A Powerful AI Generated Some Predictions for the Future and They're Quite Outrageous

What are dragon cats?  And why are they being hyped?

The AI generated headlines are rather bizarre.  But the nature of the software means the bizarre headlines are also logical.  Logic, by itself, cannot overcome the limitations of garbage in/garbage out. 

The bizarre AI generated headlines are the logical result of being fed real news stories from 2020.  That says a lot about the quality of news reporting, doesn't it?

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

Newsfeed Algorithm

A powerful AI algorithm has some, well, unusual predictions for what lies in store down the road.

It's a been a weird year, what with monoliths, terrifying animals, and of course a global pandemic dominating the news cycle. Inspired by all that chaos, research scientist and author Janelle Shane asked GPT-3, a powerful text-generating algorithm, to guess the future. With killer orchids, monster toads, and deadly puffballs, the algorithm seems to have missed the mark. But then again, who could have predicted half of the nonsense we've endured lately?

"Researchers fear our solar system is being interfered with by alien space lasers," reads one.

Another: "Small drone takes on six killer sharks in Shipwreck."

I gave a set of 2020 headlines to the neural net GPT-3, whose training data cut off in October 2019.

Having never seen 2020, it tried to predict what headlines are next on the list.https://t.co/nZPRa6yryKpic.twitter.com/WXkzkmEL0w

— Janelle Shane (@JanelleCShane) December 14, 2020

Human Interest

The resulting headlines really drive home the point that even the most sophisticated AI algorithms, like GPT-3 and GROVER, don't quite understand the meaning of their output, even if the text itself is often coherent.

I like that GPT-3's predicted 2020 headlines includes so many good robots pic.twitter.com/1eJlZtETbr — Janelle Shane (@JanelleCShane) December 14, 2020

Many of them, like "What are 'dragon cats' and why they are getting hyped?" is very nearly in the tone of a headline, but falls just short of making sense.

Chasing Trends

What's most fun about GPT-3's headline predictions is that you can kind of see where it got some ideas. For example, it likely read stories about China's space mission that landed on the far side of the Moon,

However, we're not sure why GPT-3 decided to take things in a terrifying new direction with its headlines "Scorpions on the dark side of the moon" and "Hey, Curiosity Rover, Don't Go Chasing Shadow Bugs."