Over the last 48 hours I’ve enjoyed a fascinating conversation, on Twitter, with one of my graduates – now a frequent collaborator and a friend – Jordan Moore, where we’ve explored the creative possibilities unleashed by OpenAI’s GPT-3 model.
GPT-3 is a neural-network-powered language model. It’s a natural language processing (NLP) tool that’s been pre-trained on a large corpus of text (amongst the sources, Common Crawl, a repository collecting years of crawled content) before being fine-tuned on specific tasks.
Using GPT-3 Moore had ‘created’ an echo of Steve Jobs, a mentor from beyond the grave. The results were fascinating: Moore could ask ‘Jobs’ a question and the answers returned by the model were quite convincing. This, coupled with an idea I had for The School of Design, around imaginary conversations between designers, took us to the idea of ‘dead mentors’.
Imagine if we trained a number of ‘mentors’ – providing a perspective from the past – and we then gave the school’s learners access to these mentors. We might include:
- Walter Gropius (d. 1969)
- Eileen Gray (d. 1976)
- Buckminster Fuller (d. 1983)
- Charles and Ray Eames (d. 1978, 1988)
- Anni Albers (d. 1994)
Imagine adding these mentors to The School of Design’s Faculty page, alongside our living mentors. We might be the first (design) school with a faculty born in the 19th century teaching – from beyond the grave – in the 21st century. We’ve only scratched the surface of GPT-3, but the possibilities are, already, incredibly exciting.
