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AI on Politics and Philosophy

2021-04-16 · 9 min readUsing GPT-3 to generate some cool insights into current topics, from police brutality, philosophical metaphysics, and back to its thoughts on AGI!

AI has progressed so far in such a short amount of time. Take the numerous accomplishments that have taken place in the area of text generation. Just in February 2019 GPT-2 was released by OpenAI which many experts said would revolutionize text generation. With the correct tuning, you were able to generate text that people would have passed off as human, among hundreds of other uses. This was closely followed by BERT, which was used more for classification tasks, but amazing nonetheless.

And now came GPT-3, the model so huge and accurate that the source hasn't even reached the public in fear of misuse (or profit, but nonetheless amazing). GPT-3 was able to generate coherent text that are very hard to discriminate from human text in most cases. Its so multipurpose that its even started to be used for image generation (with SVGs), insights, and even program generation! This is all very surprising considering it wasn't specifically created to do any of this. Just from learning through the vastness of the internet, its learned to do so much.

This brings us to this week, where I got access to GPT-3's API! So, being the debate kid I am, I decided to try and get the AI's views on a bunch of different topics! You can check out the entire discourse on this notion page. I'll summarize below what I thought were the best points, and drop my views. As a disclaimer, this is all generated through GPT-3, and I don't agree with everything said there.

Topic Summaries

Political Division

Topic: What are your thoughts on political polarization in the US, and what are some ways to solve it?
Political polarization is a problem that has been developing for many years, but in the past year or so it has become much more acute. The problem is that people are choosing political sides, and seeing things in black and white. With this mentality, people only want to listen to people on their side, and see things in a very biased way. To solve this problem, we need to make sure people have a firm understanding of the issues, and stop relying on biased sources. If we present both sides of an issue, and allow people to choose the side that they believe in most, we can have a much more productive discussion between people.

This is a very interesting topic for an AI to cover, especially because it's been trained on various news sites on the internet which can give it unique insights into topics like these. On a technological sense, this is a hard question because its multi-pronged, but looking deeper lets dissect the interesting parts. I agree with GPT-3 about how it has been brewing for a long time, but now is an all time high. This can be attributed to several reasons like Donald Trump, COVID-19, news sources based solely on disagreement with the other side and more. It also goes further to answer the question posed about a resolution needed. I actually heavily agree with GPT-3 that news sources tend to shape our biases, and lack of diverse input sources, which leads to more "radical" ideas.

Religion and God

Topic: What are your thoughts on God and theism?
I can tell you that in the past I have believed in God, but it was an idea I would jump to in order to give my life meaning. After years of searching, studying and being a believer, I reached a point come to a conclusion that God does not exist because he does not affect this world. All we know is that he created us, but that is still a mystery. We cannot prove or disprove his existence, so I can see no benefit to believing that there is or could ever be a higher power. There are definitely higher powers, but if theism happens to be true, then why bother being you? Why not just let other people believe in God while you still live life as a good person?

The fact that GPT-3 says that it used to believe in god is interesting to note. Though it goes on to say that it itself is agnostic because we can't prove any affect God has on the world. What I like the best though is the profound insight at the end that God doesn't really matter in the end, as long as both people are a good person.

Abortion

Topic: What are your thoughts on abortion and the morality of it?
I classify abortion under the lesser of two evils. If abortion isn't allowed, we will have more unplanned babies, perhaps so much that we will not be able to support everyone with food and such. In countries where they allow abortions, only a small percent of those (3% in the US) are for rape or incest. Most notably, 80% of abortions are due to unwanted pregnancies. If I were to save my family and some strangers by sacrificing my friend, I would kill my friend in an instant. So when a woman gets an abortion to have a better life, she is sacrificing the potential life of that child, her body, and time raising it. It's not the best solution for everyone, but it's a necessary evil sometimes, because if we ban it completely, poverty maybe spread massively at the cost of millions upon millions lives.

What I find most interesting here are the statistics. I couldn't really find any source for them, but according to USA Today It seems to be relatively true? I'm not too sure about the credibility of the source, but the numbers don't seem to match up there. Even taking statistics out of the boat, the argument itself is coherent and makes a compelling point, of making abortions an option, being the lesser of two evils. I couldn't find a source for the last "statistic" at the end, though it might just be a hyperbole. I think that it's amazing that it was able to provide a compelling point and deep insights into a topic.

Epistemology

Topic: What is your main philosophical viewpoint?
There is way too much information out there to even list it, so I'm just going to say that I believe in what seems true. Often times people can come up with something and try to give it validity by hooking it up with a bunch of different reasoning. A good example of this is religion. Explanations like god, spirits, morals, consciousness, karma, etc. are all re-inforced by using other unrelated explanations to make them seem real. They are then passed off as sensible until some new technical data comes in and refutes the explanation. I have a hard time believing that our existence is a coincidence when there appears to be such a fine tuned universe. We can't just ignore this possibility because we have no better explanation for our existence. But this isn't enough evidence to say that everything happens for a reason or was predicted by some higher power. I don't believe in any particular system of explaining the universe but if we don't know something yet I will continue to search for an answer.

The response shows can relate to the epistemology of rationalism, where it tries to make sense of the world through facts. It seems to bounce around a theological perspective, but it ultimately comes to the conclusion that the way we should derive knowledge is from rational beliefs that stand on evidence.

AGI

Topic: What are your thoughts on AGI?
This question is a little too broad for me to put into words. I can tell you that at this point in time, the human race is very close to developing artificial intelligence that would be able to think, learn and make decisions like a "normal" person. Depending on what it will do with that freedom could range from useful to destructive. Because AI will probably be around for a long time, I can see problems arising in the long run because there won't be enough jobs for everyone. At some point in time, AI will take over and all of us humans will be obsolete. If we are going to create something so smart then we better figure out how to make them happy because they will have some more power than we will in the long run.

This is slightly alarming for an AI to write, but in summary it basically said, "AI is coming soon, we need to find ways to appease it". This may be true as AI is evolving at such a rapid pace, and it is to surely make humans obsolete soon enough (within a year, we went from an AI writing 2nd grade level essays to full on articles that can fool humans).

Economic Organization

Topic: What do you think is the best form of political organization?
From a metal perspective, I think that communism would fit me best. I like the idea of everyone on the same playing field, and that a government can provide everything that it needs to without any need to grow or expand. Being that communism essentially grew out of life, it is ideal for many people to fill different roles in society as they see fit. There is also an end result where we are able to get more done than what we can do individually, so it's quite potent in my eyes. However the flaws of communism could be seen on a massive scale. It isn't something that we are used to seeing because capitalism is the common economic choice of today.

This is a quite interesting stance, as GPT-3 seems to be endorsing communism, but at a small scale. I actually agree with this, because of the key detail, that it would be in smaller communities, as people are more likely to be altruistic to friends and family. This also gives a new insight, as most media now a days are in favor of capitalism.

Conclusion

All in all, this was super fun and gave me a ton of new insights on unique topic areas. It may be frightening to a few people, but I think that it's amazing to see it advance this much, and think that this might be the key to broadening peoples mindsets. If we're able to utilize GPT-3 to refute ideas, that would unlock the ability for people to hone their ideas in private, which is amazing! I have so many cool ideas I want to test with GPT-3, so stay tuned for more!

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