An A.I. Wrote This Story on Life in the Time of Coronavirus. It’s Eerie.
GPT-210, as we call it, has some serious writing chops
OneZero, as you may have seen in our publication’s tagline, is all about the undercurrents of the future — the technological and scientific forces that are carrying us into tomorrow. Artificial intelligence, of course, is a major part of that future: It shapes how we communicate, how businesses operate, how Instagram markets sketchy discount palazzo pants in your feed…
So, we decided to see if an A.I. could fill in as a OneZero columnist.
At the suggestion of OneZero senior writer Dave Gershgorn, we’ve been testing weekly short fiction pieces scribed by GPT-2, a text-generating artificial intelligence algorithm originally built by OpenAI. We give the algorithm a sentence from a real OneZero article (you’ll see them below in bold), and the algorithm iteratively generates what it thinks the next word should be. GPT-2 learned which words often follow other words by analyzing a dataset of 8 million webpages. We’re calling this project GPT-210. (Get it?)
To help the A.I. generate longer stories, sometimes we’ll insert the last full sentence it wrote back into the GPT-2 program and stitch the two parts together, but each word is algorithmically generated…
