The former President of the Government, Mariano Rajoy, has just made his debut as a sports columnist. He has done it in El Debate, a medium in which he publishes his texts analyzing Spain’s matches in the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. His brief texts have ended up generating all kinds of reactions, including a singular one.
Fancy. Twitter has been fill humorous criticism of the prose of Rajoy, which was limited to two paragraphs in its first column and to three in the second. Some they already call him sardonically “the best living columnist in the Spanish press” while others —with the same tone— assure after the publication of that second column that “his talent as a columnist has no ceiling”.
Germany is Germany. The repetitive language without fear of synonymy is certainly striking, and in its first column many were left with that “Germany is Germany” that has become quickly in a meme and to which in fact he returned after the game with the German team. He himself reaffirmed the phrase in the headline of that column “Germany agreed with me.”
(in)imitable style. Your writing style has been very criticized by some —often humorously— but valued by others: “Reading the second paragraph without knowing its author, you can quickly deduce that it is Rajoy. Hardly anyone can do that.” Those first two paragraphs deserved much longer analysis than the column itself, but it may be easier to imitate him than it seems.
An AI that writes like Rajoy. The GPT-3 engine became quite a revolution two years ago. Said artificial intelligence system allowed it to be trained to then complete texts —and later, code— from a small introductory sentence. Juan Alonso, a user who has been experimenting with GPT-3 for some time, has trained the model to write like Rajoy. He has already foreseen how Rajoy’s third column will be next Thursday, after the Spain-Japan game, and the result is certainly surprising.
exclusive! Here you can read the future column by M. Rajoy on the next match between Spain and Japan, generated with an AI (GPT-3). pic.twitter.com/Ip7w6zhpBF
– Juan Alonso (@kokuma) November 28, 2022
GPT-3 mimics tics and style. The engine offers a column full of obviousness, like the first two by Rajoy, and a simple language that precisely imitates that of Rajoy, tics included. This same user already explained how he trained the engine with the first column and advancement what would the second one be like (he foresaw a 0-0 draw, by the way). The result of the second also has his private ‘making of‘and it is longer thanks to a slight modification of the generation parameters and training with the two previous columns.
If GPT-3 already imitated Shakespeare, it can imitate anyone. The AI-generated text is certainly believable and could easily be attributed to Rajoy, but in reality GPT-3 is capable of imitating virtually any author. Various analyzes showed how he is capable of writing like Shakespeare, but he is also capable of writing like renowned philosophers and imitating our particular fondness for posting offensive comments on Reddit.
sensitive debates. This and other engines have also opened up a debate about more sensitive uses, such as what happened with the developer who created a chatbot that wrote as if it were his deceased girlfriend and another firmly assured that the chat engine he had created with Lamda —a project from Google that competes with GPT-3—had a conscience.
Imitation / inspiration. The capacity of these engines is amazing and we are also seeing it in the field of image generation with DALL-E 2, Midjourney or Stable Diffussion. As with text, these engines can imitate artistic styles, and their performance and accuracy is increasing. GPT-3 has actually just been renewed, and there is already talk of its successor, GPT-4, which will be even more powerful and which portends a future in which the generation of texts through artificial intelligence is the norm, and not the exception.
Image: the Moncloa