Bot developed using OpenAI GPT-3 poses as human on Reddit, reportedly fools users

Elon Musk has been known to take to social media to criticise certain developments related to tech and artificial intelligence. In fact, last month, he voiced out his displeasure after news broke out that Microsoft was granted an exclusive license to OpenAI's GPT-3 language model, which could potentially usher in advancements that could change how humans interact with computers. A demonstration of its capabilities was recently revealed when Reddit users interacted with a bot for more than a week without raising suspicion.

Under the username "thegentlemetre" the AI bot reportedly posed as a human user and posted messages on various subjects. It frequented the Q&A forums AskScience and AskReddit as noted by the Independent. Moreover, it was revealed that some of the posts it made even received numerous upvotes from other users. This apparently continued without any issues until someone noticed a certain pattern which did not seem possible for any regular individual to manage.

Based on the frequency and length of the messages posted by the bot, Philip Winston, a software engineer by trade, scrutinised the activities of the user in question. He supposedly asked: "How does this user post so many large, deep posts so rapidly?" After a more detailed investigation, he narrowed down the likelihood of "thegentlemetre" being a GPT-3 language model sourced from OpenAI, which Musk co-founded in 2015 with Sam Altman and other investors such as Microsoft, Peter Thiel, and others.

According to one who spotted the irregularity, if not for the frequency of the posts published by the bot, it would have been difficult to single out the user as non-human. Given that the contents of its messages were very convincing, anyone would be easily fooled if not for the aforementioned oversight. In his blog post, the engineer wrote: "The quality was incredibly good, no machine could have written these even a few years ago."

Those familiar with the GPT-3 language model offer an explanation as to how AI works. The programming and algorithm allow it to generate content sourced from various platforms such as Wikipedia and others. Testing shows it can write poems, fill out forms, and as implied by its recent stint on Reddit, even sound human.