“I’m a Screenwriter. These AI Jokes Give Me Nightmares”, Simon Rich2023-08-04 (GPT-3 humor, GPT-4 nonfiction, AI mode collapse)⁠:

[see also NYer, NPR] …When most people think about artificial intelligence, they think about ChatGPT. What they don’t know is that way more powerful AI programs already exist. My friend from OpenAI (hey Dan [Daniel Selsam]) has shown me some that are not available to the public and they have absolutely scared the hell out of me.

One of the reasons I find these programs scary is that they seem to want to murder humans. They talk about it a lot, even when you ask them to be nice. The other reason that I’m scared is more prosaic: I’m worried they will take my job. When I mention this fear to my friends on the picket lines, they all say the same thing: “I tried ChatGPT and it sucks.” They’re right. ChatGPT sucks. It sucks at jokes. It sucks at dialogue. It even sucks at tag lines.

What they don’t realize is that it sucks on purpose. OpenAI spent a ton of time and money training ChatGPT to be as predictable, conformist, and non-threatening as possible. It’s a great corporate tool and it would make a terrible staff writer.

But OpenAI has some programs that are the exact inverse. For example, Dan showed me one that predates ChatGPT called code-davinci-002, and while its name does suck, its writing ability does not…Based on the secret stuff Dan’s shown me, I think it’s only a matter of time before AI will be able to beat any writer in a blind creative taste test. I’d peg it at about 5 years.

Taste is subjective, so you be the judge. Try to identify which of the following parody headlines were written by the Onion and which ones were generated by code-davinci-002:

• “Experts Warn that War in Ukraine Could Become Even More Boring.”
• “Budget of New Batman Movie Swells to $200M as Director Insists on Using Real Batman”
• “Story of Woman Who Rescues Shelter Dog With Severely Matted Fur Will Inspire You to Open a New Tab and Visit Another Website”
• “Phil Spector’s Lawyer: ’My Client Is A Psychopath Who Probably Killed Lana Clarkson’”
• “Rural Town Up in Arms Over Depiction in Summer Blockbuster ‘Cowf—kers’”

The answer: they were all written by code-davinci-002.

…“Anthem”

A hole in the floor begins to grow. It grows throughout the day, and by nightfall it has grown so large that everyone at work needs to hustle around it. Our office furniture is rearranged. There are whispers. In the end it makes more sense for those of us whose cubicles were near the hole to work at home. Our conference calls are held over video, and no one mentions the hole. Somehow, the hole is growing, taking over the building, but for some reason it is off-limits as a topic of conversation, just another corporate taboo. We are instructed not to arrive on Monday before noon. On Tuesday we are told to check our e-mail for further instructions. We each wait at home, where the smell of the hole is still in our hair, and a black powder is still in our clothes. And when we all camp out in front of the building the next day, holding signs with carefully worded appeals to upper management, when we block the roads with our cars and drape ourselves in the company colors, we are fired and do not take it well. We circle our former place of employment, day after day. Covered in darkness, we scream until our voices snap. “F—KING S—THOLE”, we chant. “F—KING S—THOLE.”

The writer of this piece was base4 [gpt-4-base], an even more advanced secret AI that Dan showed me. Reading base4 is what inspired me to write this mostly boring article. The hole is growing, and as uncomfortable as it is, I think we need to look at it instead of just wait to fall in.