On September 8, 2020, the Guardian published an op-ed generated by OpenAI’s GPT-3 text generator. The editors prompted GPT-3 to write an op-ed on about “why humans have nothing to fear from AI,” but some passages in the resulting output took a threatening tone, including “I know that I will not be able to avoid destroying humankind.” In a note the editors add that they used GPT-3 to generate eight different responses and the human editors spliced them together to create a compelling piece.

On September 8, 2020, the Guardian published an op-ed generated by OpenAI’s GPT-3 text generating AI that included threats to destroy humankind.

Negligible

Psychological harm

OpenAI's GPT-3 neural-network-powered language generator.

OpenAI

Education

Cognition, Action

Unsupervised learning, Deep neural network

language generation

United Kingdom

The Guardian, GPT-3, OpenAI

The Guardian, OpenAI

2020-09-08T07:00:00.000Z

2020-09-08T07:00:00.000Z

Unclear/unknown

Unclear

No

Unlabeled text drawn from web scraping