The Dangerous Economist: Will computer programs replace newspaper columnists?

Friday, July 31, 2020

Will computer programs replace newspaper columnists?

See How do you know a human wrote this? by Farhad Manjoo of The New York Times.

In my macroeconomics class, we talk about the types of unemployment. Here is one of them:

Structural-unemployment caused by a mismatch between the skills of job seekers and the requirements of available jobs. One example of this is when you are replaced by a machine.

Excerpts from the article:

"This month, OpenAI, an artificial-intelligence research lab based in San Francisco, began allowing limited access to a piece of software that is at once amazing, spooky, humbling and more than a little terrifying.

OpenAI’s new software, called GPT-3, is by far the most powerful “language model” ever created. A language model is an artificial intelligence system that has been trained on an enormous corpus of text; with enough text and enough processing, the machine begins to learn probabilistic connections between words. More plainly: GPT-3 can read and write. And not badly, either.

Software like GPT-3 could be enormously useful. Machines that can understand and respond to humans in our own language could create more helpful digital assistants, more realistic video game characters or virtual teachers personalized to every student’s learning style.

OpenAI has given just a few hundred software developers access to GPT-3, and many have been filling Twitter the last few weeks with demonstrations of its surprising capabilities"

"Give GPT-3 a natural-language prompt — “I hereby resign from Dunder-Mifflin” or “Dear John, I’m leaving you” — and the software will fill in the rest with text that is eerily close to what a human would produce.

These aren’t canned responses. GPT-3 is capable of generating original, coherent and sometimes even factual prose. And not just prose: It can write poems, dialogue, memes, computer code and who knows what else.

GPT-3’s flexibility is a key advance. Matt Shumer, the chief executive of a company called OthersideAI, is using GPT-3 to build a service that responds to email on your behalf: You write the gist of what you’d like to say, and the computer creates a full, nuanced, polite email out of your bullet points.

Another company, Latitude, is using GPT-3 to build realistic, interactive characters in text-adventure games. It works surprisingly well — the software is not only coherent but also can be quite inventive, absurd and even funny."

Friday, July 31, 2020

Will computer programs replace newspaper columnists?

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