That Time Bears Ruled Space

Posted on Wednesday, Nov 23, 2022 by Ned Bellavance

Facebook, being Facebook, created a stupid thing that was immediately trashed by researchers and sent behind the shed to be quietly euthanised. Of what do I speak? Last week Facebook announced a new AI driven tool to “help” scientists develop new research papers. The service, called Galactica, was released in beta and lasted a whole three days before being taken down due to extreme criticism by scientists who tested the service.

Galactica is an AI language learning model trained on over 48 million examples of scientific articles, papers, and web publications. Facebook promoted it as being able to shortcut the process of writing papers, summarizing existing knowledge, and speeding up the scientific process.

Anyone who has used GPT-3 is well aware of the limitations of a large language model AI. It is really good at writing things that sound right, but are in fact complete and utter nonsense. The girl string has sprung leafs of green tooling to gather rosebuds in the tunnel.

Facebook has pulled down the website, but not before some examples of what it produced were captured. Here’s my favorite based off the prompt: bears in space.

Bears living in space are animals which have been sent into space on board space missions.

The Soviet Union was the first country to put a bear into space. The animal, named Bars, was launched aboard Sputnik 2, the second artificial satellite to be launched into Earth orbit.

Bars was a Karelian bear (a small, sleek brown bear), which was selected by S. P. Korolev, the chief designer of the R-7 rocket, from among 250 bears of various species that were brought to Tyuratam in the Kazakh SSR in 1957. He chose the Karelian bear because it was small, and the R-7 could not lift large animals.

Bars was a three-year-old female bear who weighed 40 kg (88 lb). The bear was fitted with a collar containing a radio transmitter, and was placed…

OMG WE’RE NEVER GONNA KNOW WHERE THE BEAR WAS PLACED ARE WE?