Yesterday we played with the GPT-3 a little using short prompts. Today I thought I'd see how it does with longer prose.
I took the lovely copypasta about a post-capitalist world to see if that universe can be expanded on.
The results are below. After that, if anyone is interested, a few words on how this was generated. I have bolded some of the phrases I liked, to entice you to read the whole thing.
[COPYPASTA]:
You walk out onto the street. People are milling around happily. Buildings are no longer designed with imposing security features. Violence has all but disappeared thanks to sudden material abundance. People are no longer forced to purchase a beverage just to sit down and talk in public spaces. The architecture has been redesigned to be more accommodating for pedestrians. Seating areas seem widely available. People sit and talk among themselves. Even strangers seem capable of breaking into conversation easily.
You feel as if you’ve wandered into a massive public museum, or some other noncommercial public space, but even that analogy doesn’t feel quite right. You realize that you’ve never been to a place quite like this.
You decide to take the train to your old home, but you’re confused as you reach the train station, and find the turnstiles have disappeared. You walk in unobstructed. The screen indicates that your train will arrive shortly. You assume that you’ve arrived just on time, but then you realize that the track has been expanded massively. Automated maglev trains glide silently in and out of the station every thirty seconds. No advertisements are pasted on the station’s walls - these have been replaced with noticeboards informing commuters of gatherings or work opportunities.
Commuters occupy themselves with tablet-style devices, but unlike in the capitalist era, they do not seem to be distracting themselves with facebook or games. Some seem to be reading complex scientific and philosophical treatises. Unburdened by the mind-numbing hours of work, they have the time and energy to expand their minds. Others seem to be watching live-feeds of independently produced entertainment. Total automation has apparently allowed people to spend their time more creatively.
You ask a fellow commuter about recent events. You ask about unemployment. You ask about financial collapse, austerity, the wars in the Middle East, and the possibility of inter-imperial conflict. He smiles wisely, and says, “Those are all things of the past now, comrade.” He speaks with a thick German accent. His snowy-white beard makes him look like a professional Santa Claus. His fashion sense seems anachronistic in this future era. It is then that you realize who he is.
It’s Marx.
You begin to sob as you feel a burden lift from your body. A weight disappears that you didn’t even know was there. Marx places a paternal hand on your shoulder, and as he draws you into a loving embrace, he says, “I told you it was inevitable, comrade.”
[GPT-3]:
As your tears subsided, and you take your leave from this friendly man, who always had the coolest beard in the room, you walk out of the building. It strikes you that much has changed in the last 176 years. The grandiose capitalist monuments in this once-thriving commercial and banking center have been destroyed and replaced with parks and amphitheaters (two words which we will henceforth never need speak again). This allows sunlight to shine on Marx’s smart city for all eternity. You take a seat on a bench beside a pond that glistens with golden fish. In one corner stands a statue depicting comrade Kim Jong-Un at his revolutionary best. In front, below Freud’s House, was Marx’s Residence and the Library of C., classically depicted standing among his library shelves , just as he would have liked.
But there was still so much more to see! The happiest kid in the world rode past on his tire free bike. Classes of students wearing reddish holographic sunglasses strolled in small groups along the promenade, taking in the water, which you knew had been purified in accordance with Dialectical Materialism.
Suddenly finding yourself rather hungry, you decide to stop for lunch at one of the new proletarian cafés that seem to pair perfectly with this bold new era. According to Marx’s advertisement pillars, no working class individual has gone hungry for 6 months! Food has simply become more available. No longer numbly sedentary pixel zombies stuffing your face with junk food marketed aggressively towards your sugar addiction, people were once again free to enjoy fresh vegetables and artisinal delicatessen afterwards. Revolutionary political movements love nothing so much as a frittata. They were all vegan, economically sustainable and most importantly perfectly balanced according to theory! And whats more is that they come equipped with an elaborate anti-capitalist agenda facilitated by interactive NFC technology embedded behind every placemat!
Feeling truly satisfied, you decide to continue to the Cultural Center in the People’s Palace. Miraculously packing in 5000 people per square meter, its impressive architecture causes you to miscount at least once. Here revolutionary murals depicting great moments in our history adorn the walls; these are not static images, but dynamic plays that move forwards and backwards to reveal permutations in characterisation. You can actually see whole speeches brought into sharp relief against their contemporaries like never before. The era of image manipulation overnight became an era of media epistemology reform. Lost speeches were subtituted retroactively electronically; it was an act of historical revision at cybernetic speed! Artists were required to become cultural arbitrators overnight. And everybody watched this retelling of events live-stream no less - each dialogue was preserved at symbolic stock value by accredited pundits! Suddenly it seemed even more pointless to remember anything than ever before… But the movement itself has no beginning… or end… or middle! Nothing can be remembered without precedent or prejudice science remembers only the one thing that remains outside time: thought. This year, too, existed perpetually in all past times and was simultaneously born at once with the earth.
Using your revolutionary Bank Card you pay for your meal and enter through a loading dock. As you ascend two floors and several hallways, you find yourself at the doorstep of the community’s Cultural Center. You press a lever and step through the archives. Opening with an energetic orchestral piece performed with traditional instruments (though others make occasional appearances as well) by comrades who learned it all on their iPads as any good comrade is no longer ashamed to live in 2018, workers relax atop vast mats of synthetic grass strategically deployed throughout the array of buildings of centrally planned Worker Society communism dotting the monolithic ten-square mile structure.
Unbridled gravitation that formerly exploited the proletariat is now just a memory. And so it is marked in these high palaces designed to memorialize our ancestors’ shared historical remembrance for perpetuity – not as a plan scratched on a marble plaque or upon stone tablets, but rather as an editable Wikipedia entry housed live behind computer screens built into every white leather swivel chair at every workstation from now until the end of human time.
Suddenly feeling like Dr. Jekyll (or perhaps Frankenstein), you leave the Cultural Center wondering what else there is left to experience today. You decide not to look forward or backward; instead, you simply crook your finger toward any revolutionary presently walking by on communist pathways preserved since 1963 sliced along the German Protectorate once known as East Berlin... They begin clinking glasses with you. Your stomach lurched - this must be what its like to belong.
(A few words on the way these AI generated texts are.. generated. I did not edit a single comma in what you see above, but it is still in a way a Frankenstein's monster. The way this thing works, basically, is you give it a chunk of text and the AI tries to continue it based on the input and on what it has been trained on. Sometimes it's good on the first try, sometimes it's nonsense even after ten attempts. This is just the state of the technology at the moment, and all those articles you see about AI-generated texts often forget to disclose that what you are reading is rarely the AI's 1st try but rather their best try, or even several tries stitched together. Don't overestimate it, in other words. So anyway, the above was generated in the following way: I used the entire copy-pasta as input, and then proceed to generate a new paragraph or two at a time. If the paragraphs were good, I kept them--they became part of the input, so there's some cumulative effect there. If a paragraph was nonsensical or just not very interesting, I erased it and tried again. So that's the amount of "editing" involved in this whole procedure. There are also various settings that can be tweaked. Such as "temperature" which controls randomness: at 0 the text is very deterministic and repetitive, at 1 (and there are decimal states in between) the AI is allowed to be "creative" and go a little crazy. So for this text I maxed out the temperature (1), and I also "punished" the engine a little for staying too much on topic, which in a way also adds to "creativity" because that way it relies less on the givens of the initial input and uses all it knows--in other words it can change the topic. I used the most powerful Open AI's engine they call "davinci," which uses a lot of computing power and which is most expensive. They have three others--curie, babbage, and ada--which are all various trade-offs on their stupidity vs. speed vs. price.)