Philosophers on GPT-3 (

GPT-3 raises many philosophical questions. Some are ethical. Should we develop and deploy GPT-3, given that it has many biases from its training, it may displace human workers, it can be used for deception, and it could lead to AGI? I’ll focus on some issues in the philosophy of mind. Is GPT-3 really intelligent, and in what sense? Is it conscious?... See more

When you send query text to GPT-3, you aren’t communing with a unique digital soul. But you are coming as close as anyone ever has to literally speaking to the zeitgeist.

So: GPT-3 is incredibly powerful, but it’s only as good as its training data. And GPT-3 achieves its power through the vastness of its training data-set. Such data-sets are cannot be hand-picked for some sensitive, subtle value. They are most likely to be built around simple, easy-to-capture targets. And such targets are likely to drive us towards ... See more

“…Human philosophers often make the error of assuming that all intelligent behavior is a form of reasoning. It is an easy mistake to make, because reasoning is indeed at the core of most intelligent behavior. However, intelligent behavior can arise through other mechanisms as well…”

So, bot-speech isn’t speech and thus not protected on free speech grounds. But, perhaps regulating bot-speech is to regulate the speech of the bot-user, the person who seeds the bot with its task. On this understanding, the bot isn’t speaking, but rather acting as a megaphone for someone who is speaking –the person who is prompting the bot to do th... See more

Understanding is beyond GPT-3’s reach because understanding cannot occur in an isolated behavior, no matter how clever. Understanding is not an act but a labor. Labor is entirely irrelevant to a computational model that has no history or trajectory; a tool that endlessly simulates meaning anew from a pool of data untethered to its previous efforts.... See more

As for consciousness, I am open to the idea that a worm with 302 neurons is conscious, so I am open to the idea that GPT-3 with 175 billion parameters is conscious too. I would expect any consciousness to be far simpler than ours, but much depends on just what sort of processing is going on among those 175 billion parameters.

quote by GPT3 itself:

GPT-3 has been trained on us—on a lot of things that we have said and written—and ends up reproducing just that, racial and gender bias included.