- AI can write just like me. Brace for the robot apocalypse,
- OpenAI built a text generator so good, it’s considered too dangerous to release, or
- OpenAI holds back research on new system since it can write fake news
Since the political and societal implications of this - and future technology that will stem from it - would be talked comprehensively enough elsewhere, let's discuss its possible use in a different realm. RPing in sites like NS. What would this mean to its users?
On one hand, the "Fake News" aspect of OpenAI proves to be a blessing for NS since, well, we're writing actual Fake News in our Fake Countries within a Fictional Setting in the NS Multiverse. The twist and turns the model will take can open interesting paths in worldbuilding our nations with believable articles or pieces written by its citizens. Imagine reading maintenance threads with regular columns by different in0universe authors with wildly differing personalities, fleshing out the story of their country's reactions with Maxtopians and Bigtopians by the day.
A flip side I can anticipate, however, is intellectual dishonesty. How will a group of users RPing a diplomatic summit in International Incidents react if one of them were continuously giving top-notch posts that, it turns out, were actually created by a robot? How about if someone decides to use it to crank up RP posts in NS Sports where bonuses apply to next day's scorination results?
Given these items, and my general feeling of cautious optimism in such a tool, I can give a potential use case. When I heard of GPT-2's release, I'm contemplating the creation of a Nation Maintenance thread of my own, with posts generated by the model and then edited by hand so that they properly belong to a Diarcesian context. For the purposes of the demonstration, I will use the recently concluded XIII Summer Olympics at Republica to create a very paraphrased statement and let GPT-2 use it to create a post.
My initial prompt started with "Diarcesia bagged three golds, five silvers, and four bronzes in the XIII Olympiad." and I had to tweak it and make its context narrower whenever the model gives a wildly out-of-context result. If the prompt is already specific enough, it can be inputted again to tell the model to "fit" more what you wrote. The final form of the prompt is used below:
What would I do next after that? That's where I change details like the countries involved, the events that took place, and some other 'facts' to be more in line with what transpired in the Republica Olympics. You may ask "Why did you add a disclaimer at the top of the demo post?" My answer is that if we are to use tools like OpenAI for RPs, stating outright that it was autogenerated at least partially is the least we can do.
To the other humans among us, what are your thoughts?
And don't worry, aside from the spoilered demo, the rest is hand-crafted.