Emailed on August 21, 2020 in The Friday Forward

College student Liam Porr used the language-generating AI tool GPT-3 to produce a fake blog post that recently landed in the No. 1 spot on Hacker News, MIT Technology Review reported.

Porr was trying to demonstrate that the content produced by GPT-3 could fool people into believing it was written by a human. And, he told MIT Technology Review, “it was super easy, actually, which was the scary part.”

I covered GPT-3 in a prior newsletter, but at its most basic, GPT-3 (which stands for “generative pre-trained transformer”) auto-completes your text based on prompts from a human writer.

So that's what Porr did, then shared the blog post on Hacker News. Then hilarity ensued.

The post went viral in a matter of a few hours and the blog had more than 26,000 visitors. Only one person reached out to ask if the post was AI-generated, although several commenters did guess GPT-3 was the author.

And then the community downvoted those comments because they were insulting: