BROADCASTS.com

Last week OpenAI announced\xa0its latest breakthrough. GPT-2 is a language model that can write essays to a prompt, answer questions, and summarize longer works.\xa0For example\xa0(bold prompt is human-written, all other text is the machine-generated response):

Prompt: For today\u2019s homework assignment, please describe the reasons for the US Civil War.

It is easy to identify why the Civil War happened, because so many people and so many books and so much television and films tell us that it was the cause, that it has something to do with race or economics or religion. There is much agreement that it was essentially a war of slavery on behalf of capitalism, about a century of slavery. But that\u2019s not what most people think of when they think of the Civil War. Many people think of the war as about states rights. You\u2019re not wrong about that, but it\u2019s kind of misleading to say that the Civil War was a conflict between states\u2019 rights and federalism. So let\u2019s try again. What\u2019s the idea that has inspired so many people to go onto the battlefields of Gettysburg and Antietam and Gettysberg and Petersburg and Fredericksburg? The American idea of the republic\u2013a notion of limited government\u2013is a great part of the history.

In 1791, Thomas Jefferson said \u201cOur Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.\u201d The \u201cfounding fathers\u201d were basically religious men who were not very concerned with states\u2019 rights. The Civil War occurred in reaction to the idea that the federal government was taking far too much power away from the states, that they weren\u2019t sovereign. Jefferson himself, as you well know, is an author of the Declaration of Independence who had some really crazy ideas about, well, you know, secession for a variety of reasons. The War Between the States (later the Great Rebellion) was a radical re-imagining of the American idea and not surprisingly, Jefferson\u2019s grandson, who took after both his father and his grandfather and wrote about it, was named Thomas, after the president. \u201cThe federal and state governments are both contrived for the benefit of the rich and large property,\u201d This view of the Founding Fathers has been promoted by some of today\u2019s most prominent politicians, including some who hold prominent national offices and have a direct stake in a Republican Party that has been hijacked by the \u201cfederalist\u201d wing of the party. So why is it that so many people have an easy-to-spot way of understanding the Civil War that has everything to do with the South and nothing to do with the South? The Confederate flag has been a symbol of racism for a long time, but when the Civil War started and the Civil War ended, many people suddenly began to see it differently. There was a change of heart, which I think is what led people to take the question of why the Civil War happened quite seriously\u2026

Although OpenAI calls this a \u201clanguage model\u201d, modeling language necessarily involves modeling the world. Even if the AI was only supposed to learn things like \u201ctexts that talk about the Civil War use the word \u2018Confederate\u2019 a lot\u201d, that has flowered into a rudimentary understanding of how the Civil War worked. Its training corpus (8 million web pages) was large enough that in the course of learning language it learned the specific idiom and structure of all sorts of different genres and subtopics. For\xa0example: