Katharina Höne Director of Research of DiploFoundation
GPT-3 for diplomacy? First published on DiploFoundation Blog, 24 September The artificial intelligence (AI) Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) can write texts on any topic. OpenAI, the organisation that developed and released it as a beta version in June 2020, describes it as a general-purpose application for creating text, ‘allowing users to try it on virtually any English language task’. GPT-3 is a scaling up, by two orders of magnitude, of the previous model released by OpenAI, making it ‘the most powerful natural language processing (NLP) application available today’. The promises are greater accuracy and an improved ability to transfer things learned in one context to a different context. Overall, GPT-3 can mimic a variety of styles and genres, and in doing so, return texts that look very much like having been written by a human. The Guardian recently used it to write an article. So, what does this mean for diplomats whose daily work is steeped in the art and craft of language? 1. Automated diplomacy When thinking through the use of AI for specific tasks and within specific professions, it is useful to distinguish between augmentation and automation. Augmentation describes a situation where parts of a task are taken over by a machine. Automation means that the whole process is taken over by a machine with extremely minimal, if any, human intervention. What can GPT-3 deliver in terms of augmented and automated diplomacy? 2. Augmentation: Efficiency tools OpenAI’s website includes a number of use cases that are also applicable to the work of diplomats. First, the company CaseText uses GPT-3 to search through legal documents and to facilitate litigations and presentations by lawyers. Similar applications in the area of international law are not hard to imagine, and have indeed already been suggested and tested (the Cognitive Trade Advisor is an example). Second, productivity tools that lead to better decisions could also be applied in the field of diplomatic practice. Third, ‘comprehension tools’, that provide quick summaries of long texts, might also eventually aid the work of diplomats. As these tools become more widely available and used, it is not far-fetched to suggest that diplomats will use them in their daily work, either as off-the-shelf productivity tools or as custom-build systems that take the specifics of the work of diplomats into account.
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