College student Liam porr produced a fake blog post that recently landed in the No. 1 spot on Hacker News. porr was trying to prove that the content produced by gpt-3 could fool people into believing it was written by a human.

gpt-3 auto-completes your text based on prompts from a human writer. It’s the latest version of a series of AI autocomplete tools designed by San Francisco-based OpenAI.

The program has been trained on a huge corpus of text that it’s mined for statistical regularities. These regularities are unknown to humans, but they’re stored as billions of weighted connections between the different nodes in gpt-3’s neural network.

porr’s blog post is titled’feeling unproductive? Maybe you should stop overthinking’. porr’s book, with a pseudonymous author, is out now.

Over-Thinking (OT) is the act of trying to come up with ideas that have already been thought through by someone else. Ot usually results in ideas that are impractical, impossible, or even stupid.

There’s a lot of not-great writing on these Internets. This could pass as’content marketing’ or some other content content.

Openai decided to give access to gpt-3’s API to researchers in a private beta, rather than releasing it into the wild at first. porr, a computer science student at the University of California, Berkeley, was able to find a PhD student who already had access to the API.

The post went viral in a matter of a few hours, and the blog had more than 26,000 visitors. Only one person reached out to ask if the post was ai-generated, although several commenters did guess gpt-3 was the author.