I admit I am a bit handicapped recovering from surgery. That makes me grumpy as a default setting. Looking through my recent emails, I was reminded to follow up on a potential application of GPT 2 to create an automatic email reply bot. In the ideal case, everybody would have one, in the near future, and while the bots are conversing in “Cyberspace”, we then could do more enlightened things. GPT 2 is an unsupervised AI system that is easy to access by APIs. It can transform, predict texts, as well as complete paragraphs. Among others, the access I am using is via https://deepai.org/machine-learning-model/text-generator.
For example, I entered for predictive purposes the beginning of Homer’s Odyssey:
“Tell me, Muse, of that man of many resources, who wandered far and wide, after sacking the holy citadel of Troy. Many the men whose cities he saw, whose ways he learned. Many the sorrows he suffered at sea, while trying to bring himself and his friends back alive. Yet despite his wishes he failed to save them, because of their own un-wisdom, foolishly eating the cattle of Helios, the Sun, so the god denied them their return. Tell us of these things, beginning where you will, Goddess, Daughter of Zeus.”
The result generated by the system sounds to me like any paragraph taken from a contemporary bachelor thesis in any social sciences subject. To be fair “AI” (Artificial Intelligence) is the wrong technical approach to write such a thesis (I mean the term “intelligence”). But anyway, have a look. Automating contemporary philosophers seems not far fetched; if you catch my drift:
“But he left many among the rest of Niflheim, to whom he asked them to trust, and to take back many of their treasures. Many found out of ignorance the reason why they should trust Zeus: "The word of Zeus is not known, and it is very strange for him who says that this day is the Lord of the Worlds." For I had come to hear his tale and see what it might mean. Then the gods took their place on the slopes at Helos above the mountain range, there a mighty mountain, an enormous and mighty serpent, for we have heard it say of the god, whose name was Zeus, or Zeus the son of Ophiodorus, or Ochos, like the great mountain of the sea and its vast mountains. And they went up from the mountains and over the place that went up: and they said, we are a god of earth”
As a practical result, I conclude, GPT 2 would neither work for my email response nor as Homer’s teaching assistant. This is the kind of text, that, when you think hard enough about it for some time, starts making sense. I guess that’s what people experience sometimes as “spiritual”. Good luck with that.
Of course, we were also laughing off automatic translations some years ago, and now they became quite good. So let’s wait a bit, what AI has to offer in the decade to come.
If you one day have some time at hand, where you can’t do much more than sitting upright in front of a computer, try this GPT-Python application described in the video below. Looks like fun.
(Thumbnail is public domain: Von Napoleon Vier, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1353019)