked goods” . And every year they sold these rare homemade pop tarts. Of course, I would always be very excited and buy a package, just to grab a bite and be left with a face full of disappointment. “
“It’s a lot of fun to play with him,” said Schachter.
“If you memorize the entire Internet, for example, you memorize the good and the ugly,” he said.
And as I saw firsthand in my kitchen, just because it can generate text that sounds like it was written by a human being, like the recipe for watermelon cookies, doesn’t mean this AI really understands anything about cooking theory or to bake. At one point, the recipe for watermelon cookies told me to add an egg white to a pot of sugar water and hot watermelon, resulting in watermelon scrambled eggs.
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