2: The impact of machines that "learn" and produce

FOSS and Crafts

The results from machine learning have been getting better and better and the results seen so far from OpenAI's GPT-3 model look stunningly good. But unlike GPT-2 (which was publicly released under a free license), so far GPT-3 is accessible via API-only. What's the reasoning and possible impact of that decision? For that matter, what kind of impacts could machine learning advancements make on FOSS, programming in general, art production, and civic society?

Links:

• The OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since bitcoin article

  • The quoted comment on Hacker News
• Auto-generation of legalese and auto-web-design GPT-3 demos
• GPT-2
• GPT-3's API and FAQ page
• Tensorflow and PyTorch
• (Artificial) neural networks and machine learning
• https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/
• Google's Deepmind and Agent57 (be sure to watch the Agent57 videos, they're's impressive)
• Mozilla's Common Voice project
• AlphaGo
• Bayesian spam filters; see also Paul Graham's highly influential a plan for spam writeup
• Markov chains (we miss you, X11R5...)
• The Postmodernist Essay Generator
• Postmodernism
• Neural networks' difficulties in explaining "why they did that" and an overview of attempts to make things better: An Overview of Interpretability of Machine Learning
• Chris had a conversation with Gerald Sussman about AI that was related to the above and influential on them. "If an AI driven car drives off the side of the road, I want to know why it did that. I could take the software developer to court, but I would much rather take the AI to court."
• The Propagator Model (by Alexey Radul and Gerald Jay Sussman, largely): Revised Report on the Propagator Model. See also: We Really Don't Know How to Compute!
• Three Panel Soul's Recursion comic (cut from this episode, but we also originally mentioned their Techics comic which is definitely relevant though)
• Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Impressionism, and the Realism movement (Obviously there's also a lot more to say about these art movements than just lumping them as a reaction to photography but... only so much time on an episode.)
• AI Dungeon 2 (nonfree, though you can play it in your browser)
• Episode of Ludology about procedural narrative generation
• Implicit Bias and the Teaching of Writing

• Machine learning's tendency to inherit biases

  • Rise of the racist robots -- how AI is learning all our worst impulses
  • Machine bias (and its use in deciding court cases)
  • Google's Vision AI producing racist results
  • When It Comes to Gorillas, Google Photos Remains Blind (Content warning: this is due to an extremely harmful form of synthesized racism from the biases in the datasets Google has used)
  • Predictive policing algorithms are racist. They need to be dismantled.
• Discovering Reinforcement Learning Algorithms and the subdiscipline of Learning to Learn
• Hayao Miyazaki's criticism of an AI demonstration not considering its impact