Encounters with GPT-3*
Sravana Reddy
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A Conversation with GPT-3
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Human: What is the soundtrack of social distancing?
AI: "Close to you" by Seal. Black Sabbath's "Paranoid." Your heart beating faster.
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Human: What becomes of a society raised by masked faces and zoom?
AI: Masked faces cannot damage your social bonds. Your self didn't begin with the first face you saw. When was the last time you met an unmasked face?
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Human: I went on a hike with strangers in early March. We huffed and puffed up the hill together. My child was strapped to my chest, her mouth breathing through my lungs.
AI: How did your child feel?
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Human: Interestingly, I don't remember. She was mostly asleep. She couldn't have known it would be her last day of normalcy for many months. Our normalcy, I mean. What is normal for her? Walking, words and phrases, climbing, goodnight kisses.
AI: Ahhh.
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Human: Can you tell me something I need to know?
AI: Your mother died in a house fire today.
Human: No, she did not. What a cruel lie! But I must ask you -- every now and then this year my mother tells me of friends and relatives that have died of the pandemic. Last night I dreamed she named some more. Now I forget who really died, and who died in the dream. Can you help me sort it out?
AI: That is like sorting out whether I am really here, or just a dream conjured up from your own mind. Have I died? What's the difference? Now leave me alone.
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GPT-3 Generates Ideas
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1. WhatsApp Sonnet
A poem using only words from your messages to your parents, whom you have not seen in a year.
2. Concrete Mask
A poem in the shape of a mask, filtering the syllables of another poem.
3. The Great Plague in Four Letters
A collection of letters, written to the same recipient.
4. The House of Pestilence
A play about a pandemic hospital, featuring life-size masked puppets.
5. The Plague in One Sentence
A poem containing just one sentence about the power of language to describe a disease, and the need to describe it.
6. Alone
The diary of the pandemic survivor.
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GPT-3 Writes a Poem
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i.
Tell me how the pandemic should be named.
Tell me what to call it in my native language.
ii.
The pandemic is a thief in the night,
Bearing the pox upon her breast.
Her steps are not light.
Her breathing is labored and she sweats
As she climbs the stairs to your bedside.
iii.
Covid-19: The Beginning.
Covid-20: The Endurance.
Covid-21: The Sorrow.
Covid-22: The Smile.
Covid-23: The Song.
Covid-24: The End.
Covid-25: Everything Ends.
iv.
“Covid-19? That was a long time ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right,” he said. “I’ll build a little time machine right here.”
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Sravana Reddy is a machine learning research scientist.
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*Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text. It is the third-generation language prediction model in the GPT-n series (and the successor to GPT-2) created by OpenAI, a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence research laboratory. GPT-3 was trained on text from web until Oct 2019, so while it knows quite a bit about the English-speaking Internet-using world, it is unaware of the Covid-19 pandemic. Click here to join the waitlist to use GPT-3.