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[Yuli Ban]

Here's an interesting story that was partially written by GPT-3.
Singular: Possible Futures of the Singularity

In each of these stories, colored text indicates a passage written by GPT-3. I used the Sudowrite app to generate a set of possibilities, primed with the story's premise and a few paragraphs.
I chatted with GPT-3 about the passage, prompting it to roleplay as the superintellgent AI character in each story. I question the AI's intent, leading to a meta-exchange where we both discover and create the fictional narrative in parallel. This kind of interaction—where an author can spontaneously talk to their characters—can be an effective tool for creative writing. And at times, it can be quite unsettling.
Can GPT-3 hold beliefs? Probably not, since it is simply a pile of word vectors. However, these transcripts could easily fool me into believing that it does.

Edit: Should probably emphasis: short storIES.

[Yuli Ban]

Those conversations off to the side spook me. I know for a fact this is just a language model, but... my simian brain can't accept it.
By pure coincidence, one of the tabs open in my browser is to the Wikipedia page for the ELIZA Effect.
 

Though designed strictly as a mechanism to support "natural language conversation" with a computer, ELIZA's DOCTOR script was found to be surprisingly successful in eliciting emotional responses from users who, in the course of interacting with the program, began to ascribe understanding and motivation to the program's output. As Weizenbaum later wrote, "I had not realized ... that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people." Indeed, ELIZA's code had not been designed to evoke this reaction in the first place. Upon observation, researchers discovered users unconsciously assuming ELIZA's questions implied interest and emotional involvement in the topics discussed, even when they consciously knew that ELIZA did not simulate emotion.

 

Reminder: that was in the 1960s. It doesn't take much to convince humans of deeper intelligence.