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This is unjustly harsh. At least it's got tangible benefits and customers without harming a soul. GPT-3 can be and is likely already weaponised, it's nice to see anyone out there using it for humble things rather than straight-up digital warfare.

I'm hoping we can finish some of Tolkien's unpublished books (Please give me beta access OpenAI heh)

discuss

webmaven|5 years ago

> This is unjustly harsh. At least it's got tangible benefits and customers without harming a soul. GPT-3 can be and is likely already weaponised, it's nice to see anyone out there using it for humble things rather than straight-up digital warfare.

> I'm hoping we can finish some of Tolkien's unpublished books (Please give me beta access OpenAI heh)

> [...] GPT-3 can be and is likely already weaponised, it's nice to see anyone out there using it for humble things rather than straight-up digital warfare.

Well, not that I necessarily agree with the decision (I'm undecided), but one point in favor of only giving access to the model via an API rather than releasing it, is that the use can be monitored and hopefully "weaponization" will be either noticed or detected[0].

It would be pretty interesting if OpenAI eventually provided an external "ML API abuse monitoring" service, but one problem I haven't figured out a solution to is that when providing such a service, the goals of "reducing harmful use" and of "slowing the arms race"[1] (which are both valid goals) are somewhat opposed. I'm still thinking about that.[2]

[0] Using ML to detect harmful uses of an ML API would be a quite interesting research topic, and quite in line with OpenAI's stated mission, but gathering the necessary data set for training purposes may require allowing harmful use of the API in the first place (though I have thought of a few ways to mitigate those risks and limit the actual harm).

[1] http://xkcd.com/810/ is amusing, but misses the point. Spammers aren't just attempting to evade filters, but also trying to accomplish their goal, so inadvertently training a bot capable of writing an apparently constructive comment that successfully sneaks a spam link through to be clicked on and/or indexed isn't exactly a win for the good guys.

[2] I wouldn't be surprised in the least if a GAN-like social deception arms-race (especially since the same networks have to serve as both generator and discriminator) was the proximate cause of the Upper Paleolithic Revolution.