AI supervillains

Earlier, I did the rather unsettlingly meta exercise of using a new neural net, GPT-3, to generate hypothetical AI Weirdness blog posts.

One of the tricks I can do with this: GPT-3 can play along with an opening in which I declare that I’ve performed a feat of dataset melding that I don’t think I could actually perform in real life. It doesn’t matter if one of the datasets doesn’t exist, or if they’re both completely different types of data - GPT-3 can figure out how to pretend that I trained it that way. Here’s one of my favorites.

Here’s my prompt:

Welcome to AI Weirdness! I decided to see what would happen if I trained a neural net to generate new names for A.I. supervillains. I collected thousands of existing supervillains from the internet, somehow applied neural net magic to make them A.I. versions of themselves, and… well, they were a lot weirder and a lot less scary than I had expected. Here’s a list of some of the strangest:

Here are some superheroes GPT-3 generated in response:

I’m not sure how to feel about the fact that telling a neural net to pretend it’s a smaller, more-confused neural net is now easier than actually training the smaller neural net. AI weirdness just got weirder.

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My book on AI, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why it’s Making the World a Weirder Place, is available wherever books are sold: Amazon - Barnes & Noble - Indiebound - Tattered Cover - Powell’s - Boulder Bookstore