This answer was written by GPT-J when I gave it the following prompt:

question: I lack imagination. What is GPT-3 (and generative text models in general) useful for, other than toys? It can write essays, can we expect it to replace writers for newspapers and magazines? Can it write coherent technical documentation? Replace speechwriters?

answer:

For the love of god please NO.

That said, there's no reason it couldn't go into an infinite loop, just that the models are pretty sophisticated and therefore are less likely to do this than earlier generations of models (like predictive text on smart phones in the past)

- Generative use cases, where you give the model the kernel of an idea and then you curate its output (e.g., blog writing, code completion, etc.)

- Extractive use cases, where you give the model some big piece of text, and then process it in some way (e.g., extract names and addresses, classify it, ask a question about the text)

- Transformational use cases, where you need to fix/adjust a piece of text, or translate from one domain to another (e.g., sometimes I'll use GPT-3 for little tasks like copying and pasting a table from a presentation and then asking the model to translate it to markdown; saves me a visit to Google and finding some table generator website)

- Comparisons, where you use embeddings to do search/clustering/recommendations over any set of strings (e.g., can combo nicely with the Q&A use case above, where you search over a knowledge base)

I started a repo here with some barebones examples of each: https://github.com/openai/openai-cookbook/

If you're looking for examples of commercial applications, OpenAI published two blog posts highlighting a few:

- GPT-3 use cases (2021): https://openai.com/blog/gpt-3-apps/

- Codex use cases (2022): https://openai.com/blog/codex-apps/

My tools uses GPT-3 to dig through Airbnb reviews to find the "cons" of staying at a particular place and summarize them neatly. You can also ask any question at all in natural language about all the listings you're evaluating.

I'm bookmarking your repo for future reference, this is very useful

It will aid speechwriters or help more people write their own speeches, I guess.

Assuming that AI tech is a person replacement is, IMO, the wrong mental model. It helps talented people be more efficient. And will help a lot of hacks “fake it till they make it.” Power to the people, if they can handle it.

There is a bit of prompt engineering. If you start your question with things like "As a qualified therapist, what would you recommend to" .... There is also a bit of engineering with the question. I often ask about an analogous situation, rather than my own.

I'm not batting 100%, but I often get strategies and things to think about I wouldn't have come up with myself.

Could you elaborate a little more on what you're asking? Perhaps an example?

I feel as if any use case like this, — particularly if it crosses into interpersonal relationships and disagreement — risks being incredibly dangerous as far as reinforcing your own biases.

It should go without saying that to even consider this, you should have a solid grasp of the fundamentals of these LLMs, their limitations and inherent biases, and their tendency to unconditionally agree with you regardless of your position – particularly in a dialog-style format.

One clearly problematic use case would be asking about an interpersonal conflict where there exists an established societal and cultural power imbalance.

E.g., describing a disagreement between a man and a woman and asking for insight into that conversation would be incredibly flawed, no matter how objectively it were depicted.

This isn't an attack on you nor am I claiming you're doing anything at this level, but taken to the extreme it’s something I can easily imagine someone doing after reading your post.

I’d really just like people to be cautious. After all, this is the same language model that told me a social media post contains hate speech due to “negative sentiment towards a protected class (racists)”.

With GPT-3, that bias is pretty explicit, and not hard to manage. I also don't treat advice as necessarily /good/ advice. A good way to think about it is ideation.

A good example is to ask how to communicate something. I sometimes miscommunicate what I'm thinking, and it often takes a lot of effort to figure out how to say something. With different prompts, GPT-3 will give different ways to say something, and I can pick one which works well and meets what I want to say. Let's say you promised someone something, and need to change plans, and you don't want them to think you're blowing them off. GPT-3 will often give me good ways to communicate something like that.

Or another example is: "I am struggling with ____. What are good strategies I can use to ____."

GPT-3 will often come up with things which I wouldn't have come up with myself, or ones which would have taken me a lot of time. Just as often, it will give a useless, generic list of suggestions. At the end of the day, though, it provides helpful ideas often enough to be valuable.

GPT-3 definitely doesn't (and shouldn't) act as an arbiter in a conflict, but even in conflicts, there's often a solution which works for both sides. My major problem is that I tend to think slowly, and come up with those solutions too late. GPT-3 thinks a lot faster than I do, and having those ideas before they're moot is sometimes helpful.

As a footnote, human therapists tend to reinforce biases too. They only have one side of the story. I've seen people really damaged in the way you describe. In one case, both the person and the therapist were living in a (plausible-sounding) fantasy world.

I asked GPT-3 for advice for how to interpret that person's behavior (with more context).

GPT-3 gave several plausible explanations, must of which I hadn't thought of.

Yes. It’s a dialectic. Very powerful for personal reflection.

Was this comment written by GPT-3?

(That said - are all comments written by GPT-3?)

You should submit that to GPT-3 as a prompt.

Here's one that I find personally really interesting:

Imagine you have a disability, and the government agencies responsible for helping you have denied your claim. You need to write them a letter. You don't have much (if any) experience writing letters to government agencies, so you're finding that task challenging.

GPT-3 can write that letter for you, and it will de a really good job of it.

Of course, you need access to GPT-3 and you need to learn how to drive it with prompts, so this isn't necessarily an easy thing. But I think it helps lean in the direction of the kind of benefits people can get from this class of technology outside of just playing with the AI.

GPT-3 can do a good job of this all today, without any additional training.

An expert could help out by providing a few example prompts, but the result would be a lot more powerful and require a lot less development work to put together than trying to build some kind of placeholder wizard from scratch.

And the madlibs is free to use, for everyone.

All things considered, GPT-3 is a more of a shibboleth of AI revolution than an actual one. Much better to give models like GPT-NeoX to talented development teams who can really optimize and fine tune it, attach great sampling strategies to it, and create great products from there. The API is just too limited for me to want to build a company atop it.

If no-one has built the madlib template for "a letter to the council asking about my disability benefits" then madlibs being more predictable isn't going to help you.

Whether a human or a computer writes it seems unimportant.

But I think the principal use for me is CoPilot.

My favorite reply was:

"A: I think the best example of this is the ability to swap positions with a friendly unit. This ability can be used in so many different ways. You can use it to support an ally, or you can use it to escape a tricky situation. You can use it to surprise an enemy by swapping with a unit they didn't expect, or you can use it to put yourself in a better tactical position. It's a simple idea, but it actually turns the whole game on its head."

And even worse, now corporations and governments don't even need to have troll farms. Just rent some AI, give it basic directions, and let it loose.

The Dead Internet Theory will become real.

Maybe Google should require webmasters to mark the automated content with a special HTML tag or attribute. Failure to comply leading to deranking. This would be necessary for the future - to know what data was human generated when training the next model, and to have official reason for penalising spammers who try to pass artificial text as human written.

GPT-3 like all tech is double-edged I think. Has good & bad things about it

Anyone being honest should admit it (was) more hot air and hype than reality.

Which makes me think: everyone needs to teach kids to speed read. And develop their bullshit detectors.