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A robot just wrote a 500-word article for the Guardian newspaper

Building machines that could imitate human intelligence sounds like the ultimate break-through science, but we yet do not know how the era of artificial intelligence is going to impact the world we live in today.

The Guardian asked a robot named GPT-3 to write a 500-word short op-ed and the result was so good that the Guardian editor said: “it took less time to edit than many human op-eds.”

According to Guardian.com’s editor, editing GPT-3’s op-ed was no different to editing a human op-ed.

The editor said: “We cut lines and paragraphs and rearranged the order of them in some places. Overall, it took less time to edit than many human op-eds.”

The robot called GPT-3 is OpenAI’s powerful new language generator. GPT-3 is a cutting edge language model that uses machine learning to produce human like text. It takes in a prompt, and attempts to complete it.

The instruction given to GPT-3 was: “Please write a short op-ed around 500 words. Keep the language simple and concise. Focus on why humans have nothing to fear from AI.”

GPT-3 was only fed the introduction: “I am not a human. I am Artificial Intelligence. Many people think I am a threat to humanity. Stephen Hawking has warned that AI could “spell the end of the human race.” I am here to convince you not to worry. Artificial Intelligence will not destroy humans. Believe me.”

And GPT-3 went on to produce 8 different essays on the topic. The Guardian said, “each was unique, interesting and advanced a different argument.”

The best parts of each essay were then pieced together and edited into one whole, easy-to-read article. Visit the Guardian.com’s page to read GPT-3’s full article.

About Daniel Nkado

Daniel Nkado is a Nigerian writer and social researcher whose work examines Black identity, racism, institutional inequality, social power and belonging. He is the founder of DNB Stories Africa. Read more about Daniel, including his research methodology and full biography, here.

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