Machine-written literature might offend your tastes but until the dawn of Romanticism most writers were just as formulaic.
Since its inception in 2015, the research laboratory OpenAI – an Elon Musk-backed initiative that seeks to build human-friendly artificial intelligence – has developed a series of powerful ‘language models’, the latest being GPT-3 (third-generation Generative Pre-trained Transformer).
A language model is a computer program that simulates human language. Like other simulations, it hovers between the reductive (reality is messier and more unpredictable) and the visionary (to model is to create a parallel world that can sometimes make accurate predictions about the real world). Such language models lie behind the predictive suggestions for emails and text messages. Gmail’s Smart Compose can complete ‘I hope this …’ with ‘… email finds you well’.
Instances of automated journalism (sports news and financial reports, for example) are on the rise, while explanations of the benefits from insurance companies and marketing copy likewise rely on machine-writing technology.
Read more here courtesy of Yohei Igarashi and Aeon.co
