title: "rgpt3: Making requests from R to the GPT-3 API" tags:
The past decade has seen leap advancements in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP, i.e., using computational methods to study human language). Of particular importance are generative language models which - among standard NLP tasks such as text classification - are able to produce text data that are often indistinguishable from human-written text. The most prominent language model is GPT-3 (short for: Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3) developed by Open AI and released to the public in 2021 [@brown2020language]. While these models offer an exciting potential for the study of human language at scale, models such as GPT-3 were also met with controversy [@bender2021dangers]. Part of the criticism stems from the opaque nature of the model and the potential biases it may hence propagate in generated text data. As a consequence, there is a need to understand the model and its limitations so researchers can use it in a responsible and informed manner. This package makes it possible to use the GPT-3 model from the R programming language, thereby opening access to this tool to the R community and enabling more researchers to use and test the powerful GPT-3 model.
The GPT-3 model has pushed the boundaries the language abilities of artificially intelligent systems. Many tasks that were deemed unrealistic or too difficult for computational models are now solvable.
GPT-3 changes how we do research and what NLP/AI can do van der maas
powerful tool with many promises and dangers bias bias bias
binz stevenson miotto
need to understand the system researchers have recently started to study GPT-3 in a "machine behaviour" [@rahwan2019machine] approach need to use it need to have R access on it current barrier to using it
Especially the performances of the model on tasks originating from Psychology show the enormous potential of large language models. For example, when asked to formulate creative use cases of everyday objects (e.g., a fork), the GPT-3 model produced alternative uses of the objects that were rated of higher utility but lower originality and surprise compared to creative use cases produced by human participants [@STEVENSON]. Others found that the GPT-3 model shows verbal behaviour similar to humans on cognitive tasks so much so that the model made the same intuitive mistakes that are observed in humans [@binz2022using]. Aside from these efforts to understand how the model thinks, others started to study the model in the same way as psychological research is studying human participants. Asked to fill-in a standard personality questionnaire, the GPT-3 model showed as response pattern comparable with human samples [@miotto_who_2022]. The same paper also showed that the model reports to hold values
mention on the API key issue no need to run python in the background
Since the model has been released to the public under the Open AI API, the official libraries to interact with the model are limited to python and node.js and community libraries do not yet include access to the model via R. Since a large part of the social and behavioural science research community are using R, this package is intended to widen the access to the GPT-3 model direct from R.
temperature
The rgpt3 package allows users to interact via R with the GPT-3 API to perform the two core functionalities: i) prompting the model for text completions and ii) obtaining embeddings representations from text input.
requests (what they are) (how they are used) (why they are controversial)
embeddings (brief example)