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aladyinasong · 3 years ago

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Thinking about Branwen, sister of Bran the Blessed, and Sansa.

Branwen (and Bran) story start with the King of Ireland traveling to Wales to ask her hand in marriage to make peace between the two kingdom, the betrothal is accepted and in the next day, a feast is held to celebrate their marriage. When Branwen arrives in Ireland the King starts to treat her cruelly as punishment for the actions of Efnysien, one of her brothers. Later, she gives birth to an heir, Gwern, and continues being mistreated by her husband until she finds and trains a small bird and later sends it with a message telling what she is suffering to Bran and he takes a army to Ireland to rescue her. When the army arrives, Branwen’ husband fears a war and agrees to give the kingdom to their son, still a child, to avoid conflict but some of the irish lords don’t support the idea and plan to secretly attack Bran and his men, Efnysien discover this and kills all the lords crushing their heads one by one. A feast is hold in celebration to Gwern’ coronation but Efnysien burns his own nephew alive after getting jealous while Branwen watches everything and tries to leap into the fire after her son but Bran holds and protect her when a war breaks between Welsh and Irish in the middle of the feast. Efnysien regrets what he did after realizing that the Irish have more chances of winning the war and tries to help the Welsh soldiers breaking a magic cauldron used to resurrect dead people by the Irish, he dies in the process. The war still goes on, everybody dies except Bran, Branwen and seven welsh soldiers, including one of their other brothers, they return to Wales but discover that Bran has been hit by a poisoned arrow to his leg, he dies and because of the grief for everything she lost, Branwen also dies of a broken heart.

Sansa story start with the King of Westeros going to the North asking her father to be his hand and proposing a betrothal between her and his son, a feast is held in homage to the King. They go to KL and after Ned execution, Joffrey now the king, starts to treat Sansa badly and punishes her for the victories of her brother. In the original outline, Sansa actually marries Joffrey and gives birth to a heir. Later, Jaime kills everyone in the Red Keep including Sansa and her child (his grand nephew) to be king. Part of this became Elia Martell story and Branwen death also probably inspired Ashara Dayne a little, both died because of heart break after losing their brothers and children.

Branwen is almost always represented with birds, specially starlings. She was described as one of the most beautiful maidens of all times and considered the perfect example of wife and queen. She is one of the Goddess of Sovereignty, a woman that personifies a territory and it’s her that confers sovereignty upon a king by marrying or having a romantic relationship with him. Similarly, Sansa is considered the key to the North and a big part of her plot it’s people trying to force her into marriages to get Winterfell.

#Sansa Stark #Branwen #Branwen daughter of Llyr

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isingletonmajortwo2022 · 3 years ago

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Branwen: Daughter of Llŷr.

I chose this story because it is mainly set on the island (Ynys Môn) where I grew up; it’s a landscape I grew up with and feel very connected to. I also enjoyed the imagery in this story and thought that it was a tale I could translate well into the kind of installation I wanted to create.

Branwen’s Story Synopsis:

Branwen’s story is the second tale of the Mabinogi. Bendigeidfran marries off Branwen, his sister, to Matholwch, the king of Ireland, also known as the island of the Fair in some translations. As a symbol of peace and unity between the two islands. Efnysien, their half-brother, learning that Branwen has been married to Matholwch, becomes enraged. As an act of revenge, he slaughters all of the horses brought to Wales by the Irish. This is seen as an offence to the Irish, demanding a fight. Bendigeidfranin promises all of his best horses to replace those Efnysien killed and the Cauldron of Rebirth to Matholwch as compensation for the actions of Efnysien. The Cauldron of Rebirth is a magical item that can bring any dead placed into it back to life. Matholwch accepts this compensation, and he returns to Ireland with Branwen. Some translations give Branwen more active agency in her marriage, making it something she chooses to do for her country instead of Bendigeidfran giving her away.

After they return to Ireland, Branwen has a son, Gwern. However, Matholwch’s court is still angry about how the Welsh has insulted them and convinced Matholwch that Branwen should be punished as recompense. They sentence Branwen to cook for the court and to be beaten daily. They also isolate Branwen from her brothers and ban all communication from Wales so that Bendigeidfran and his court never find out how they have punished Branwen.

Branwen’s only company during the three years of her punishment is a Starling or Drudwy; in the original translation, she tames the Starling and gives it a note to give to Bendigeidfran, telling him of her punishment for Efnysien’s actions. In some interpretations, she has a magical power that lets her speak to birds. In others, she teaches the Starling to speak.

Bendigeidfran, upon hearing the news gathers his men, and they set out towards Ireland. One day, men see an island with a mountain moving towards Ireland, and they go to warn Matholwch. Matholwch, hearing the news, realises that Bendigeidfran has learnt of his treatment of Branwen. Fearing Bendigeidfran’s wrath, he moves his people and Branwen further inland - destroying any bridges along their path to slow Bendigeidfran and his men's approach.

Upon seeing that they cannot stop Bendigeidfran, Matholwch offers peace between the two countries on Branwen's advice. Stating that he will build a house for Bendigeidfran - as he is a giant and has never had a home with sturdy walls. Alongside this, he will make his son, Gwern, King of Ireland. This peace offer is accepted, and they build a home for Bendigeidfran. They decide to have a feast to commemorate the harmony between the two countries and crown Gwern King of Ireland. However, during its construction, Matholwch placed soldiers in flour sacks on the pillars of the main room, telling them to wait until the Welsh had let their guard down so that they could attack. Efnysien finds the flour sacks suspicious and soon discovers that Irish soldiers are waiting to attack; he kills all of them by crushing their skulls between his hands.

The feast begins, and all seems well, but Efnysien, in his hatred, throws Gwern, his nephew and Branwen’s son, into the fire, killing him. Upon seeing this act, both countries took up arms and began to fight. Matholwch calls upon the soldiers he had hidden in the house, but when they don’t attack, it is found that they have all been murdered.

As the two countries fight, the Irish have the upper hand as they have the Cauldron of Rebirth. Efnysien, in regret for his actions and the heartbreak he has caused his family and country, takes it upon himself to stop the Irish. Disguising himself as a dead Irish soldier, he is thrown into the Cauldron of Rebirth. This action breaks the cauldron and kills Efnysien. Without the cauldron, the Irish lose.

During the battle, Bendigeidfran is struck with a poisoned spear. Knowing he is going to die, he orders his remaining seven men to cut off his head and to return to Wales so they can bury his head. When they return to Wales, Branwen believing that her brother is dead, along with her son and all those killed in the battle, dies of heartbreak on the banks of Aber Alaw. The story ends with the seven remaining men of Bendigeidfran’s court and his head - which is still alive and speaking - head to Annwn, where they live in peace and harmony for 80 years without ageing.

Branwen the Goddess:

Branwen, in Celtic mythology, is also a goddess. Their stories are the same. However, her death is seen as a sacrifice so that a new life and age could begin. It is believed that Branwen is the goddess of love and the centre from which all new life emerges. Her name means White Raven, and she is often associated with the image of a raven or a starling. She is also related to the imagery of the Cauldron of Rebirth and a cup. Cadair Bronwen, also known as Branwen’s Seat in English, is a mountain in mid-Wales believed to be her sacred spot.

Bedd Branwen:

Bedd Branwen or Branwen’s Grave is a Bronze Age cairn that is thought to be the grave of Branwen. A cairn is essentially a mound on a hill; they were often used as a marker of the presence of civilisation. Many cairns were used as burial sites in the neolithic and bronze age period as a headstone or symbol of the dead. One way to tell them apart in age is what the chamber inside is like; Neolithic cairns usually had long underground structures that could be used for multiple people. Think of the system inside the Pyramids in Egypt.

In contrast, Bronze Age cairns had simple stone sarcophagi entombed into the cairn. The burial mound isn’t there anymore due to the excavations done on the site in the 19th century, but the stone monument Branwen was interred in remains. Inside, there was evidence of cremated remains, jewels, and three vessels containing a child's ear bones. This was a common Neolithic practice that was thought to signify a form of familial relationship.

Bedd Branwen is located in Llanddeusant, a small village along the Avon Alaw that runs from Holy Island to near the centre of Ynys Mon.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/15mx9g_B67UjxzhlZxnvGvhbDYaC0zPaa?usp=sharing

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branwendaughterofllyr · 4 years ago

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White Ravens, Winter Roses - Part One

It is no secret that ASOIAF is influenced by various facets of Norse and Celtic mythology, especially in regards to the Long Night and the North. I want to discuss here parallels between ASOIAF and the Welsh epic, the Mabinogion. Specifically, the parallels between Lyanna, Sansa, and Branwen, Daughter of Llyr.

Branwen, Daughter of Llyr by Alan Lee

Branwen ferch Llŷr is the second branch of the Mabinogion, which was compiled sometime in the 12th to 13th century in the White Book of Rhydderch, but is likely far older and part of a greater oral tradition, and has connections to the Arthurian mythos which is Welsh in origin.

Here is a summary of the story of Branwen, Daughter of Llyr by Owen Sheers in his novella, White Ravens.

Bendigeidfran, son of Llyr, is the king of the island of Britain, invested with the crown of London. One day, while sitting at one of his courts in Harlech he sees several beautiful ships approaching from southern Ireland. The ships bear Matholwch, king of Ireland who asks to marry Bendigeidfran’s sister, Branwen, daughter of Llyr. Bendigeidfran agrees to the union, but during the celebrations, Bendigeidfran’s half-brother, Efnysien, objects and viciously maims Matholwch’s horses. Bendigeidfran offers Matholwch compensation in the form of a magic cauldron that can bring men back to life but without the power of speech. Matholwch and Branwen go back to Ireland where they are at first welcomed and Branwen has a son, Gwern. But after a year rumours spread about Efnysien’s insult and Matholwch has to reject Branwen to stop the uproar. Set to cook for the court, she rears a starling that, after three years, she sends to her brother with a message about her treatment. Bendigeidfran raises an army that sails to Ireland while he wades, because no ship is big enough for him. The Irish see him coming and retreat over the Liffey, destroying the bridge. But Bendigeidfran makes himself a bridge for his army to cross, and to appease him the Irish build a house, because no house has ever been big enough for him before. But they hide a hundred warriors inside. Efnysien secretly kills the warriors, and when the two sides meet openly peace is restored and Branwen’s child Gwern is made king. Calling Gwern to him, Efnysien throws the child into the fire; fighting immediately breaks out, with the Irish replenishing their ranks by throwing their dead warriors into the cauldron. Seeing this Efnysien repents and throws himself into the cauldron, stretching out to break it and his heart at the same time. Bendigeidfran, who is wounded with a poison spear in the foot, escapes, as do Branwen and seven men. Branwen dies of a broken heart. Bendigeidfran orders his men to cut off his head and carry it to the Gwynfryn in London to be buried with its face towards France. It was said no oppression could come to the island while the head was in its hiding place.

There has been some speculation that Bran Stark is connected to Bendigeidfran, whose name translates to “Magnificent Crow” or “Blessed Crow” and is usually anglicized as Bran the Blessed. Bran the Blessed had a reputation for wisdom and was the owner of the cauldron that revives the dead, and was grievously injured by a poisonous spear. Scholars have also noted connections between Bran the Blessed and the Fisher King, keeper of the Holy Grail (which in some legends can restore the fallen), who is also speculated to be connected to Bran Stark as the Fisher King is gravely injured by a spear, unable to sire children or hunt. But that’s another meta.

I want to talk about how Branwen’s story mirrors Lyanna’s and Sansa’s. Lyanna and Branwen leave home, resulting in feud between their husband/lover and their brother(s), are isolated from their home and family, lose their sons, and die after their brother rescues them. Branwen’s death from a broken heart, after both of her brothers die, echoes Lyanna’s own death in childbirth following the demises of her father, brother, and Rheagar.

Sansa goes south in order to marry the prince, just Lyanna went south, and Branwen went across the sea to Ireland, and bitterly regrets it in the end. Joffrey frequently punishes Sansa’ for her brother’s victories and her family’s opposition, bringing to mind Branwen’s own unjust punishment from her husband because of her brother’s actions, which included being banished to the kitchens and daily beatings. Both Branwen and Sansa are put aside by their husband/betrothed because of the enmity between them and their brothers.

What is most striking is the deep longing for home Branwen and Sansa express.

“Verily, lord,” said his men to Matholch, “forbid now the ships and the ferry-boats, and the coracles, that they go not into Wales, and such as come over from Wales hither, imprison them, that they go not back for this thing to be known there.” And he did so; and it was thus for no less than three years. And Branwen reared a starling in the cover of the kneading-trough, and she taught it to speak, and she taught the bird what manner of man her brother was. And she wrote a letter of her woes, and the despite with which she was treated, and she bound the letter to the root of the bird’s wing, and sent it toward Wales.

- The Mabinogion, tr. Lady Charlotte Guest

Branwen is almost always depicted as looking across the sea to Wales, sending the sterling to her brother.

From the high battlements of the gatehouse, the whole world spread out below them. Sansa could see the Great Sept of Baelor on Visenya's hill, where her father had died. At the other end of the Street of the Sisters stood the fire-blackened ruins of the Dragonpit. To the west, the swollen red sun was half-hidden behind the Gate of the Gods. The salt sea was at her back, and to the south was the fish market and the docks and the swirling torrent of the Blackwater Rush. And to the north… She turned that way, and saw only the city, streets and alleys and hills and bottoms and more streets and more alleys and the stone of distant walls. Yet she knew that beyond them was open country, farms and fields and forests, and beyond that, north and north and north again, stood Winterfell.

-Sansa VI, AGOT

Sansa is trapped in King’s landing, yearning repeatedly to go north, to go home.

I pray for Robb's victory and Joffrey's death . . . and for home. For Winterfell.

-Sansa III, ACOK

Branwen and Sansa are both forced to wait for their brothers to rescue them, again paralleling Ned traveling South for his sister, Lyanna. It’s could be interpreted through Ned’s dreams of Lyanna screaming for him while the kings guard block his way to the tower, that in the end Lyanna too wanted to return home, and became an unwilling prisoner.

“And now it begins," said Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning. He unsheathed Dawn and held it with both hands. The blade was pale as milkglass, alive with light."No," Ned said with sadness in his voice. "Now it ends." As they came together in a rush of steel and shadow, he could hear Lyanna screaming. "Eddard!" she called. A storm of rose petals blew across a blood-streaked sky, as blue as the eyes of death."Lord Eddard," Lyanna called again.” -Eddard X, AGOT

That Sansa, Lyanna, and Branwen are unwilling imprisonmened by men who were ostensibly romantically involved with them could be just a case of a common trope, but the fact they went willingly at first and are waiting to be rescued by their brothers unites them into similar narratives.

There is also a motif of birds that connect Branwen and Sansa. “Branwen” translates as “white raven,” bringing to mind Sansa’s own monikers of “Little Bird” and “Little Dove.” Birds are traditional symbols of freedom, and it is situational irony that Sansa and Branwen both take on the roles of caged birds

"Some septa trained you well. You're like one of those birds from the Summer Isles, aren't you? A pretty little talking bird, repeating all the pretty little words they taught you to recite."

-Sansa II, AGOT

Branwen’s freedom comes about from a bird, a starling she sends to her brother, whereas the letter Sansa writes is the opposite of Branwen’s secret message detailing her terrible circumstances. Cersei essentially dictates Sansa’s letter to Robb and Catelyn, cementing Sansa’s hostage status. It also recalls Lyanna’s isolation at the Tower of Joy, unable to communicate with her family.

So lovely. The snow-clad summit of the Giant’s Lance loomed above her, an immensity of stone and ice that dwarfed the castle perched upon its shoulder. Icicles twenty feet long draped the lip of the precipice where Alyssa’s Tears fell in summer. A falcon soared above the frozen waterfall, blue wings spread wide against the morning sky. Would that I had wings as well.” - Alayne I, AFFC

Here we have Sansa’s desire for freedom laid out in a wish for wings, a wish for flight. She wants to be free as a bird, or rather “a wolf with big leather wings like a bat” (Arya XII, ASOS). Unlike Lyanna and Branwen, Sansa has been able to make her escape, first from KL, where the wold with bat wings quotes comes out of, and as of AFFC, she is descending from the Eyrie, which literally means a nest of a large bird of prey. But even now, she is still captive in all the most important ways, at the mercy of Littlefinger.

There is also the tragedy of all of their lives, affecting both the women themselves and bringing about the destructions of others.

"Alas," said she, "woe is me that I was ever born; two islands have been destroyed because of me!" Then she uttered a loud groan, and there broke her heart.

-The Mabinogion, tr. Lady Charlotte Guest

Branwen puts the blame on herself, despite having her agency routinely seized from her by her brothers and husband. She is the cause of the war, just Lyanna was the cause of Robert’s Rebellion, and Branwen’s fate is constantly defined by the men around her, just as Lyanna acts a symbol.

Lyanna as the beautiful woman causing a war immediately puts in mind Helen of Troy, but there’s another figure that is similar to both Lyanna and Branwen: Deirdre of the Sorrows.

Deirdrê by Helen Stratton

Deirdre was prophesied to bring ruin upon all of Ireland with her beauty (similar to “two islands [being] destroyed because of [Branwen]), and does so by running away with her lover, Naoise, slighting the king she was betrothed to, Conchobar. The spiteful Conchobar’s revenge results in the deaths of Naoise and his brothers, and Deirdre ultimately commits suicide.

Prince Rhaegar loved his Lady Lyanna, and thousands died for it.

-The Kingbreaker, ADWD

Lyanna deeply echoes women like Branwen and Deirdre, who are fought over, imprisoned, and die.

Sansa herself considers suicide after the death of her father, connecting herself to Branwen who dies of grief and shame, and Deirdre, who cannot bear life with the man who killed her lover.

Perhaps I will die too, she told herself, and the thought did not seem so terrible to her. If she flung herself from the window, she could put an end to her suffering, and in the years to come the singers would write songs of her grief. Her body would lie on the stones below, broken and innocent, shaming all those who had betrayed her. Sansa went so far as to cross the bedchamber and throw open the shutters … but then her courage left her, and she ran back to her bed, sobbing.

-Sansa VI, AGOT

Here, Sansa is directly connected to all the beautiful dead women in the songs, be that Branwen, Deirdre, Lyanna, and even Ashara Dayne and Elia Martell. Ashara Dayne threw herself off a cliff because of a broken heart, again echoing the deaths of Branwen and Deirdre. Whether or not Ashara really did so or even why, is again, another theory, but the story is there. Elia Martell’s forced stay at King’s Landing and her children’s death is deeply reminiscent of the captivity of Branwen and the murder of her son Gwern.

Many have criticized GRRM for the deaths of many of the women of the previous generation of ASOIAF, and leaving them uncharacterized and nebulous figures. See the Dead Ladies Club metas for more on this subject. I have hopes that we will get more characterization of these women in future books, especially in the case of Elia.

@lostlittlesatellites wrote a meta about Sansa acting as a deconstruction of “The Princess in the Tower” trope, and I would like to echo her sentiment that Sansa is trapped physically, but is also isolated by the constraints the world of ASOIAF puts on girls and woman.

And this brings me to my idea that Lyanna is the trope played straight, while Sansa subverts it. Lyanna dies after her brother reaches her, just as Branwen does. But Robb never saves Sansa.

He could still hear Sansa pleading, as Lyanna had pleaded once.

-Eddard IV, AGOT

Sansa parallels

"You never knew Lyanna as I did, Robert," Ned told him. "You saw her beauty, but not the iron underneath.”

-Eddard VII, AGOT

My skin has turned to porcelain, to ivory, to steel

-Sansa V, ASOS

It has to be noted that Sansa and Lyanna disobeyed their fathers for “love” and ended up as the princess in the tower.

And in terms of character, Lyanna has quite a few similarities that she shares with Sansa rather than Arya (though there is something to be said about how the two Stark girls are two different aspects of Lyanna.) Lyanna weeps when she hears Rhaegar plays the high harp, and ran off on a romantic adventure. All very Sansa like traits.

But while Lyanna ends up meeting her death in Tower of Joy, Sansa’s own story has been much more complicated at the books continue. Her imprisonment is as much mental as physical. She cannot rely on her brothers, who are dead or disappeared or bound by other duties. And even her “love story” with her southern prince is cut short and diverted from Lyanna’s story, as she is cast off by Joffrey in the end. Sansa remains unrescued, passed from captivity to captivity, but in the end, she will be the one to save herself. I believe that Sansa will escape during or just after the Tourney of the Winged Knights, and bring her subversion of Lyanna’s story, which began at the Tourney of Harrenhal, full circle, as she has to rescue herself in order to truly fly free.

#Sansa Stark #Lyanna Stark #meta #mine #asoiaf #book canon #mythology #parallels

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strqyr · 4 years ago

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On the Welsh mythology angle, if you squinted you could probably make a case for Cinder being Gwern? (Branwen's son who is burned to death in a fire place). Like, Cinder being a very young kid Raven took in shortly after leaving and who lived with the tribe for a while before becoming separated/assumed dead (maybe in a fire related incident?). But unlike Gwern, Cinder actually survived and ended up in the "orphanage".

ooh, the plot thickens...

if this was the case, then cinder’s time with the tribe would have been very short, or she was super young at the time, as her interaction with raven don’t really give away any sort of familiarity.

but i like the cinder being qwern angle. a fire related incident, perhaps assumed dead... you do find cinders in the fireplace. isn’t that also how cinderella got her nickname? because she slept near a fireplace or something similar to that?

#rwby #rwby8 #rwby spoilers #cinder fall #cinder is a branwen #conspirwbytheorist #ask.strqyr

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mindthump · 4 years ago

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Language supermodel: How GPT-3 is quietly ushering in the A.I. revolution https://ift.tt/3mAgOO1

OpenAI

OpenAI’s GPT-2 text-generating algorithm was once considered too dangerous to release. Then it got released — and the world kept on turning.

In retrospect, the comparatively small GPT-2 language model (a puny 1.5 billion parameters) looks paltry next to its sequel, GPT-3, which boasts a massive 175 billion parameters, was trained on 45 TB of text data, and cost a reported $12 million (at least) to build.

“Our perspective, and our take back then, was to have a staged release, which was like, initially, you release the smaller model and you wait and see what happens,” Sandhini Agarwal, an A.I. policy researcher for OpenAI told Digital Trends. “If things look good, then you release the next size of model. The reason we took that approach is because this is, honestly, [not just uncharted waters for us, but it’s also] uncharted waters for the entire world.”

Jump forward to the present day, nine months after GPT-3’s release last summer, and it’s powering upward of 300 applications while generating a massive 4.5 billion words per day. Seeded with only the first few sentences of a document, it’s able to generate seemingly endless more text in the same style — even including fictitious quotes.

Is it going to destroy the world? Based on past history, almost certainly not. But it is making some game-changing applications of A.I. possible, all while posing some very profound questions along the way.

What is it good for? Absolutely everything

Recently, Francis Jervis, the founder of a startup called Augrented, used GPT-3 to help people struggling with their rent to write letters negotiating rent discounts. “I’d describe the use case here as ‘style transfer,'” Jervis told Digital Trends. “[It takes in] bullet points, which don’t even have to be in perfect English, and [outputs] two to three sentences in formal language.”

Powered by this ultra-powerful language model, Jervis’s tool allows renters to describe their situation and the reason they need a discounted settlement. “Just enter a couple of words about why you lost income, and in a few seconds you’ll get a suggested persuasive, formal paragraph to add to your letter,” the company claims.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. When Aditya Joshi, a machine learning scientist and former Amazon Web Services engineer, first came across GPT-3, he was so blown away by what he saw that he set up a website, www.gpt3examples.com, to keep track of the best ones.

“Shortly after OpenAI announced their API, developers started tweeting impressive demos of applications built using GPT-3,” he told Digital Trends. “They were astonishingly good. I built [my website] to make it easy for the community to find these examples and discover creative ways of using GPT-3 to solve problems in their own domain.”

Fully interactive synthetic personas with GPT-3 and https://t.co/ZPdnEqR0Hn ????

They know who they are, where they worked, who their boss is, and so much more. This is not your father's bot… pic.twitter.com/kt4AtgYHZL

— Tyler Lastovich (@tylerlastovich) August 18, 2020

Joshi points to several demos that really made an impact on him. One, a layout generator, renders a functional layout by generating JavaScript code from a simple text description. Want a button that says “subscribe” in the shape of a watermelon? Fancy some banner text with a series of buttons the colors of the rainbow? Just explain them in basic text, and Sharif Shameem’s layout generator will write the code for you. Another, a GPT-3 based search engine created by Paras Chopra, can turn any written query into an answer and a URL link for providing more information. Another, the inverse of Francis Jervis’ by Michael Tefula, translates legal documents into plain English. Yet another, by Raphaël Millière, writes philosophical essays. And one other, by Gwern Branwen, can generate creative fiction.

“I did not expect a single language model to perform so well on such a diverse range of tasks, from language translation and generation to text summarization and entity extraction,” Joshi said. “In one of my own experiments, I used GPT-3 to predict chemical combustion reactions, and it did so surprisingly well.”

More where that came from

The transformative uses of GPT-3 don’t end there, either. Computer scientist Tyler Lastovich has used GPT-3 to create fake people, including backstory, who can then be interacted with via text. Meanwhile, Andrew Mayne has shown that GPT-3 can be used to turn movie titles into emojis. Nick Walton, chief technology officer of Latitude, the studio behind GPT-generated text adventure game AI Dungeon recently did the same to see if it could turn longer strings of text description into emoji. And Copy.ai, a startup that builds copywriting tools with GPT-3, is tapping the model for all it’s worth, with a monthly recurring revenue of $67,000 as of March — and a recent $2.9 million funding round.

“Definitely, there was surprise and a lot of awe in terms of the creativity people have used GPT-3 for,” Sandhini Agarwal, an A.I. policy researcher for OpenAI told Digital Trends. “So many use cases are just so creative, and in domains that even I had not foreseen, it would have much knowledge about. That’s interesting to see. But that being said, GPT-3 — and this whole direction of research that OpenAI pursued — was very much with the hope that this would give us an A.I. model that was more general-purpose. The whole point of a general-purpose A.I. model is [that it would be] one model that could like do all these different A.I. tasks.”

Many of the projects highlight one of the big value-adds of GPT-3: The lack of training it requires. Machine learning has been transformative in all sorts of ways over the past couple of decades. But machine learning requires a large number of training examples to be able to output correct answers. GPT-3, on the other hand, has a “few shot ability” that allows it to be taught to do something with only a small handful of examples.

Plausible bull***t

GPT-3 is highly impressive. But it poses challenges too. Some of these relate to cost: For high-volume services like chatbots, which could benefit from GPT-3’s magic, the tool might be too pricey to use. (A single message could cost 6 cents which, while not exactly bank-breaking, certainly adds up.)

Others relate to its widespread availability, meaning that it’s likely going to be tough to build a startup exclusively around since fierce competition will likely drive down margins.

Christina Morillo/Pexels

Another is the lack of memory; its context window runs a little under 2,000 words at a time before, like Guy Pierce’s character in the movie Memento, its memory is reset. “This significantly limits the length of text it can generate, roughly to a short paragraph per request,” Lastovich said. “Practically speaking, this means that it is unable to generate long documents while still remembering what happened at the beginning.”

Perhaps the most notable challenge, however, also relates to its biggest strength: Its confabulation abilities. Confabulation is a term frequently used by doctors to describe the way in which some people with memory issues are able to fabricate information that appears initially convincing, but which doesn’t necessarily stand up to scrutiny upon closer inspection. GPT-3’s ability to confabulate is, depending upon the context, a strength and a weakness. For creative projects, it can be great, allowing it to riff on themes without concern for anything as mundane as truth. For other projects, it can be trickier.

Francis Jervis of Augrented refers to GPT-3’s ability to “generate plausible bullshit.” Nick Walton of AI Dungeon said: “GPT-3 is very good at writing creative text that seems like it could have been written by a human … One of its weaknesses, though, is that it can often write like it’s very confident — even if it has no idea what the answer to a question is.”

Back in the Chinese Room

In this regard, GPT-3 returns us to the familiar ground of John Searle’s Chinese Room. In 1980, Searle, a philosopher, published one of the best-known A.I. thought experiments, focused on the topic of “understanding.” The Chinese Room asks us to imagine a person locked in a room with a mass of writing in a language that they do not understand. All they recognize are abstract symbols. The room also contains a set of rules that show how one set of symbols corresponds with another. Given a series of questions to answer, the room’s occupant must match question symbols with answer symbols. After repeating this task many times, they become adept at performing it — even though they have no clue what either set of symbols means, merely that one corresponds to the other.

GPT-3 is a world away from the kinds of linguistic A.I. that existed at the time Searle was writing. However, the question of understanding is as thorny as ever.

“This is a very controversial domain of questioning, as I’m sure you’re aware, because there’s so many differing opinions on whether, in general, language models … would ever have [true] understanding,” said OpenAI’s Sandhini Agarwal. “If you ask me about GPT-3 right now, it performs very well sometimes, but not very well at other times. There is this randomness in a way about how meaningful the output might seem to you. Sometimes you might be wowed by the output, and sometimes the output will just be nonsensical. Given that, right now in my opinion … GPT-3 doesn’t appear to have understanding.”

An added twist on the Chinese Room experiment today is that GPT-3 is not programmed at every step by a small team of researchers. It’s a massive model that’s been trained on an enormous dataset consisting of, well, the internet. This means that it can pick up inferences and biases that might be encoded into text found online. You’ve heard the expression that you’re an average of the five people you surround yourself with? Well, GPT-3 was trained on almost unfathomable amounts of text data from multiple sources, including books, Wikipedia, and other articles. From this, it learns to predict the next word in any sequence by scouring its training data to see word combinations used before. This can have unintended consequences.

Feeding the stochastic parrots

This challenge with large language models was first highlighted in a groundbreaking paper on the subject of so-called stochastic parrots. A stochastic parrot — a term coined by the authors, who included among their ranks the former co-lead of Google’s ethical A.I. team, Timnit Gebru — refers to a large language model that “haphazardly [stitches] together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in its vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning.”

“Having been trained on a big portion of the internet, it’s important to acknowledge that it will carry some of its biases,” Albert Gozzi, another GPT-3 user, told Digital Trends. “I know the OpenAI team is working hard on mitigating this in a few different ways, but I’d expect this to be an issue for [some] time to come.”

OpenAI’s countermeasures to defend against bias include a toxicity filter, which filters out certain language or topics. OpenAI is also working on ways to integrate human feedback in order to be able to specify which areas not to stray into. In addition, the team controls access to the tool so that certain negative uses of the tool will not be granted access.

“One of the reasons perhaps you haven’t seen like too many of these malicious users is because we do have an intensive review process internally,” Agarwal said. “The way we work is that every time you want to use GPT-3 in a product that would actually be deployed, you have to go through a process where a team — like, a team of humans — actually reviews how you want to use it. … Then, based on making sure that it is not something malicious, you will be granted access.”

Some of this is challenging, however — not least because bias isn’t always a clear-cut case of using certain words. Jervis notes that, at times, his GPT-3 rent messages can “tend towards stereotypical gender [or] class assumptions.” Left unattended, it might assume the subject’s gender identity on a rent letter, based on their family role or job. This may not be the most grievous example of A.I. bias, but it highlights what happens when large amounts of data are ingested and then probabilistically reassembled in a language model.

“Bias and the potential for explicit returns absolutely exist and require effort from developers to avoid,” Tyler Lastovich said. “OpenAI does flag potentially toxic results, but ultimately it does add a liability customers have to think hard about before putting the model into production. A specifically difficult edge case to develop around is the model’s propensity to lie — as it has no concept of true or false information.”

Language models and the future of A.I.

Nine months after its debut, GPT-3 is certainly living up to its billing as a game changer. What once was purely potential has shown itself to be potential realized. The number of intriguing use cases for GPT-3 highlights how a text-generating A.I. is a whole lot more versatile than that description might suggest.

Not that it’s the new kid on the block these days. Earlier this year, GPT-3 was overtaken as the biggest language model. Google Brain debuted a new language model with some 1.6 trillion parameters, making it nine times the size of OpenAI’s offering. Nor is this likely to be the end of the road for language models. These are extremely powerful tools — with the potential to be transformative to society, potentially for better and for worse.

Challenges certainly exist with these technologies, and they’re ones that companies like OpenAI, independent researchers, and others, must continue to address. But taken as a whole, it’s hard to argue that language models are not turning to be one of the most interesting and important frontiers of artificial intelligence research.

Who would’ve thought text generators could be so profoundly important? Welcome to the future of artificial intelligence.

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