A Guardian opinion piece headlined as written by GPT-3, opening with the model claiming it had no desire to wipe out humanity, which circulated in September 2020 as the first machine-written newspaper article. The editor's note at the bottom explained that the paper had generated eight versions and stitched together the best paragraphs. The note travelled less far than the headline.
The record notes the note: eight essays, human selection, human editing, 'no different to editing a human op-ed'. Which is to say the robot wrote about a third of the article and none of the headline.
September 2020, the article in every AI researcher's feed with the word 'misleading' attached. The public read the first paragraph and the researchers read the last.
A Robot Wrote This Entire Article, September 2020. Died of its own footnote. Survived by two years of 'a robot wrote this' headlines, and then by a technology that actually could.
What does it mean? Write it the way you would say it out loud.
