I wrote this story for the Communications of the ACM and it was published on July1, 2021
Last year, Open AI's automatic text generator
GPT-3 was one of the biggest breakthroughs in AI research. GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3) writes human texts in all kinds of genres, which is unique. Give a piece of text to the machine, and it generates a new piece of text which the machine considers to be the most likely continuation of the first. This can be an essay, a poem, a song, a dialogue, an interview, or any other text form that can serve as a starter. GPT-3 also can perform very different tasks from just a few examples, as long as they involve text. It can, with only a few examples, translate, generate news articles, complete a short story, correct English grammar, answer factual questions about texts, and even provide answers to simple arithmetic problems.
However, in order to produce interesting results, GPT-3 requires a lot of human intervention. There is nothing wrong with that, says AI researcher Melissa Roemmele; on the contrary, she says, it means humans can use such an AI text generator to augment their own creative writing.
Read the full story on the website of the ACM.
