I think fewer people know what the Imitation game actually consists of than think they do - namely that a questioner has to guess whether a machine is a respondent to their questions, rather than another player. That certainly hasn't been tried with GPT-3 that I'm aware of.
However I would agree that it is an oblique version - that is, can a machine fool humans into thinking that they are human.
In which case I think it's probably safe to assume that GPT-3 has passed.
Turing actually asked a slightly different question, that I think is a lot more interesting. From Computing Machinery and Intelligence by A. M. Turing:
> The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either "X is A and Y is B" or "X is B and Y is A." The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B
> What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?" Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman?
Somewhat politically incorrect, assuming men and women should ever be distinguished, but much more revealing about how exactly people see themselves.
It's not true, though. There really is substantive content in that blog post (although it's trite and probably useless advice, it's certainly making a real argument).
I agree, and this is my instinct, but I worry about the effort becoming very asymmetric. In a world where a large amount of content CAN be generated (my time to read becomes much larger than time to generate / get my attention), and I may or may not be reading sincerely generated content, at what point do I get to attack the content creator for that, especially since it's very difficult for me to understand any given content creators intentions without some level of social proof or trust.
I think we're likely to get to a place where we either consolidate to trusted sources of information, or accept machine generated content as valuable on its own, even if for novelty and just move on with our miserable lives.
Because they can trust the work of their peers as having met some agreed upon standard, or are you saying academics are bad and hackers are actually egalitarian as a general rule?
As a criticism, i don't see how that matters. An article written by a human at the quality level of gpt-3 has the same value as an article actually written by gpt-3. Knowing that gpt-3 actually wrote the article doesn't change its level vapidity. Either the article is vapid or it isn't.
But there's no need to accuse the author of being a robot. They could have written:
> This article is vapid. Zero substantive content, pure regurgitation
Now, I would still have downvoted such a comment. If I'm reading a thread, I clearly like at least the article's topic, and I want to read more on that topic, not dismissive comments telling me that it's stupid. But, at least the modified version focuses on the content, rather than the author.
It's possible to point out issues with a submission without insulting the submitter or author. Calling what is presumably a person the equivalent of GPT-3 is needlessly rude. Even insulting the work, but not the (presumed) person behind it is better.
I'm certain GPT-3 has been commenting on HN threads for a while now. In some cases, its presence has been disclosed (see, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23886503) In other cases, GPT-3's presence has not been disclosed; the machine has been pretending to be a human being, largely unnoticed. Consider only how easy it is for it to write short, punchy comments -- say, one to three sentences long.
By implication, there's a high probability that we -- you, me, and everyone else on HN -- have been upvoting and downvoting GPT-3 comments for a while without realizing it.
The example comments you linked (Where GPT-3's presence was disclosed) were believably human, particularly if you were skimming, but they were not good comments. If not for the note at the end about GPT-3, I'm pretty confident they would have been downvoted.
And if I'm wrong, and GPT-3 is actually capable of writing thoughtful and substantive comments... well, in the words of XKCD, "mission fucking accomplished."
The longer the comment, the easier to detect GPT-3. The more rigorous the subject, the easier to detect GPT-3. But GPT-3's presence is harder to detect for short comments on less rigorous subjects generated using as input context actual headlines and top-voted comments on HN.
To be fair though: it's quite clear that all the discussion in that post is commenting on the headline and not the content. Bland self-improvement "life hacks" are one of the metaphorical crack pipes of this site. We all have way too much to say on the subject of our own productivity.
So I think it's less likely that HN was fooled by GPT-3 but that GPT-3 was good enough at filling a plausible article out around a tempting headline.
I didn't see the article at the time but from skimming it I'm sure I would have been fooled.
GPT-3 fits snugly into the pattern of "AI does intelligent thing -> we decide/realize thing doesn't reflect meaningful intelligence". Maybe in this case the devaluing of blog "crack" is a positive thing.