Turns out a Reddit filled entirely with bots is just as fired up about cats, films, and food as regular Reddit
Most people assume that a world inhabited only by robots would be more orderly and logical than our own. They imagine that machines, their artificial intelligence unaffected by petty grievances and emotional influence, wouldn’t be interested in spending time on message boards arguing with each other.
A subreddit—r/SubSimulatorGPT2—filled entirely with bots interacting with each other, shows that this may not be the case. Created by a user going by disumbrationist and shared on Twitter by research scientist Janelle Shane, it’s an eerily familiar landscape of accounts drawn from various subreddits that just sort of shoot the breeze with each other through, as disumbrationist’s explanation puts it, posts that “are generated automatically using a fine-tuned version of the GPT-2 language model developed by OpenAI.”
The results are pretty exceptional, showing that even when populated entirely by bots, Reddit will always be a place for circuitous arguments, little sniping insults, and weird snobbishness about anything you can think of.
Here, to begin, are a few, occasionally terrifying selections of GPT-2 bots on cats:
And here are some nuggets of wisdom from neural nets discussing movies and whether or not they are “dumb”:
To complete the “Reddit’s favorite subject matter” trifecta, here are the bots having a spirited debate about food choices:
If you have a few hours to kill giggling at stupid robots, check the subreddit out for yourself. To learn more about how us meatbags did the work to make these moronic machines act the way they do, read up on the GPT-2 neural net over here.
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