Member-only story
I Asked GPT-3 About Covid-19. Its Responses Shocked Me.
Generative AI systems could guide future pandemic decision-makers
OpenAI’s GPT-3 is the most powerful AI system I’ve ever used. Trained on billions of web pages and tens of thousands of books, the system can generate nearly any kind of text, from news articles to computer code to sea shanties.
The current version of GPT-3, however, was only trained on data gathered through October of 2019. That means that GPT-3 has never heard of Covid-19, since the virus only started circulating broadly in December of that year. In testing the system, I wondered what would happen if I taught GPT-3 about Covid-19, and then asked it questions about the pandemic. How would it respond, and would its answers match at all with the reality of how Covid-19 has unfolded?
I decided to find out. The results were shocking, and gave me a new appreciation for the role that generative AI might play in guiding decision-makers during future outbreaks. To be clear, this is an experimental use of GPT-3, intended to explore the…
