The voice of the machine and the right to truth

Gianni Riotta , Twitter @riotta The subject that most interested my students in this season of pandemic, at the University of Princeton and at the LUISS Master’s program in Journalism and Multimedia Communication, has been GPT-3, an automatic writing system launched in 2020 by Open AI institute. It involves neural algorithms that, absorbing more than 175 billion informational “synapses” acquired from our online knowledge, from the classics of ancient times to today’s newsletters, produce texts that can stand up to those composed by human beings. GPT-3 knows how to “write”: if you give it a page from Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea”, it continues the text, with logic and precision. Scientists and artists who took part in seminars organized in cooperation with Pirelli, Giuseppe Italiano, Debasish Pattanayak and Vladimir Alexeev ...