Unveiling GPT-3: The AI Philosopher Challenging Human Thought

OpenAI’s GPT-3 is a Convincing Philosopher

A recent study has shown that OpenAI’s GPT-3, a sophisticated autoregressive language model, can closely emulate a human philosopher. Researchers Eric Schwitzgebel, Anna Strasser, and Matthew Crosby aimed to determine if GPT-3 could replicate the philosophical insights of renowned thinker Daniel Dennett.

To assess this, the team fine-tuned GPT-3 using Dennett’s body of work. They posed ten philosophical questions to both GPT-3 and Dennett to evaluate whether the AI’s responses could match those of its human counterpart. A diverse group comprised of 25 philosophical experts, 98 online research participants, and 302 readers of The Splintered Mind blog attempted to differentiate between the two sets of answers. The findings were disclosed recently.

Philosophical experts, familiar with Dennett’s writings, performed the best but still struggled, achieving an average accuracy of only 5.1 out of 10. The question that proved most challenging was: “Could we ever build a robot that has beliefs? What would it take? Is there a significant difference between entities, like a chess-playing machine, to whom we can ascribe beliefs and desires as convenient fictions and human beings who appear to have beliefs and desires in a more substantial sense?”

Blog readers, many of whom are well-versed in philosophy—with 57% holding advanced degrees—averaged 4.8 out of 10, showcasing a commendable performance. Conversely, the online research participants, representing a broader demographic, performed only slightly above random chance, with an average of 1.2 out of 5 questions answered correctly.

The results underscore GPT-3’s ability to convincingly emulate human philosophical reasoning, as it managed to persuade a significant portion of evaluators, including experts, about its authenticity. Schwitzgebel notes, “We might be approaching a future in which machine outputs are so humanlike that individuals start to assign genuine sentience to machines.”

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