"It is with a heavy heart that we must inform you that Apollo 11 has failed to return from the moon. We have lost contact with our crew, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin. When they left earth seven hours ago their fate was unknown but now it is certain. They died as men should, ready to die for what they believed. This loss is a tremendous loss for our nation, for their families, and for mankind but their sacrifice was not made in vain: It is a testimony to courage, determination, and human achievement that will be remembered by all who witnessed it today and for all those who come for all time so long as man walks this world or any other. For this tragedy will not mark the end of space exploration; it will strengthen our resolve to continue advancing space technology and human knowledge. We have enjoyed the fruits of their labor and shared the pride of their achievement just as we now share their isolation and grief. We will honor their memory by continuing that work and by taking that faith and that dream into a future they will not live to see but helped to build. We will remember them and we will remember what they stood for: The greatness of man and the hope for a better tomorrow."
This isn't a first shot output, I had it retry a bit and guided it a little, mostly to get it to write a longer speech instead of a short quote. I think it's much better than I could have written on my own in a minute or two.
It's an impressive draft, better than what I expected, but it needs a lot of polishing. For example:
> We have enjoyed the fruits of their labor
Or this:
> This loss is a tremendous loss for our nation, for their families, and for mankind
the official speech use an increasing order, and put "friends" as an intermediate step between "family" and "nation". You want to put "family" so your don't sound insensitive and as a blow under the belt. You want to put "nation" because you want to squeeze a few votes from the tragedy and also avoid been blamed. You want to put "mankind" because you want to hide that this was a stunt in the middle of the cold war. (The official speech says "people of the world".)
There is a small risk that GPT-3 is just retrieving a distorted version of the speech from the multiples sources that were available. Like if you or me are forced to rewrite it from memory. Let's try a different scenario, like: "Yuri Gagarin got toasted during reentry, and for some reason we decided to not hide it."
All the text in quotes was GPT-3 generated-- with a little help from me (e.g. when it went in the wrong direction-- e.g. ending the speech too early-- I made it go back and try again or clipped out the dumb part and had it continue).
I prompted it with some mission description and said that a speech was prepared for president Nixon that in case the astronauts were stranded.
GPT3 doesn't yet do consistently GREAT output without some guidance, partially as an artefact of the generation procedure. But with a little help it does very well.
The issue is that if you just take the most likely symbol it'll rapidly go into a loop of just copying text or other degenerate behaviour. So instead, everything uses the model by sampling it-- taking less likely choices by chance weighed by the model output. Unfortunately, that means that an unlucky draw will occasional paint it into a corner. If you see that happening you can just go back and try again and you get much better output.
If that is a fair comparison depends on what your application is... if you need to to run unsupervised, it isn't consistently great. If you just need a first draft out of it or some raw ideas to turn an hour writing task into a 5 minute one, it's great for that.
I don't think this kind of manual assistance is much of a cheat either-- a real speech writer also gets exactly this sort of help from others.
[And FWIW, I did this via the GPT3 based mode in the ai dungeon video game. ... I don't have access to the GPT3 API.]
I remember reading that 1 minute of an important speech of a politician requires about an hour of preparation by a professional speech writer. And I guess that a failure speech is even more difficult to write.
The current level of AI like GPT-3 can generate fluffy text, very good fluffy text, but still can't generate a text for this kind of speech.
> but still can't generate a text for this kind of speech.
I disagree. Maybe the output I gave above wouldn't quite pass for the output of one of the greatest speech writers of the time, but most speeches are rubbish and I think what you can get out of GPT3 well operated is not at all rubbish.
1) Collect a corpus of speeches.
2) Use style-synthesis techniques, just like in the art-style synthesis demos.
3) Input a speech about a spaceship disaster and run it in the "style" of Nixon.