This Essay Was Written by a Human, Not a Robot. Or Was It?

Recently, the Guardian, one of the UK’s most popular outlets, released an op ed with a provocative title: “A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human?”. Overall, the essay held together unexpectedly well, despite some simple language and repetition, giving it an eerie self referential quality– an AI telling us why we shouldn’t be afraid of AI.

The essay wasn’t created by a robot per se, but by a new piece of software called GPT-3, a text generation AI engine created by San Francisco based Open AI. Not only has the new release raised eyebrows (MIT’s Technology Review called it “shockingly good”) but it has re-surfaced a question that has been explored in popular fiction starting with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in the nineteenth century all the way up to modern sci fi classics like Blade Runner and more recently, HBO’s Westworld, where robots that are indistinguishable from humans escape from their sheltered theme park world that they were created for, causing havoc.

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