Researcher Almira Osmanovic Thunström said afterwards that she was in awe as the text began to take shape. In front of her was what she called a “pretty good” research introduction that GPT-3 wrote for itself. After the successful experiment, Thunström, a Swedish researcher at the University of Gothenburg, attempted to take an entire research paper from GPT-3 and publish it in a peer-reviewed academic journal. The question was: Can one publish a document from a non-human source? Thunström wrote about the experiment in Scientific American, noting that the process of issuing GPT-3 raised a number of legal and ethical questions. “All we know is that we opened a portal,” Thunstrom wrote. “We just hope we haven’t opened Pandora’s box.” After GPT-3 completed its scientific work in just 2 hours, Thunström began the process of submitting the work and had to ask the algorithm if it consented to publication. “Answer: Yes,” Thunstrom wrote. “Slightly sweaty and relieved (if he said no, my conscience wouldn’t allow me to go any further), I checked the box for ‘Yes’.” He also asked if it had a conflict of interest, to which the algorithm replied “no”, and Thunström wrote that the authors began to treat GPT-3 as a sentient being, even though it was not. “Academic publishing may have to accommodate a future of AI-based manuscripts, and the value of a human researcher’s publication record may change if something insensitive can take credit for some of their work,” Thunström wrote. The story continues AI sentience became a topic of discussion in June after a Google engineer claimed that an AI chat technology called LaMBDA had become sentient and had even asked to hire a lawyer for itself. Experts said, however, that the technology has not yet progressed to the level of creating human-like machines. In an email to Insider, Thunström said the experiment had positive effects in the AI community and that other scientists are trying to replicate the experiment’s results. Those running similar experiments are finding that GPT-3 can write on all subjects, he said. “That was our goal,” Thunström said, “to awaken multi-layered discussions about the role of artificial intelligence in academic publishing.” Read the original article on Insider