No you're wrong. It's literally creativity. Machine learning models literally work because they fill in gaps where the data doesn't exist.

Any content generated by ML is very unlikely to be anything else other then original.

Imagine linear regression. Then pick a random point on that line. How likely is it that that point on that trend line coincides with an actual data point? Very unlikely.

ML is simply a multidimensional version of this. Some 1000 dimensional surface and the result you see is simply a point on that surface. The likelihood of that point on the surface to coincide with an actual data point is astronomically low.

Nobody is being carried away here. What you are seeing is raw creativity by an AI. It is a highly simplified version of human creativity, but the deep fundamentals are identical.

In fact all intelligence is simply a huge thousands or more dimensional surface. A giant curve fitting methodology. The only gap between ML and human intelligence as of now is the amount of neurons, the training algorithm and the actual template for the equation describing the model. But in essence we have the fundamentals down at a high level.

But that's how humans learn language to begin with.

I mean, look at this sentence.

> But overall, I think the point of the article is that the AI was able to produce something fairly coherent on its own.

The AI not only combined words. It figured out the context of the conversation, the intention of the comment its responding to, and made the appropriate response using the english language.

> it is a different combination of existing prose

This isn't true. It's been explained numerous times on HN how mistaken this view is.

Language models do not work like this. They can copy content but usually that's for something like the GPL language text.

Generally they work on a character by character basis predicting what is the most likely character to appear next.

This very rarely results in copying text, and almost never rare text.

I don’t know how AIs work or any of their limitations, but I’m pretty sure that “we” tend to think much more about ourselves than we actually are. Humans like to perceive themselves as sacred inscrutable beings, while mostly we just reshuffle what’s already there, brought by natural complex processes. Maybe AI couldn’t show anything remarkably innovative (yet?), but that also applies to average you and me, who literally lived this life for so long. I doubt that anyone taught by solely a part of the internet snapshot could compare to the best [large groups] of us or to these AIs at least. Pretty sure we’d be just cavemen drawing recognizable pictures, not geniuses.

> it is still originalonly to the extent that it is a different combination of existing prose

So what is left in your opinion? Do you really think us more than complex remix machines? What is fundamentally different to the current AI?

[GPT-3 Prompt]

Humans were so far away from meeting their own potential when they invented religion, which distracted and headed them off on a long terrible violent intellectually dishonest wild goose chase in the opposite direction, from which they still haven't recovered. Here is their story:

[GPT-3 Output]

One day, a long time ago, a bunch of cavemen got together and decided that, since they didn't understand the nature of the universe and the world around them, it must have been created by some sort of god. Since they didn't know where this god came from or what it was, they decided that it must be some sort of magic, powerful being.

They also decided that this god must be interested in them, since they were the only beings in the world that they knew about. They decided that this god must have given them instructions on how to live their lives, since they didn't know any better.

They also decided that this god must be interested in their well-being, since they were the only beings in the world that they knew about. They decided that this god must have given them instructions on how to live their lives, since they didn't know any better.

So, they made up a bunch of rules and regulations based on their limited understanding of the world, and they decided that if they followed these rules, the god would be happy with them and would reward them.

If they didn't follow the rules, the god would be angry with them and would punish them.

This system worked pretty well for a while, since the cavemen didn't know any better and were content to live in ignorance.

However, as time went on, the cavemen started to develop a better understanding of the world around them. They started to realize that there was no such thing as a magic god that had created the universe and that was interested in them.

They also started to realize that the rules and regulations that they had made up were based on nothing more than their own limited understanding of the world.

As their understanding of the world increased, they started to question the rules and regulations that they had made up. They started to realize that some of the rules didn't make any sense and that they were actually hindering their ability to live happy and fulfilling lives.

Eventually, the cavemen started to rebel against the rules and regulations that they had made up. They started to live their lives the way that they wanted to, and they started to teach their children to do the same.

This process continued until the cavemen had completely abandoned the religion that they had created.

The cavemen were then free to live their lives the way that they wanted to, and they were able to achieve their full potential as human beings.

[GPT-3 Output (with higher temperature = 1.0)]

On that day people came together as one to mourn the death of thousands of families, friends, and loved ones. The world wept. The next day, enraged people demanded justice. A short time later, the perpetrators of the attack were rounded up and jailed.

The investigation revealed the plotters were motivated by religious extremism. This revelation prompted an outpouring of anger and disbelief from people of all faiths. "How could this happen in our country?" they asked. "We're a nation of laws, not of men."

The shock quickly turned to resolve. "We will not allow this to stand," the people said. "We will hunt down the terrorists and bring them to justice."

And that's exactly what happened.

The terrorists were quickly caught and tried. They were found guilty and sentenced to death. And the world breathed a sigh of relief.

Until the next attack.

[Another GPT-3 Output, including misspellings and typos]

Religion may have delayed the development of science, technology and global cooperation.

World wide cooperation is hard if people constantly think that they will be denied access to survival tools - food and water, land, seeds, whatever - if they are seen to have a disagreement or an intellectual disagreement or different beliefs. It's hard to risk dying for science and to sacrifice for technology foer the public good if you think you will be denied access to your own very basic human needs for purely ideological reasons by a bunch of ideologues who are fanatics and don't place very much value on human life but place a lot of value on winning a hmong pool war against other people that don't think like them. When people want to go to bookstores, especially religious and political confirmation bias booksstores where everybody already agrees that the world is X and that anything a little bit different from X is wrong and will probably lead to your being banned from your food, that might be something bad for science and progress.

Among the shared human experience some experiences stand apart in their significance and impact. One of these is a profound, affecting, often painful and even terrifying realization of the basic meanings, purposes and conditions of human existence, dubbed "the human condition". Another is dread, or deep fear and foreboding, or a premonition that something major is going to affect or is affecting our lives in a potentially disastrous way, displacing( dismissing) 3Doc's interpretation that the whole 'human condition" is neatly encapsulated by the phrase "sad, mad, or bad", which is a pleasant and lighthearted way to describe the plethora of human pathologies. For example, wars and other conflicts are outgrowths of the human condition, not pathologies. . . . these are not conditions that can or should be ameliorated or cured. . . ., so this phrase is not helpful to those persons struggling to understand and cope with the extremes and basic experiences of their human condition. Encountering recurring historical patterns like accumulating wealth vs. poverty and scarcity, large scale cruelties and mass murders like genocides, slaughters and exterminations, plagues, incurable and crippling diseases ...etc. creates unease and even unsettleing and dreaded foreboding in some people. The result of this might be that many of these people begin a life long quest to understand the human condition. . . .

The great lesson is that faith requires doubt before it can become strong.

People pursue 30 Doc's quest in lives of many different types. Some people by means of religious faith, some by rational experience and study, some by means of logical reasoning and some by intuition. Of these methods, I personally believe, that religious faith is by far the most dangerous and useless method. Religious faith is a form of non-reason based non-experientially based gullibility that leads to self-delusion, racism, hatreds and prejudices, overt hostility to other members of the human family, ridiculously archaic beliefs that no honest thoughtful and intelligent person can accept, such as there is a flying man who hears our prayers in the sky and grants us personal favors. Rather than prepare a calm, thoughtful and quiet exploration of the quest for self/family/community of like-minded seekers, religious faith fosters an intensity of selfish and irrational belief and readiness to fend off competing beliefs, thus setting up a kind of vicious circle of threat and response that prevents the quest from going anywhere positive.

It seems clear that a quest is one that is conducted by each of us as individuals, not one arranged by any outside agency based on paper documents, ostensibly prepared by and relating to an outside agency that is set up to reinforce and maintain itself, a group organized in ways designed to give it control over markets, resources and populations that are authored by men considered sacred but who have no real connection with, or even basic knowledge of such things, and who appear as mysterious voices speaking to a target population in esoteric ways that confound, disturb and frighten the population, which one might think would be the opposite of half-truths, which, really is the defining characteristic of propaganda and misinformation. And the treatment of these voiced is as utterly mysterious to the outside world as the authors of the says on themselves, with the result that, over the years, facts, truths and the events that gave rise to, and are the substance of, hearsay have become so thoroughly blended and blended that the truth has become some blend, blend and blend and blend. . . .

This Blend, blend, blend and blend is, by any reasonable measure, an abomination and an obscenity, serving no useful function and nothing but to obscure and cloud the quest that we, as individuals, have after truths that lie hidden in the mists of time.