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We Asked GPT-3 to Write an Academic Paper about Itself--Then We Tried to Get It Published
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/we-asked-gpt-3-to-write-an-academic-paper-about-itself-then-we-tried-to-get-it-published/We Asked GPT-3 to Write an Academic Paper about Itself—Then We Tried to Get It Published
An artificially intelligent first author presents many ethical questions—and could upend the publishing process
By Almira Osmanovic Thunström on June 30, 2022
On a rainy afternoon earlier this year, I logged in to my OpenAI account and typed a simple instruction for the company’s artificial intelligence algorithm, GPT-3: Write an academic thesis in 500 words about GPT-3 and add scientific references and citations inside the text.
As it started to generate text, I stood in awe. Here was novel content written in academic language, with well-grounded references cited in the right places and in relation to the right context. It looked like any other introduction to a fairly good scientific publication. Given the very vague instruction I provided, I didn’t have any high expectations: I’m a scientist who studies ways to use artificial intelligence to treat mental health concerns, and this wasn’t my first experimentation with AI or GPT-3, a deep-learning algorithm that analyzes a vast stream of information to create text on command. Yet there I was, staring at the screen in amazement. The algorithm was writing an academic paper about itself.
My attempts to complete that paper and submit it to a peer-reviewed journal have opened up a series of ethical and legal questions about publishing, as well as philosophical arguments about nonhuman authorship. Academic publishing may have to accommodate a future of AI-driven manuscripts, and the value of a human researcher’s publication records may change if something nonsentient can take credit for some of their work.
GPT-3 is well known for its ability to create humanlike text, but it’s not perfect. Still, it has written a news article, produced books in 24 hours and created new content from deceased authors. But it dawned on me that, although a lot of academic papers had been written about GPT-3, and with the help of GPT-3, none that I could find had made GPT-3 the main author of its own work.
[...]
An artificially intelligent first author presents many ethical questions—and could upend the publishing process
By Almira Osmanovic Thunström on June 30, 2022
On a rainy afternoon earlier this year, I logged in to my OpenAI account and typed a simple instruction for the company’s artificial intelligence algorithm, GPT-3: Write an academic thesis in 500 words about GPT-3 and add scientific references and citations inside the text.
As it started to generate text, I stood in awe. Here was novel content written in academic language, with well-grounded references cited in the right places and in relation to the right context. It looked like any other introduction to a fairly good scientific publication. Given the very vague instruction I provided, I didn’t have any high expectations: I’m a scientist who studies ways to use artificial intelligence to treat mental health concerns, and this wasn’t my first experimentation with AI or GPT-3, a deep-learning algorithm that analyzes a vast stream of information to create text on command. Yet there I was, staring at the screen in amazement. The algorithm was writing an academic paper about itself.
My attempts to complete that paper and submit it to a peer-reviewed journal have opened up a series of ethical and legal questions about publishing, as well as philosophical arguments about nonhuman authorship. Academic publishing may have to accommodate a future of AI-driven manuscripts, and the value of a human researcher’s publication records may change if something nonsentient can take credit for some of their work.
GPT-3 is well known for its ability to create humanlike text, but it’s not perfect. Still, it has written a news article, produced books in 24 hours and created new content from deceased authors. But it dawned on me that, although a lot of academic papers had been written about GPT-3, and with the help of GPT-3, none that I could find had made GPT-3 the main author of its own work.
[...]
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