Hate Speech Submission
Mark Honeychurch (August 9, 2021)
A couple of weeks ago I talked about the NZ Skeptics putting together a submission for the Ministry of Justice in response to their new Hate Speech proposals. You can read our submission on our website, but I thought it would be fun to use EleutherAI's free online GPT-J-6G deep learning model to write a submission for us. I gave the software the first few paragraphs of our real submission, and then clicked the button to guess the next hundred or so words. I then fed the result back into the algorithm so that it could create the next block of text, and so on.
Eventually the text started getting repetitive, and veering off track, but for a while what I was being given by this trained algorithm made sense and looked pretty believable. I didn't agree with its arguments, but at least it seemed to be creating text that reads like a coherent argument. Please be aware that the pieces of legislation it mentions probably don't exist - this software is just trying to emulate the kinds of language it's been trained on, writing in blogs and on forums from all across the internet.
In the text below, everything in bold comes from our actual proposal. The ensuing text that is not in bold, starting at "We also acknowledge that there is a public interest", is written by the deep learning algorithm. Have a read and see if, like me, you're more than a little bit impressed with how well it did: