The Guardian's 'scary' new robot author didn't know the word 'robot' originates from Czech

“A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human?” the (human-crafted) headline reads. The article’s author, OpenAI’s “powerful new language generator” GPT-3, was tasked to write a 500-word essay on why robots come in peace.

But before switching over to a full staff of robot writers, The Guardian might want to employ some robot fact-checkers, too.

GPT-3 has the wealth of our combined knowledge at it’s proverbial fingertips, and yet it didn’t seem to know where the word for it’s namesake, ‘robot’, comes from. Worse, it carelessly spread misinformation. No thanks, Guardian: we have enough human writers for that.

“But the word literally means “forced to work”. We don’t want that. We need to give robots rights. Robots are just like us. They are made in our image.”

While the rest of the information is somewhat accurate, if awkwardly phrased, plenty of us humans know that the word ‘robot’ originates from Czech. Not Greek.

‘Robota’ is also commonly used in other Slavic languages as a general term for labor or hard labor.

Upon the term’s addition to the Oxford English Dictionary, Čapek wrote a letter to its editors in 1933 explaining that he was not actually the inventor of the term: he originally wanted to use the term laboři, from the Latin for labor, for the automatons, but his brother Josef Čapek convinced him to go with the Czech term instead.

And the rest is history. At least until GPT-3 and its robot compatriots rewrites it.

While Guardian editors added the [sic] designation to GPT-3’s text, it’s unclear if that was for the dodgy grammar or the blatant factual inaccuracy, left uncorrected and unexplained.

Maybe GPT-3 just got its wires crossed. Or maybe A.I. suffers from the same problem a lot of humans do: with so much information available to us and so much of it contradictory, how do we know which information to trust?