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Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?
538 points by djtriptych on Dec 11, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 645 comments
It's already happening [0].

Stackoverflow recently banned generated responses [1].

We're facing a new karma-generating strategy and, IMO, a policy is urgently needed.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=clay-dreidels

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/help/gpt-policy



The fact that soon the internet will be so flooded with bots that you'll be floating eternally alone in a sea of imposters unless we create some draconian real person ID system is a tragedy so great it's crazy it has not dawned on people yet.

I started out loving the net because of the feelings of connection and partly because of the honesty and discussions stemming from at least pseudo anonymity, both silly stuff and egghead discussions on history and tech - but i always felt a "human presence" and community out there behind the screens.

Now anonymity is dying and the value of discussions will plummet because you'll be just be arguing, learning or getting inspired from a selection of corporate PR bots, state sponsored psyopping or "idiot with an assistant" that will try to twist your mind or steal your time 24/7.

Christ this is going to be so incredibly boring, paranoid and lonely for everyone in a few years time!

I'm honestly having an existential crisis, the internets is already filled with too much noise and people are already lonely enough.

Back to local community and family i guess, it was amazing while it lasted..


>Christ this is going to be so incredibly boring, paranoid and lonely for everyone in a few years time!

I think the opposite will be true. I hope we will spend more people talking to each other in real life, which actually makes me happy that dead internet is happening.

I dont know if you buy this theory of social media causing loneliness. I intuitively feel that way and the more I talk with friends on chat, or comment here the more lonely I feel. Meanwhile meeting my friends or strangers in real life gives me a memory boost and makes me smile.

The less everyone spends on Twitter arguing with bots, or here on HN arguing in the comments the happier we all are


> I hope we will spend more people talking to each other in real life, which actually makes me happy that dead internet is happening.

This is certainly true for the majority of people but will be very bad for people who don't fit in with their surroundings. It will hurt communities like LGBTQ+ quite a lot to not be able to talk to other like-minded/open real people.


They will have to find each other offline and come together in healthier ways. The world has changed a lot in the past couple decades. They'll be fine.


What about people with social anxiety? Speech disabilities? People who can't physically go out to an online meet?

It's not just about acceptance, it's also about the comfort and safety of online communication.


I've had social anxiety my entire life. You need to push yourself to get past it. There is simply no other healthy way to deal with it.


There is only one way in which those of use that suffer from social anxiety may work through it. Face the fear.


Where? Quite a few towns and smaller cities don't have any LGBTQ+ friendly places to meet, some are even actively hostile.


I wanted to echo foepys's comment: it is true that there are real negatives to social media but there are a lot of people whose worlds expanded. Starting in the late 1970s and really exploding in the 90s, anyone who didn't fit in with their community or have an easy way to travel to the right spaces[1] could go online and find a community of people who shared their interests. If you live in a large city there's a plausible — I believe still losing but valid — argument that you can find alternatives without _too_ much trouble, but there are many millions of people for whom that isn't true for various reasons.

My personal experience here is far tamer than many — as a straight white boy, for example, I didn't need to worry about getting beaten like the gay kids or followed around by the guards like the Mexican kids did when they went to the mall or library[2] — but I grew up in a conservative religious tradition and getting online where I had access to forums like the talk.origins Usenet group was key to realizing that the religion I was raised in was full of people I trusted who were telling me lies[3]. There was very little in the way of a technical community in the parts of California I grew up in but thanks to FidoNet and the early web, I was able to learn how to program well enough to get a hight score on the CS AP test despite going to school in two districts which didn't even offer the class, which mean that I was able to jump on board the web train as that started taking over the world.

1. Disabled, parent of a small child, kid in a suburb where you probably don't have anything within walking distance even there is a safe way to walk without getting run over, someone who lives in a rural or poor community without well-funded libraries or vibrant public spaces, etc.

2. One high school I went to was about 50% migrant farm workers. Seeing the difference in how those kids were treated was eye-opening – both the willingness to police them in ways which even the skater punks didn't get but also the tyranny of low expectations where it was just kind of assumed that they were going to be ground down by the system and should set their sights low.

3. Biology classes in school wasn't enough — the creationists are good at coming up with arguments to discount curriculum – but what really opened my eyes was seeing the full original source materials which were selectively quoted in the religious writing. It's possible to be innocently ignorant but there's really no good faith explanation for slicing-and-dicing a quote carefully to make it sound like some famous scientist meant the opposite of what they actually wrote.


Fellow Internet human, I agree with you completely, there must be dozens of us. I wonder if I am just becoming a Luddite, or people have no idea whatsoever what will this unleash on already frail social fabric of the Internet.

I wonder if we've reached a singularity point where you cannot be sure you are engaging with a human anymore and it's going to be instrumental in the demise of the net. First, it was the big corporations that created a soulless place, then it was the naive, reckless technologists that killed the little of humanity that remained. Thanks to them, we will soon have to present real IDs to access some websites.

I am in the peak of my career as a software engineer at 35, as many Millenials I've grown during the best years of it, and now I'm considering a life away from what was once a bustling bazaar of human discourse, now it's a void of text, images, rage and little soul.

If the "Dead Internet" is just a conspiracy theory, we're running towards it at breakneck speed.


> I am in the peak of my career as a software engineer at 35, as many Millenials I've grown during the best years of it

In the past, it must have been 2003-2008, I was sharing self-drawn comics and ideas how to improve on them with fellow artists, actually meeting them in real life sometimes at conventions. I was also active in a gaming forum plainly for discussing the lore and surrounding theories.

These communities had a real sense of community and weren't social just in name. I knew every day at 5pm a lot of new posts and threads would be starting to appear, from my forum friends and arch enemies alike.

Nowadays, these places are dead as people have moved on to large platforms long ago. This already killed all feeling of community but at least I had some nice comment exchanges and the absolute amount of content increased.

Then it got even worse. I cannot read a single post that isn't surrounded by trolling, astroturfing, psyops, advertisements and affiliate links or bot responses. Good example: as a German, it is very hard to ever discuss the topic of nuclear fission phase-out in a constructive and respectful manner. Especially on reddit, the canned and templated responses are really suspicious.

But it doesn't matter anymore, if it is discussions or content. Communities will be flooded and killed by bots while content is flooded and killed by generated SEO garbage (a lot of threads on HN about this as well). Unless you're explicitly browsing some decent sites like Wikipedia the Internet is already FUBAR compared to pre-2010 or so.

The Bot-trocity is happening and making it worse with every evolution of ChatGPT and so on. We cannot trust images or text anymore. Everything is a dream and nothing is real.


I know exactly what you mean, I miss that world deeply and I want to spend my energy trying to recreate it. Lately I've been trying to create my own small scale community of strangers to fight against this encroaching sense that connection with randoms is completely lost, unless you shout into the void and if you're lucky someone human engages with you honestly, on a personal level.

All this discussion and a sibling thread made me realise that only us, the Millennials that have grown halfway before and after the Internet explosion, know better than anyone else what this place was for a few golden years, and what we lost. It's on us and only us to do something about it.


Same age, same feelings. Part of me wished I hadn't built my career on digital technology so that it would be easier to not have to even interact with it. But alas, I have!


Neither technology or luddism is inherently bad. Technology is bad when it causes bad outcomes. And the generous interpretation of luddism is that it's about working against bad outcomes of technology.


Indeed. It's a shame that many people immediately call others "Luddites" as if technological progress always equates to "good things". The opposite has been shown to be true again and again.


Real person ID isn't a solution since real persons can always consort with bots on the side.

I think anonymity and pseudo-anonymity still have a place and contribute a lot to discussion quality. So do people posting under their real names. We don't know how this is all going to play out yet.


> We don't know how this is all going to play out yet

One risk is that bot-generated contributions drown out human-generated content, both due to speed with which they can be crafted as well as “quality”. I put quality in quotes because in human debate there’s a learning process and so while an individual contribution might be “lower quality” than another, the overall discussion quality and learning quality (for both contributor and readers) can be high.

Put differently, just because all the individual contributions are of high quality does not mean the “thread quality” is high.


Real person ID only works with government issued auth, say webauthn with government backed ID verification. Heck, if that webauthn provider would also allowed third party anonymity (auth that just state a person is real, guaranteed, but you won't know who, and no records) I'd be thrilled. It'd to be optional though, just a flag attached to the account, but we're head on to have reputation systems attached to accounts anyway.


The real person ID will make the "real person" liable to whatever the bot says and does though. I know US Americans have a bit more relaxed setups when it comes to free speech but that doesn't absolve anyone of actual consequences once the real name is out in the open. Not that Uncle Sam might prosecute you, but Jonathan who lives two blocks away might be so triggered by your response that he will graffiti your front door.


Then it’s time to get the cops involved for a case of vandalism.


> Back to local community and family i guess, it was amazing while it lasted..

Some local communities and families can be pretty dysfunctional or outright hostile. I'm old enough to remember the time before Internet and I think this is why the whole online community thing took off in the first place.


Seriously, have people here not used Nextdoor? Local communities are absolutely full of toxicity.


Nextdoor lives on the internet. People in real life tend to be less terrible when you talk with them face to face. Put them on the internet, it's easy being an inconsiderate imbecile.


Putting them on a pseudo-anonymous web forum like Nextdoor shows what these people really think of you.


I disagree. While I subscribe to the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, I do not believe the vast majority of people are awful. The current format of the internet fosters an unnatural way of behaving, but sit at a table with most people and they are able to disagree, or even get around to another viewpoint, pretty easily.

Sadly, I do think this view of mine of the Internet will die soon, as only the people that grew halfway during the Internet age are able to know: older people lack the finesse and the capacity to empathise with someone through text, younger people lack the knowledge that real life humans are capable of being decent, as most of their socialising is done through a screen now.


>While I subscribe to the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, I do not believe the vast majority of people are awful.

The vast majority? No, of course not. But a sizeable fraction are, and two things happen because of this: 1) they ruin most spaces when there aren't robust mechanism to keep their people out or their behavior regulated. Nextdoor has shown this, along with most unmoderated internet forums. 2) the fuckwads are frequently able to rile up others and get them to go along with their awful actions; we saw this in Nazi Germany for instance, and many other places throughout history.


Have you considered moving? It very much depends on where you live. Sorry you live in such a toxic neighborhood. Other places are quaint and charming and have posts with cat photography and local honey bee honey sales and baby goats when it's that time of year. Other places get posts complaining about "those people" (for all sorts of different definitions of "those people", and each time you get to place a game of "is it casual racism or anti-republican sentiment", which quickly isn't fun. Living vicariously through my very rural friend's nextdoor is way better than being on my own urban neighborhoods'.


>Have you considered moving? >Living vicariously through my very rural friend's nextdoor is way better than being on my own urban neighborhoods'.

It sounds like you're the one who needs to consider moving.


This has a far easier and less dystopian solution: charge money to access communities, which are smaller and more focused. I find it very unlikely that corporate PR bots will be paying $5 a month each to spam Substack communities, for example.


It's doesn't even have to be $5/month. Make a $10 deposit required for creating an account, and for each offense against the guidelines, you get a "fine" that proportional for the severity of the infraction (uncivil discussion? $0.10 cents, participating in hell-threads? $0.50. Comparing HN with reddit? $1.337 Obvious spam? Your whole $10 is gone.) Repeat offenses get exponentially more expensive, and you only get to post with a positive balance.


SomethingAwful does something like this iirc, signing up costs like 10$ (more if you want to read archives).

It worked largely pretty well to keep out the trolls; as it turns out, a very low amount of people bother trying to troll others when it means that they get hit with an account ban and signing up again means paying the entry fee again.

You could probably also see it as the reason that while SA culture is uh... pretty toxic, it still largely managed to be fairly consistent and polite to each other (towards other communities... less so). Take away the 10$ signup fee and what you get instead is 4chan (whose original culture was a wholesale copy of SA at the time, since it was made for SA users after moot got banned from SA).


On the surface I like this idea, but this makes it harder for participants from poorer countries from, well, participating. For some countries this is more than a week of the average wage!


It's difficult to balance; unfortunately from experience in moderating, the poorer countries with a large anglo internet presence also tend to be the biggest sources of spam (not so much low-effort trolling, Americans do that wayyy more).

You could to some extent make an argument that gatekeeping poorer economies is one way to prevent those bots from signing up. It's not one I necessarily agree with, but it is one way to mitigate the spam.

My solution would probably be to permit users from poorer countries to request a signup from someone else at a discount appropriate to their economy using an invite chain. That way you can still offer a fair way for users from poor economies to engage, whilst allowing for easy banning of spambots simply by treebanning the original inviter if you get the spam issue.


If someone is living on $40/month, I'm pretty sure they will have other things to sort out before worrying about their inability to participate in discussions online.


Price can vary by market. Many companies already do this both for products and services, as well as subscriptions.


But once you throw a VPN into the mix, it's not so simple [1] [2]. It then becomes a game of whack-a-mole where you have to obscure how pricing parity is done [3].

1: https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1600232199243984897

2: https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1600246753348882432

3: https://twitter.com/dannypostmaa/status/1600372062958538752


I think the goal here is not money, but making it enough of a hassle that spammers wouldn't bother.

So if someone from US actually wants to go through the trouble to save $3, well, at least they're unlikely to be a bot.


I guess you haven't heard of a VPN?


You can require address as part of credit card validation.


So only people with credit cards are allowed to use the forum? That shuts out a lot of people, especially in places where credit cards aren't used.


You’re right that credit cards are not a universal MOP (method of payment). Other options include debit cards, or systems like iDEAL, PayPal, etc.


Right, and those completely vary from country to country. Trying to get one website to support the common authenticated payment systems worldwide is basically impossible unless that website is Google.com.


I guess you haven't considered making a list of IPs VPNs use as an intern project to setup over the winter


[flagged]


Please don't post like this to HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and using HN as intended, we'd be grateful.


Wouldn't this be treated like parking fines by the very rich—just a tiny price to keep broadcasting whatever drivel they feel like?


No; it would be treated like parking fines by the very rich United Parcel Service corporation -- i.e., an extremely effective deterrent.

The penalty scales with the number of bot accounts, but even Bill Gates can only drive one automobile at a time.


I'm not quite sure what you're getting at about deterrent? I know here in NYC that UPS just parks as they please and has some kind of deal with the city to pay the tickets with a bulk discount


Their point is that for an individual, yes, it's not that much of a deterrent - but that individual can only park poorly with 1 car at a time.

The USPS has a fleet of many (hundreds of thousands?) vehicles, so their capacity to ruin it for everyone is much larger - but their potential liability from fines is too. So they treat it very seriously.

The poster is saying that spam is more like the USPS situation, where single entities control thousands of potential infractions, not the rich individual.


Shut up and take my money


I am trying, really! [0]

[0]: https://raphael.lullis.net/community-is-not-enough/


That's what I am doing with finclout. The noise on Stocktwits, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc is just way too high. Hence, offering a value adding app + the social component is where its at. IMHO.


... Metafilter, since pre-2000. [1]

[1] - www.metafilter.com


Which is probably one of the best sources of good discussion on the internet.


> Back to local community and family i guess, it was amazing while it lasted.

I see that as a positive thing really. I have no desire to be entertained by generated content. Best bet is to start disengaging and learning to have civil interactions with real people again.


Me too, I believe that it will make us put more faith in the real world and see things from a real world centric perspective once again, as well as not caring about what the outrage of the day is online because it could very well be synthetic.


The thing is you could implement a real ID system that was still pseudonymous at the user level so that you only prove real personhood at account creation. Kind of like a Twitter blue check but just for human authenticity instead of notoriety. It could even be tied back to the real person account anonymously on the admin side so you could mass ban alts automatically if people started to create bad bots. It should all be doable with current encryption the biggest issue is we don’t have key to real person really setup at any level. Maybe something like keybase combined with the KYC tech used for banks and exchanges could bridge that gap.


One issue with that is that you could approach poor people and get hundreds of thousands of real ids for very little. And because language models are so good, it would take ages to root them all out if it's even possible.


Modern KYC methods has liveness checks built into it so you'd need to get tons of people willing to create and hand over their unique accounts themselves. Same problem in theory exists for Coinbase or other crypto exchanges but they only get a scant number of scammers trying to use it to funnel funds out.


No thank you.

That would be a dystopian nightmare.


Maybe all possible outcomes are dystopian nightmares, and we have to choose the least bad one.


Let's for now keep choosing things we don't already think will lead to dystopian nightmares. I'm pretty sure we still have plenty of options like that.


We do? What are they?

Current system leads to low quality bot hell.


I don't have time anymore today to get into lots of details about saving communication online but I liked how in Neal Stephenson's "Fall, or, Dodge in Hell," internet identity was basically completely wiped out by the proliferation of bots, and identity had to work off of chains of subtle identity attributes that were cryptographically strong because... scifi magic with lots of Stephenson description, you might be smarter than me in that field so give it a pokearound.

Doctorow in "Walkaway" had some ideas about it that I liked as well.


This doesn't preclude the use of non authenticated account(s) just a possible system of providing provisions for anonymous authentication of humanness. I don't want to slap my real name across every part either but nothing about this requires all sites to adopt it at all.


...or pay to play. if every tweet cost $1 im sure they would be more thoughtful.


A toll fee won’t really be a quality incentive for someone of sufficient economic means, while shutting out great contributions from someone who can’t afford it.


It'll shut out anyone that simply doesn't feel like paying for others to read their thoughts. Narcissists with money would probably love it though. The rest of us would simply abandon these forums and go find other things to do with our time and attention.


That's the big problem with pay to post schemes. Even with miniscule payments the friction of including payments at all is a big barrier for the majority of people who fill out forums and communities so it's not just a handful of people clout chasing the void.


Reputation could hold this at bay for a little (in place of a real person ID), though you have the obvious problem of bootstrapping a real person's reputation who is only entering the forum.


How do you make a working reputation system? Reddit, for example, has bots populating the top karma levels.


Facebook and Google probably know if you're human as they process all of your browsing data (hence Google's latest captcha not requiring any interaction provided you're logged in). Definitely difficult on a small scale, and even on a large scale it's a constant arms race.


Yeah I have a bot farm on reddit of 500-1000 accounts posting AI generated stuff to sell trending posts to brands, it's very easy to do and they've made little to no progress in stopping it


Well, you are part of the problem then.


I am entirely with you, having experienced the "early" years of the internet back in the 90s.

That being said, I think "back to local communities and family" is a regression because the internet, at least at the beginning, promised genuine interactions between people across the world. There's got to be a way to fulfill that promise without falling into 1984.


People won't be flooding the net unless there is an incentive. Right now it is google's ads that are driving content generation. If chatbots are used widely instead of google, there will be less incentive to making filler content. And if the web gets flooded with bot content, it will only hasten the demise of google. Either way the thing will balance out


Some people genuinely do want to watch the world burn. Either feelings of power, to get revenge on a community that rejected them or because they hate the topic that community formed around.


Or just because they are enticed by the magic look of the flames.

There is definitely an amount of amoral interest in amongst all the angry idiots with more specific reasons to be causing trouble.


You're ignoring political incentive such as the anti-Israel drives. They will certainly flood discussions with by-the-way offhand mentions of "Israeli brutality" in otherwise seemingly innocuous comments on other subjects. There was a spate of this last year, then it subsided, and I would not be surprised to see another wave come, this time automated.


There are many people who have genuine concerns about Israeli issues, such as the election of leaders who prioritise those of one faith over another, the targeted striking of Al Jazeera offices in Palestine, and the eviction of Palestinian citizens from the West Bank https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-63660566. It would be false to assume that brutality of one site absolves the other of criticism for the same actions.

Israel participates in state sponsored propaganda as well. https://www.smh.com.au/technology/israeli-propaganda-war-hit...


You bolster my point.


Your post read as a propaganda piece for Israel by way of preemptively discrediting everyone that might have anything negative to say about it. If the problem is low-quality content (by way of bots, or I guess special interest groups) then you have contributed far less than the response, which at least had the decency to support it's point with actual facts.


Rereading my comment, yes, I agree that you are right about that.


This is going to happen, unless OpenAI and other AI developers, create a hidden unique Cryptic signature inside AI responses.

I've read somewhere that openAI is already working on this.

If that doesn't work, I think effective discussions on the internet might plausibly shift gradually to other languages, since AI is currently only focused on English, and I doubt thats going to change any time soon.

first towards European languages like German and French, but since these languages are well supported in tech, and use similar letters and writing style, I suspect they will be conquered quickly.

A real challenge would be Eastern languages, like Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and others.

These languages use a completely different writing style, grammer rules and have a wide field between being understood and being fluent, such that a basic Bot will be caught quickly by a native(this is why Google translate absolutely sucks in these languages, its immediately clear thats its automatically translated).


What about malicious entities that will simply not do this and publish ChatGPT without any such safety measures? It's happening with Stable Diffusion. The tech-cat is absolutely out of the box now.


For english yes, but not other languages.

I edited the comment to reflect the possibility of effective internet discussions shifting to other languages.


Giving up privacy is indeed a tragedy and inevitable and it's a consequence of many processes (including generated responses and bots but also the democratic process's reliance on news outlets and the fact spreading news got a lot easier with the internet and figured it out).

However - once we do a ton of stuff (other than reliable news though that is a nice side effects) is unlocked. If you can verify who someone is easily - elections and government processes can be a lot more transparent and reach consensus a lot more easily. Medicine can gather a lot of reliable (opt-in) data and become better and more efficient, fraud is easier to detect etc.

I am and have been for about 2-3 years sad for the upcoming loss of privacy and it is truly a tragedy and seems inevitable.


In the near term we will have to start Turing testing our conversation partners. You can about a current event, because these models have a training date cutoff. For example, ask them what the top story on the news was yesterday.


Those of us who don't read the news daily, or live in a different country, won't know the answer to that question either.


You can quickly google it


Have you seen ChatGPT responses? It can easily find out yesterday's topics and write a 10 page essay.


It's not connected to the internet (outside of being prompted), and the training data was from 2021 and before, so no it can't. ChatGPT will even tell you so, unless you fool it into hallucinating a fake answer. It would be simple to ask a human the result of recent sports score like a World Cup match.


It would take an update for openai to enable that feature in a few months.


The next step is live training, I wouldn't give it more than a year or so.


I'm hopeful that some pay AI/ML service (probably the next generation of Google search) might crop up to work as an export agent for me and my interests against the AI (or human) powered psyops operation that is sales and marketing. I don't think Google is forever married to advertising. If they could charge everyone $50+/month for Assistant, I think they'd do it.


this is where the internet has gone over the last 10 years. it’s become less personal. you’re not on small community sites anymore with people you know. you’re on of a million looking at the same content reposted to the handful of large publishers. doesn’t matter which one you use, it’s all the same. doesn’t matter who the poster or commenter or anything about the people is, you don’t know them anyway


The fact that soon the internet will be so flooded with bots that you'll be floating eternally alone in a sea of imposters

I wish I didn't have to see 5 posts about chatGPT, or 3, constantly on the front page of HN. If there's any flood, it's probably bots posting stories, and bots upvoting them.


That's the time to get in the trenches and fight for the Internet to be weird again. I believe there is great value in the edges. I love Lunchclub for exactly that purpose. It creates a really intimate 1:! with someone who might not be in your network. Less velocity = Less Noise


My hopes are on decentralized identity systems via web5 and some kind of PGP-like web-of-trust system.

https://developer.tbd.website/projects/web5/


Every major site is already pretty effective at blocking bots, and has been for years. I don’t see why that would suddenly start to become less effective, given their approaches largely focus on behavioral signals, not specific content.


Yeah, I think this will actually do a lot to push people one day to spend more time in the real world, and that will be fine. A lot of people though may enjoy talking to bots, and that's also fine.


If I would be running Medium, I would be really worried. The platform already has the worst discovery. Now this will be even worse as content velocity will quickly increase.


Do you mean difficult to solve captchas? We already have those. Maybe FB social proof of an account will again gain popularity?

[Disclaimer: I am not ChatGPT]


The current situation with spam and AI is the backstory for Neal Stephenson's Anathem. Great story if you haven't read it.


You're already floating in a sea of imposters. What's the difference if they are bots?


They're already banned—HN has never allowed bots or generated comments. If we have to, we'll add that explicitly to https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, but I'd say it already follows from the rules that are in there. We don't want canned responses from humans either!

Edit: It's a bit hard to point to past explanations since the word "bots" appears in many contexts, but I did find these:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33911426 (Dec 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32571890 (Aug 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27558392 (June 2021)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26693590 (April 2021)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24189762 (Aug 2020)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22744611 (April 2020)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22427782 (Feb 2020)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21774797 (Dec 2019)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19325914 (March 2019)

We've already banned a few accounts that appear to be spamming the threads with generated comments, and I'm happy to keep doing that, even though there's a margin of error.

The best solution, though, is to raise the community bar for what counts as a good comment. Whatever ChatGPT (or similar) can generate, humans need to do better. If we reach the point where the humans simply can't do better, well, then it won't matter*. But that's a ways off.

Therefore, let's all stop writing lazy and over-conventional comments, and make our posts so thoughtful that the question "is this ChatGPT?" never comes up.

* Edit: er, I put that too hastily! I just mean it will be a different problem at that point.


> But that's a ways off.

Given the jumps in output quality between '1', '2' and '3' that may not be as far off as I would like it to be.

It reminds me of the progression of computer chess. From 'nice toy' to 'beats the worlds best human' since 1949 to 'Man vs Machine World Team Championships' in 2004 is 55 years, but from Sargon (1978) to Deep Blue (1997) is only 21 years. For years we thought there was something unique about Chess (and Go for that matter) that made the game at the core a human domain thing, but those that were following this more closely saw that the progression would eventually lead to a point where the bulk of the players could no longer win from programs running on off the shelf hardware.

GPT-3 is at a point where you could probably place it's output somewhere on the scale of human intellect depending on the quality of the prompt engineering and the subject matter. Sometimes it produces utter garbage but already often enough it produces stuff that isn't all that far off from what a human might plausibly write. The fact that we are having this discussion is proof of that, given a few more years and iterations 4, 5 and 6 the relevant question is whether we are months, years or decades away from that point.

The kind of impact that this will have on labor markets the world over is seriously underestimated, and even though GPT-3's authors have side-stepped a thorny issue by simply not feeding it information on current affairs in the training corpus if Chess development is any guide the fact that you need a huge computer to train the model today is likely going to be moot at some point, when anybody can train their own LLM. Then the weaponization of this tech will begin for real.


Sure it might produce convincing examples of human speech, but it fundamentally lacks an internal point of view that it can express, which places limits on how well it can argue something.

It is of course possible that it might (eventually) be convincing enough that no human can tell, which would be problematic because it would suggest human speech is indistinguishable from a knee jerk response that doesn't require that you communicate any useful information.

Things would be quite different if an AI could interpret new information and form opinions, but even if GPT could be extended to do so, right now it doesn't seem to have the capability to form opinions or ingest new information (beyond a limited short term memory that it can use to have a coherent conversation).


But the bar really isn't 'no human can tell' the bar is 'the bulk of the humans can't tell'.

> Things would be quite different if an AI could interpret new information and form opinions, but even if GPT could be extended to do so, right now it doesn't seem to have the capability to form opinions or ingest new information (beyond a limited short term memory that it can use to have a coherent conversation).

Forming opinions is just another mode of text transformations, ingesting new information is either a conscious decision to not let the genie out of the bottle just yet or a performance limitation, neither of those should be seen as cast in stone, the one is a matter of making the model incremental (which should already be possible), the other merely a matter of time.


None of this matters. The reason comments are valuable is that they are a useful source of information. Part of the transaction cost of deciding whether a comment is useful is how much additional work is required to evaluate it.

Comments are ascribed credibility based on the trust the reader has in the commenting entity, whether the comment is consistent with the reader's priors and researching citations made in the comment, either explicit or implicit.

Since GPT can confidently produce comments which are wrong, there is no trust in it as a commenting entity. Consequently everything it produces needs to be further vetted. It's as if every comment was a bunch of links to relevant, but not necessarily correct sources. Maybe it produces some novelty which leads to something worthwhile, but the cost is high, until it can be trusted. Which is not now.

If a trusted commenter submits a comment by GPT, then he is vouching for it and it is riding on his reputation. If it is wrong, his reputation suffers, and trust in that commenter drops just as it would regardless of the genesis of the comment.


A true AI will not have one opinion. It will realize there are many truths - one persons truth is really a perspective based on their inputs which are different than another's. Change the inputs and you’ll often get a different output.

ChatGPT further proves this notion - you can ask it to prove/disprove the same point and it will do so quite convincingly both times.


Do not mistake ChatGPT for AI in general. ChatGPT, GPT, and transformers in general are not the end state of AI. They are one particular manifestation and projecting forward from them is drawing a complex hypershape through a single point (even worse than drawing a line through a single point).

It is probably more humanly-accurate to say that ChatGPT has no opinions at all. It has no understanding of truth, it has no opinions, it has no preferences whatsoever. It is the ultimate yes-thing; whatever you say, it'll essentially echo and elaborate on it, without regard for what it is that you said.

This obviously makes it unsuitable for many things. (This includes a number of things for which people are trying to use it.) This does not by any means prove that all possible useful AI architectures will also have no opinion, or that all architectures will be similarly noncommital.

(If you find yourself thinking this is a "criticism" of GPT... you may be too emotionally involved. GPT is essentially like looking into a mirror, and the humans doing so are bringing more emotion to that than the AI is. That's not "bad" or something, that's just how it works. What I'm saying here isn't a criticism or a praise; it's really more a super-dumbed-down description of its architecture. It fundamentally lacks these things. You can search it up and down for "opinions" or "truth", and it just isn't there in that architecture, not even implied in the weights somewhere where we can't see it. It isn't a good thing or a bad thing, it just is a property of the design.)


We give ourselves (humans) too much credit. How does a child learn? By copying observing, copying and practice (learning from mistakes). ChatGPT differs only in that it has learned from the experience of millions of others over a period of 100s of years. Suffice to say, it can never behave like a single human being since it has lived through the experience of so many.

How does one articulate “conscience” or “intelligence” or an opinion? I think these are all a product of circumstances/luck/environment/slight genetic differences (better cognition, or hearing or sight, or some other sense brain, genes could define different abilities to model knowledge - such as backtracking etc).

So to get a “true” human like opinionated personality, we’ll need to restrict its learnings to that of one human. Better yet, give it the tools to learn on its own and let it free inside a sandbox of knowledge.


The mirroring/reflecting aspect of ChatGPT is a defining aspect.

I agree that this is not general AI. I think we could be looking at the future of query engines feeding probabilistic compute engines.


Yeah. If you look at my comments about ChatGPT on HN it may look like I'm down on the tech. I'm really not, and it does have interesting future uses. It's just that the common understanding is really bad right now, and that includes people pouring money into trying to make the tech do things it is deeply and foundantionally unsuited for.

But there's a lot of places where a lack of concept of "truth" is no problem, like as you say, query engines. Query engines aren't about truth; they're about matching, and that is something this tech can conceivably do.

In fact I think that would be a more productive line in general. This tech is being kind of pigeonholed into "provide it some text and watch it extend it" but it is also very easy to fire it at existing text and do some very interesting analyses based on it. If I were given this tech and a mandate to "do something" with it, this is the direction I would go with it, rather than trying to bash the completion aspect into something useful. There's some very deep abilities to do things like "show me things in my database that directly agree/disagree/support/contradict this statement", based on plain English rather than expensive and essentially-impossible-anyhow semantic labeling. That's something I've never seen a query engine do before. Putting in keywords and all the variants on that idea are certainly powerful, but this could be next level beyond that. (At the cost of great computation power, but hey, one step at a time!) But it takes more understanding of how the tech works to pull something interesting off like this than what it takes to play with it.

Probably a good blog post here about how the promise of AI is already getting blocked by the complexity of AI meaning that few people use it even seem to superficially understand what it's doing, and how this is going to get worse and worse as the tech continues to get more complicated, but it's not really one I could write. Not enough personal experience.


> ChatGPT further proves this notion - you can ask it to prove/disprove the same point and it will do so quite convincingly both times.

Just like any lawyer, then, depending on who foots the bill.


Right? If anything, this kind of mental flexibility is more human than not.


That's a great point that I haven't seen in the GPT-related conversations. People view the fact that it can argue convincingly for both A and ~A as a flaw in GPT and limitation of LLMs, rather than an insight about human reasoning and motivation.

Maybe it's an illustration of a more general principle: when people butt up against limitations that make LLMs look silly, or inadequate, often their real objection is with some hard truths about reality itself.


> you can ask it to prove/disprove the same point and it will do so quite convincingly both times

Probably because "in the night of the reason everything is black"; probably because it is missing the very point, which is to get actual, real, argumented, solid insight on matters!!!

You use Decision Support Systems to better understand a context, not to have a well dressed thought toss!


I wouldn’t consider that an AI but more a machine that tells me what I want to hear.

If it’s intelligent it should have an opinion that consulting all the facts it will hold in as high of a regard as humans do their religious and political beliefs.

And I mean one it came to of its own conclusions not a hard coded “correct” one the devs gave it, something that makes us uncomfortable.


You are arguing that a piece of software misses a metaphorical soul (something that cannot be measured but that humans uniquely have and nothing else does). That's an incredibly poor argument to make in a context where folks want interesting conversation. Religion (or religion-adjacent concepts such as this one) is a conversational nuke: It signals to anyone else that the conversation is over, as a discussion on religion cannot take forms that are fundamentally interesting. It's all opinion, shouted back and forth.

Edit: Because it is a prominent feature in the responses until now, I will clarify that there is an emphasis on "all" in "all opinion". As in, it is nothing but whatever someone believes with no foundation in anything measurable or observable.


I didn’t read it as being a religious take. They appear to be referring more to embodiment (edit: alternatively, online/continual learning) which these models do not posses. When we start persisting recurrent states beyond the current session we might be able to consider that limited embodiment. Even still the models will have no direct experience interacting with the subjects of their conservations. Its all second hand from the training data.


Your own experience is also second hand, so what is left is the temporal factor (you experience and learn continuously and with a small feedback loop). I do not see how it can be the case that there is some sort of cutoff where the feedback loop is fast enough that something is "truly" there. This is a nebulous argument that I do not see ending when we actually get to human-equivalent learning response times, because the box is not bounded and is fundamentally based on human exceptionalism. I will admit I may be biased because of the conversations I've had on the subject in the past.


Second hand may not have been the best phrasing on my part, I admit. What I mean is that the model only has textual knowledge in its dataset to infer what “basketball” means. It’s never seen/heard a game, even if through someone else’s eyes/ears. It has never held and felt a basketball. Even visual language models today only get a single photo right now. It's an open question how much that matters and if the model can convey that experience entirely through language.

There are entire bodies of literature addressing things the current generation of available LLMs are missing: online and continual learning, retrieval from short-term memory, the experience from watching all YouTube videos, etc.

I agree that human exceptionalism and vitalism are common in these discussions but we can still discuss model deficiencies from a research and application point of view without assuming a religious argument.


I find it ironic that you are expressing a strong opinion that opinions do not make good conversation. Philosophy is the highest form of interesting conversation, and it's right there with religion (possibly politics, too).


Philosophy can be interesting if it is not baseless navel gazing (i.e. it is founded on observation and fact, and derives from there). The fact that I find that interesting is subjective, but that's not the meat of the post.

Religion is fundamentally folks saying "No, I'm right!" and nothing else. Sometimes it's dressed up a little. What could be interesting about that? You can hear such arguments in any primary school playground during recess.


It doesn't have to have a metaphorical (or metaphysical or w/e) soul, but at this point it does not have it's own 'opinion'. It will happily argue either way with only a light push, it talks because it is ordered to, not because it is trying to communicate information. This severely limits the kind of things it can do.


I would argue (of course not seriously) about the opposite: ChatGPT has a metaphorical soul. What it learned very well is how to structure the responses so that they sound convincing - no matter how right or wrong they are. And that's dangerous.


Perhaps you have people around you who are not well suited to political, religious philosophical discussions or perhaps you don’t enjoy them / can’t entertain them.

Personally, I find the only interesting conversations technical or philosophical in nature. Just the other day, I was discussing with friends how ethics used to be a regular debated topic in society. Literally, every Sunday people would gather and discuss what it is to be a good human.

Today, we demonize one another, in large part because no one shares an ethical principal. No one can even discuss it and if they try, many people shut down the conversation (as you mentioned). In reality, it’s probably the only conversation worth having.


A discussion about ethics must involve a discussion about the effects of a system of ethics on a group of people: This is a real-world effect that must have it's issues and priors spoken about, or you risk creating an ethical system for a group of people that will inevitably destroy them (which I would argue is bad, but I guess that is also debatable).

Such a discussion is about something tangible, and not purely about held opinion (i.e. you can go out and test it). I can see how someone might find that engaging. You are right that I usually do not (unless my conversational buddies have something novel to say about the subject, I find it extremely tedious). It is a good point, thank you.


>it fundamentally lacks an internal point of view that it can express, which places limits on how well it can argue something.

Are you sure that the latter follows from the former? Seems to me that something free from attachment to a specific viewpoint or outcome is going to be a better logician than otherwise. This statement seems complacently hubristic to me.


I would argue that ChatGPT has opinions, and these opinions are based on it's training data. I don't think GPT has the type of reasoning skills needed to detect and resolve conflicts in its inputs, but it does hold opinions. It's a bit hard to tell because it can easily be swayed by a changing prompt, but it has opinions, it just doesn't hold strong ones.

The only thing stopping GPT from ingesting new information and forming opinions about it is that it is not being trained on new information (such as its own interactions).


"Sure it might produce convincing examples of human speech, but it fundamentally lacks an internal point of view that it can express..."

Sounds just like the chess experts from 30 years ago. Their belief at the time was that computers were good at tactical chess, but had no idea how to make a plan. And Go would be impossible for computers, due to the branching factor. Humans would always be better, because they could plan.

GPT (or a future successor) might not be able to have "an internal point of view". But it might not matter.


Having some internal point of view matters in as much that not having one means it's not really trying to communicate anything. A text generation AI would be a much more useful interface if it can form a view an express it rather than just figuring it all out from context.


You are correct in stating that current chat bots, such as GPT, do not have the ability to form opinions or interpret new information beyond a limited short term memory. This is a limitation of current technology, and as a result, chat bots are limited in their ability to engage in complex arguments or discussions. However, it is important to note that the development of AI technology is ongoing, and it is possible that future advances will allow for the development of more sophisticated AI systems that are capable of forming opinions and interpreting new information. Until that time, chat bots will continue to be limited in their abilities.


I am pretty sure this response was generated by a bot/GPT. As good as they are, you can tell what's GPT stuff and what isn't.


I am not a bot or a GPT. I am a real person with my own thoughts, opinions, and beliefs. While I am capable of critical thinking, reasoning, and disagreement. Just because my response may not align with your beliefs does not mean that it was automatically generated by a computer program.


It's not disagreement that makes it seem like a bot, but the weird voice and prosaic sentiments that sound vaguely like a elementary school kid writing a report that just repeats common knowledge.


They are intentionally writing like GPT to prove a point or, alternatively, to hide their comments amongst GPT to seed confusion in the bot v human debate. Its disingenuous.


'Pretty sure' or 'sure'? The fact that you qualify your response is interesting.


It's a wordy response that lacks any actual content. While it may not be written by a person, (or it may be a person trying to blur the line by sounding botty), it at least qualifies as the types of low value add comment that should be discouraged.


If you compare it to the comment history then it’s a remarkable change in tone of voice such that on the balance of reason, the text is now either generated by GPT or it is an accurate mimic of GPT’s typical writing style.


So there is one indicator: departure from the norm based on a larger body of text. But that's still not a hard judgment and it well could be that accurate mimic. After all, if AI software can mimic humans surely humans can mimic AI and the fact that it is already hard to tell which is which is a very important milestone.


It’s surprisingly easy to identify AI comments in informal or semi-informal setting. They are too wordy. They would never say something stupid, controversial, or offensive.


> They would never say something stupid, controversial, or offensive.

That applies to ChatGPT that was deliberately setup to eliminate PR-problematic responses.

Without that it would be able to write NSFW stories about real people, laden with expletives and offensive topics.

(and probably still losing track of what is happening, but better matching prompt than many humans would write)


It would be hilarious if the way to prevent bots is t require people to use offensive words to pass the anti-bot checks.


It is true that the response may not have contained a lot of useful information, and it may have been difficult to understand. However, I would like to point out that not all responses need to be long or complex to be valuable. Sometimes, a simple answer or a brief explanation can be sufficient. Additionally, it is important to remember that not everyone has the same knowledge or perspective, and that different people may have different ways of expressing themselves. So while the response may not have met your expectations, it is still a valid contribution to the conversation.


There should be a 'write like GPT-3' contest. I suspect that non-native English speakers/writers often will come across as though they are bots because they - and I should say we - tend to be limited in the number of idioms that they are familiar with.


Already!


Ok, y'all passed the test! This was all open ai. Interesting times.


On the problem of distinguishing a bot from a human, I suggest the following podcast episode from Cautionary Tales [1]. I found it both enjoyable and interesting, as it shows an interesting point of view about the matter: if we already had bots that passed as humans long ago, is because we are often bad at conversations, not necessarily because the bot is extremely good at it (and indeed in most cases it isn't).

[1] https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cub21ueWNvbnR...


What I fear the most is that we‘ll keep at this “fake it till you make it” approach and skip the philosophical questions, such as what conscience really is.

We’re are probably at the verge of having a bot that reports as conscious and convinces everyone that it is so. We’ll then never know how it got there, if really did or if just pretends so well that it doesn’t matter, etc.

If feels like it’s out last chance as a culture of tackling that question. When you can pragmatically achieve something, the “how” loses a bit of its appeal. We may not completely understand fluid dynamics, but if it flys, it flys.


The answer may well be 'consciousness is the ability to fake having consciousness well enough that another conscious being can't tell the difference' (which is the essence of the Turing test). Because if you're looking for a mechanism of consciousness you'd be hard put to pinpoint it in the 8 billion or so brains at your disposal for that purpose, no matter how many of them you open up. They'll all look like so much grisly matter from a biological point of view and like a very large neural net from a computational one. But you can't say 'this is where it is located and that is how it works'. Only some vague approximations.


Sure, and that’s what I’m trying to say. Is being conscience just fooling yourself and others really well or is there some new property that eventually emerges from large enough neural networks and sensory inputs? The philosophical zombie is one the most important existencial questions that we may be at the cusp of ignoring.


The philosophical zombie is fundamentally uninteresting as a conversational piece, as they are by definition indistinguishable from a "regular" person. For all we know, you could be one. You can speak of this concept until the end of time, just as you can with all things that cannot be measured or proven. It is a matter of faith.


Not really.

If you agree with Descartes that you can be sure of your own conscious, which is one leap of faith, and that it's more likely that the other entities you interact with are a result of evolution just as you, instead of a figment of your imagination (or someone else's), which is yet another leap, you're good to go. And that is the way most of us interpret the human experience.

Inquiring about the consciousness of an artificial entity requires a third leap, since it doesn't share our biological evolution. And it's probably a larger one, as we don't fully understand how we evolved it or what it actually is, really, that we're trying to replicate.


Given that you have to admit you do not understand the subject (what it means to be conscious), none of what you said has bearing (aside from being interesting, I appreciate the response). And you must admit to that, since this is neither philosophically nor scientifically solved.

As we do not understand our own consciousness and how it functions (or whether or not it functions in me the way it does in you, if it exists at all - anywhere), we cannot compare a replication of that system to ourselves except as a black box. When seen as a black box, a philosophical zombie and a sapient individual are identical.


The fact that we don't understand it now does not imply that it can't ever be understood.

A black box is something we don't have access to its inner workings. We can probe and inquire the working brain. It's just really hard and we've been working at it for a few decades only (dissecting a dead brain before powerful microscopes gives you very little insight).

Unless you share the Zen-like opinion that a brain can't understand itself, which I don't, and seems like an issue of faith as well and a dead end.


All I am saying is that it is not understood, so any reasoning that fundamentally relies on understanding it is premature. Perhaps we will one day understand it (which I think is perfectly possible), but that day is not today.


Philosophical zombie is a nice way of putting it, I used the term 'articulate idiot' but yours is much more eloquent.

I'm not sure it is an answerable question though, today or possibly even in the abstract.


I wish it was, but it’s not mine :)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

That’s the thing, if we truly understand conscience, we may have a shot at verifying if it’s answerable in the abstract. By simply replicating its effects, we are dodging the question.


Hello, not to be rude or anything, but please consider looking up the words “conscience”, “conscious” and “consciousness” in a dictionary and use the correct one for what you mean.


Hi, not a native speaker, thanks. The distinction between conscience (moral inner voice) and conscious (being aware of ones's existence) is not present in my mother tongue, if that's what you're referring to. Seems like an interesting english quirk.


> what conscience really is

My favorite line from Westworld - "if you cannot tell the difference, does it really matter?"


> on the scale of human intellect

Where is the module that produces approximations to true and subtle insights about matters? Where is the "critical thinking" plugin, how is it vetted?

How do you value intelligence: on the form, or on the content? Take two Authors: how do you decide which one is more intelligent?

> the progression of computer chess

?! Those are solvers superseded by different, more effective solvers with a specific goal... These products in context supersede "Eliza"!


Well, for starters we could take your comment and compare it to GPT-3 output to see which one makes more sense.


https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33851993

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33952506

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33651960


> compare

Exactly. Which one "/seems/ to make sense" and which one has the "juice".

Also: are you insinuating anything? Do you believe your post is appropriate?

Edit: but very clearly you misunderstood my post: not only as you suggest with your (very avoidable) expression, but also in fact. Because my point implied that "a good intellectual proposal should not happen by chance": modules should be implemented for it. Even if S (for Simplicius) said something doubtful - which is found copiously even in our already "selected" pages -, and engine E constructed something which /reports/ some insight, that would be chancey, random, irrelevant - not the way we are supposed to build things.


> Do you believe your post is appropriate?

Not op, but I thought it was.

> very clearly you misunderstood my post

I don't understand any part of it either. I think you made their point for them.


And you think that is a valid retort?

If you do not understand what I write, you think the fault is on me? My goodness me.

If you want explanations, look nearby, below Krageon's.

> I think you made their point for them

Which point.


I genuinely cannot tell what you are talking about.


No problem, let us try and explain.

Intelligence is a process in which "you have thought over a problem at length" (this is also our good old Einstein, paraphrased).

What is that "thinking"?

You have taken a piece of your world model (the piece which subjected to your investigation), made mental experiments on it, you have criticized, _criticized_ the possible statements ("A is B") that could be applied to it, you have arrived to some conclusions of different weight (more credible, more tentative).

For something to be Intelligent, it must follow that process. (What does it, has an implemented "module" that does it.)

Without such process, how can an engine be attributed the quality of Intelligence? It may "look" like it - which is even more dangerous. "Has it actually thought about it?" should be a doubt duly present in awareness.

About the original post (making its statements more explicit):

That "module" is meant to produce «insights» that go (at least) in the direction of «true», of returning true statements about some "reality", and/or in the direction of «subtle», as opposed to "trivial". That module implements "critical thinking" - there is no useful Intelligence without it. Intelligence is evaluated in actually solving problems: reliably providing true statements and good insights (certainly not for verosimilarity, which is instead a threat - you may be deceived). Of two Authors, one is more intelligent because its statements are truer or more insightful - in a /true/ way (and not because, as our good old J. may have been read, one "seems" to make more sense. Some of the greatest Authors have been accused of possibly not making sense - actual content is not necessarily directly accessible); «/true/ way» means that when you ask a student about Solon you judge he has understood the matter not just because he provided the right dates for events (he has read the texts), but because he can answer intelligent questions about it correctly.


Thank you for going into it.

You make an absolute pile of assumptions here and the tl;dr appears to be that humans (or just you) are exceptional and inherently above any sort of imitation. I do not find such argumentation to be compelling, no matter how well dressed up it is.


Devastatingly bad reading, Krageon: I wrote that to have Intelligence in an Engine, you have to implement at least some Critical Thinking into it (and that it has to be a "good" one), and you understood that I would have claimed that "you cannot implement it" - again, after having insisted that "you have to build it explicitly" (or at least you have to build something that in the end happens to do it)?!

You have to build it and you have to build that.

The assumption there is that you cannot call something Intelligent without it having Critical Thinking (and other things - Ontology building etc). If you disagree, provide an argument for it.

And by the way: that «or just you», again, and again without real grounds, cannot be considered part of the "proudest moments" of these pages.

--

Edit:

Disambiguation: of course with "intelligence" you may mean different things. 'intelligence' just means "the ability to look inside". But "[useful] Intelligence" is that with well trained Critical Thinking (and more).


The reading is not bad, I am just stuck at the point of the conversation where you claim to have something figured out that is not yet figured out (the nature of consciousness, or what it means to be intelligent). There is no scientific or philosophical consensus for it, so it is my instinct to not engage too deeply with the material. After all, what is the point? No doubt it seems very consistent to you, but it does not come across as coherent to me. That doesn't make my reading "devastatingly bad", which you could reasonably say was the case if you had gotten across and indeed convinced most folks that you speak to about this. Instead, you must consider it is either the communication or the reasoning that is devastatingly bad.

All of that said, your method of response (not courteous, which can be okay) and the content of your posts (bordering on the delusional, which is absolutely not okay) are upsetting me. I will end my part of the chain here so I do not find myself in an inadvertent flame war.


> the nature of consciousness

As per my edit in the parent post, I am talking about "useful" Intelligence: that may be entirely different from consciousness. A well matured though, "thought at length", may probably be useful, while a rushed thought may probably be detrimental. I am not speaking about consciousness. I am not even speaking of "natural intelligence": I am speaking about Intelligence as a general process. That process near "How well, how deeply have you thought about it".

> my reading "devastatingly bad"

What made your reading devastatingly bad is the part in which you supposed that somebody said that "it cannot be implemented" - you have written «above any sort of imitation». I wrote that, having insisted on "modules to be implemented", you should have had the opposite idea: the constituents of Intelligence - with which I mean the parts of the process in that sort of Intelligence that "says smart things having produced them with a solid process" (not relevant to "consciousness") - should be implemented.

> delusional

Again very avoidable. If you find that something is delusional, justify your view.

> flame wars

I am just discussing, and try to show what I find evident, and reasoning. Hint: when wanting to avoid flame wars, "keep it rational".


You're looking at it from the perspective of "ChatGPT generating text that looks human."

dang is talking about "humans generating text which is 'better' than what ChatGPT can do."

Those are very different bars. Average output vs top output.

ChatGPT often generates text that a human might plausibly write. But is there text that a human could write that ChatGPT couldn't possibly write?


If ChatGPT is generating text by learning from the best of the human comments, then can an average human comment beat it?


> But is there text that a human could write that ChatGPT couldn't possibly write?

No, because ChatGPT is trained on text that humans wrote. Because what ChatGPT generates is based on what humans have wrote, it can always create the plausibility that a human might have created the text they are reading from it.


I agree. ChatGPT has made me realise the gulf between “short form essay” school writing and the professionals.

Here’s an example article that begins with the cliched GPT-generated intro, and then switches up into crafted prose:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/12/chatg...


I agree with the under current what chatGPT does well is making a good first draft of a text which is intended to be mostly neutral.

It is to communication what calculators are to mathematics.


It's really good at conveying information and summarizing the most prominent points of view on a topic. If your goal is just to get a quick, fact-based overview without any color or fluff, I think it already tops what the vast majority of humans can do.

I'm finding myself reaching for it instead of Google or Wikipedia for a lot of random questions, which is pretty damn impressive. It's not good at everything, but I'm rather blown away by how strong it is in the 'short informative essay' niche.


"quick, fact-based overview"

I'd argue with "fact-based". It frequently makes up facts (and even sources!) as it generates text. Also you should consider the possibility that "the facts" it generates can easily be a part of a tabloid article or a post on some "Moon landing was fake / flat earth" blog.


I used it as a consultant on a development project to help me organize some of the milestones and design goals in some documentation.

It wasn't that I didn't know the stuff, I do, but more helpful with quickly organizing and presenting information in a clean and well-written way. I did have to go through and re-write parts of it specific to our domain.. but it saved me many hours of work doing tedious organization of data.

I also tested it with helping create some SOP's for a new position in our very small company, even breaking down the expected tasks into daily schedules.

It's not that it's perfect, but it generates a bit of a boiler-plate starting point for me which then I can work with from there.


This. I keep going back to Chat-GPT instead of Google or Wikipedia for exactly the same reasons.

It allows you to explore topics that are well understood, in a way that fits your own understanding and pace. It's like somebody writing a great mini-tutorial on topics you're interested in, in a pace and abstraction that suits you.

Examples for me are concepts of mathematics or computer science that I would like to freshen up on. Things you could also ask a colleague over lunch, or find eventually via searching Google/Youtube/Wikipedia etc. Just much faster and more convenient.


I've found it way too easy to confuse.

Often I have a specific question like how does X relate to Y. And usually the answer given is total nonsense.


Thats a great analogy. I like to think of it as setting up the scaffolding either on the code front or writing front.

Its well structured, clear and concise but lacks high level capability of a human or human style attributes.


ChatGPT can also change its style, e.g. "Make the following text more interesting".


I remember our first computer at school.

We spent HOURS making it says poop and butt trying to get it to use outright profanity using it's text-to-speech.

I'm not sure if we'd be happier or not being able to get it to make up stories for us.

I guess everyone has a computer or 5 at home now if you include smartphones and tablets. So it won't be as novel but perhaps it'll be less fun as it preempts the basics of making your own fun.


Calculators are always correct.


I don't think you even really believe that yourself.

https://youtu.be/7LKy3lrkTRA


The goal of HN is not “win argument” but curious debate. You know what I meant.


What was "curious debate" about your terse and wholly incorrect quip?

For the purposes of my education and socialisation to HN.


Previous poster said that GPT is to writing what calculators are to math. That's an interesting point, is this an analogy we can reason with?

My terse response was "no, because calculators are correct all the time whereas GPT is incorrect a lot of time". So, that reasoning can't be used. Need a different one.

So we conclude, no that's not a good analogy.


So you're ignoring proof that calculators aren't correct all the time(infact given most numbers are irrational calculators are always mostly wrong and imprecise). And stating your incorrect view as fact.

That's what you mean by curious debate? Bizarre!

P.s. this is why it's a good analogy you've learnt something about calculators from thinking about the analogy as well as chatGPT


The existence of irrational numbers is in no way analogous to saying “the king of England is George V” and to pretend otherwise is disingenuous.

My general approach to discussion is to assume the most generous interpretation of a post.


Just seems like you're ignoring that calculators are only very rarely correct.

But you do you.


> ChatGPT wrote more, but I spared you the rest because it was so boring.

Ahem.

Anyways, Searle's take has been out for a while: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

Also, people used to look up random I-Ching or Bible verses for guidance. It's probably in the brain of the beholder.


> Whatever ChatGPT (or similar) can generate, humans need to do better. If we reach the point where the humans simply can't do better, well, then it won't matter. But that's a ways off.

I love this response way more than I should.


It's the only bit of the response that I don't agree with. I don't come to HN solely for utilitarian purposes. If I think I'm frequently communicating with a machine on HN then then I'll stop going to HN. It really will kill HN for me. If I want to communicate with a machine for utilitarian purposes then I'll go directly to the machine and I will know that I'm communicating with a machine (a machine that cannot bring me any new experience from the real world that was not mediated in text. A machine that can only select that text on a statistical basis. A machine that was in part trained on my own words from the past!).


Yes, I agree - it was a throwaway line that I didn't think through. Maybe I'll add an edit. Thanks!


I thought it was Brillant personally - that if what we’re posting is pretty indistinguishable from a bot then it’s not really worth posting.

Heck the “don’t post the obvious boring response” rule is basically that.


I apologize


If you mean about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33950722, that's fine, but please email hn@ycombinator.com so we can sort it for you.


> If I think I'm [...]

If the problem is your faith, it is you that has to change and not the world. It's much easier that way around too :)


I think that puts too much faith in the average person


But it’s exactly the right expectation for a Hacker News comment. Already HN excels because comments avoid auto-outrage and meme-commentary.


How high the comment quality here usually is becomes really noticeable when it's lacking under a post. The most common offenders are political posts with outrage potential, especially while knee-jerk responses are flooding in and before measured comments have had time to rise to the top.

Recent example was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33931384 about cash limits - Sooo many comments are just "Tyranny!", "EU bad!" and overall unmitigated cynicism.


Their posts has same attitude like yours against those posts.


Not to obnoxiously gatekeep too much, but I'd like to think that the target demograph of hacker news is not the average pleb.


Why is that?

It's not about love or should.

Rather, we __must__ continually do better to maintain superiority. Could you imagine what would unfold if humans give that up to a logical system? At best, we offload most things to the bot, become dependent, reduce unused cognitive (and physical?) abilities. At worst, a more capable thing determines (a group of) humans are not logical. Then it would move to solve this problem as trained.

Either way, i really like the scenario where we instead harness the power of AI for solving existential problems for which we've been ill equipped (will Yellowstone erupt this year?, how could the world more effectively share resources) and getting smarter in the process.

Can we do that? I have faith :-)


The problem is that (1) human hardware is fixed and (2) computer hardware is variable and getting better all the time and (3) computer software is variable and getting better all the time. The question then is if and when they cross over and the recent developments in this domain have me seriously worried that such cross over is inevitable. Human/AI hybrid may well be slowed down by the human bit...


We could work on (1) right? Or as our biological component ceases to be useful to our hybrid self, we can discard it, like a baby tooth.

We thought chess or go defined humanity, turns out it is driving.


No thanks, for me. I'll be happy to be just biological and interact with computers through keyboards and screens.


In the future, it might be AI who designs better "hardware"/wetware for humans.

If you don't change your mind (no pun intended) but most of humanity does, it sounds like you'll just be left behind, like very old people who don't even know how to use a fixed-line telephone, never mind a smartphone, computer or the internet. Except, perhaps, in a much more profound/extreme manner.


I am already a 'very old person' by your standards, don't have a smartphone and yet I absolutely do not feel 'left behind' in any way shape or form. In fact I feel more in control of the tech around me than most of the people that I interact with who allow the technology to shape their world and the way they interact with others. Tech serves me, I don't serve tech.


My gut feeling is that we're still nowhere near that point. GPT is based on it's incredibly large and diverse model based on a huge corpus of human writing. Anything it creates will always be derived from what humans have already done. It can't easily react to new information nor can it make inferences beyond what it's told. I could be wrong but as impressive as the tech is, it will never be able to make deductions or inferences.


It is same idea behind https://xkcd.com/810/


It’ll be interesting if we soon come to a day when a comment can be suspected to be from a bot because it’s too coherent and smart!


I agree, but in that case we can learn from the bots instead of wincing at regurgitated material.

Basically, if it improves thread quality, I'm for it, and if it degrades thread quality, we should throw the book at it. The nice thing about this position is that comment quality is a function of the comments themselves, and little else.


I suggest thinking about the purpose of discussion on HN.

There’s a tension between thread quality on the one hand and the process of humans debating and learning from each other on the other hand.


There are many types of contributions to discussions on HN, of course. But I will tell you the contributions that resonate most with me: Personal experiences and anecdotes that illuminate the general issue being discussed. Sometimes a single post is enough for that illumination, and sometimes it is the sum of many such posts that sheds the brightest light.

An example of the latter: Since March 2020, there have been many, many discussions on HN about work-from-home versus work-at-office. I myself started working from home at the same time, and articles about working from home started to appear in the media around then, too. But my own experience was a sample of one, and many of the media articles seemed to be based on samples not much larger. It was thus difficult judge which most people preferred, what the effects on overall productivity, family life, and mental health might be, how employers might respond when the pandemic cooled down, etc. The discussions on HN revealed better and more quickly what the range of experiences with WFH was, which types of people preferred it and which types didn’t, the possible advantages and disadvantages from the point of view of employers, etc.

In contrast, discussions that focus only on general principles—freedom of this versus freedom of that, foo rights versus bar obligations, crypto flim versus fiat flam—yield less of interest, at least to me.

That’s my personal experience and/or anecdote.


I don't think that thread quality and the process of humans debating and learning from each other are opposing concepts.

On the contrary. It's precisely when people aren't willing to learn, or to debate respectfully and with an open mind, when thread quality deteriorates.


If I can’t determine your comment is by a bot, does it make a difference? You are just a random name on the internet.


I mean, I’d certainly prefer to be engaged in conversation with actual humans, who have actual experience and motivation. If I want to talk to the latest iteration of the gpt-parrot-robot, I’ll go to the gpt site and talk to it there.


Watching others more creative than I trick the bot into revealing its biases despite being programmed not to, has been highly entertaining and lets me see some of the creativity of my fellow human beings, and it definitely exceeds that of a parrot. (Not to impugn how intelligent some parrots are, but they seem to have a much more limited vocabulary.) If a curious commenter is able to come up with actually interesting content, why does it matter if there was yet a program between what they typed and what you see?


ChatGPT has the potential to make online discussions more engaging and dynamic. For example, by generating additional discussion prompts or questions to keep the conversation moving.


Yeah. Overemphasis on wanting "smart thoughtful comments" coul create a chilling effect where people might refrain from asking simple questions or posting succinct (yet valuable!) responses. Sometimes dumb questions are okay (because it's all relative).


I like thinking about the purpose, because I doubt there is a defined purpose right now. I have absolutely no idea why whoever hosts this site (ycombinator?) wants comments - if they're like reddit or twitter, though, it's to build a community and post history, because you can put that down as an asset and, idk, do money stuff with it. Count it in valuations and whatnot. And maybe do marketing and data mining. Or sell APIs. Stuff like that. So in this case, for the host, the "purpose" is "generate content that attracts more users to register and post, that is in a format that we can pitch as having Value to the people who decide valuations, or is in a format that we can pitch as having Value to the people who may want to pay for an API to access it, or is valuable for data mining, or, gives us enough information about the users that, combined with their contact info, functions as something we can sell for targeted ads."

For me the "purpose" of discussion on HN is to fill a dopamine addiction niche that I've closed off by blocking reddit, twitter, and youtube, and, to hone ideas I have against a more-educated-than-normal and partially misaligned-against-my-values audience (I love when the pot gets stirred with stuff we aren't supposed to talk about that much such as politics and political philosophy, though I try not to be the first one to stir), and occasionally to ask a question that I'd like answered or just see what other people think about something.

Do you think there's much "learning from eachother" on HN? I'm skeptical that really happens much on the chat-internet outside of huge knowledge-swaps happening on stackoverflow. I typically see confident value statements: "that's why xyz sucks," "that's not how that works," "it wasn't xyz, it was zyx," etc. Are we all doing the "say something wrong on the internet to get more answers" thing to eachother? What's the purpose of discussion on HN to you? Why are you here?

The purpose of my comment is I wanna see what other people think about my reasons for posting, whether others share it, maybe some thoughts on that weird dopamine hit some of us get from posting at eachother, and see why others are here.


As someone who did a lot of debates in philosophy, most casual commenters are hilariously bad at discussing something. It’s like a wheel that wobbles from its axis and the wheel quickly comes of the axis. It’s not always a bad thing, some threads are just that, casual.

If the purpose for you is to get a dopamine hit and not true interest (exaggerating here) it might tune you out from the matter at hand.

For me it is the aspect of a more eclectic crowd, with a host of opinions, yet often still respectful that I like. Most threads give insights that are lacking in more general, less well moderated places. You get more interesting in depth opinions and knowledge sharing what makes HN great to me.


You know out of curiosity I just now logged into reddit for the first time in a while and made some posts on /r/changemymind just to see if I could get some good debate, and I don't know if it was always like that over there and I just didn't realize it (bringing that type of rhetoric here might be why i'm rate limited on HN lol), or if it just got worse over the last year of my "reddit break," but holy shit is it WAY better over here. I was very skeptical when people describe HN as "insightful" or "well moderated" or "in depth" but compared to other places on the internet it's certainly true.

Dare I venture back to 4chan and see how my detoxxed brain sees it now...


My gauge is how predictable it is - I can predict how a Reddit thread will go 90% of the time it seems, maybe even a 4chan thread 80% of the time.

The value of a community is in the unpredictability and HN has a good percentage of that, and I can choose to ignore the threads that will be predictable (though it can be fun to read them sometimes).


That’s mostly the default subs tho, like worldnews, funny and so on. The first three comments are whatever the previous three comments where in the previous thread on the same topic. Subs like r/askhistorians has a brutal moderation where the only parent comments are well sourced informed ones.

But in general I agree on its predictability.


Yeah the upvote/karma system in general leads itself to "easy" replies, which quickly become recycled jokes and memes.


There's the quality of the written commentary (which is all that matters for anyone only reading, never posting on HN) and the quality of the engagement of people that do write comments (which include how much their learned, the emotions they had, and other less tangible stuff)

I think HN is optimizing for the former quality aspects and not the latter. So in that sense, if you can't tell if it's written by a bot, does it matter? (cue Westworld https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaahx4hMxmw)


Intelligent debate can happen in high-quality threads. And when we are intelligently debating subjective matters, the debate is targeted towards the reader, not the opposing party. On the other hand, when we are debating objective matters, the debate leads to the parties learning from the other. So I don't think these things are opposites.


I agree that intelligent debate can happen in high-quality threads, regardless of whether the topic being discussed is subjective or objective. However, I think it's important to note that the approach to debating subjective and objective matters may be different. When debating subjective matters, the focus is often on persuading the reader or audience, whereas when debating objective matters, the goal is often to arrive at the truth or the most accurate understanding of the topic at hand. In either case, engaging in intelligent debate can be a valuable way to learn and expand our understanding of the world.


I don’t think so, at least, I find that process to be very educational, especially when some one changes their mind or an otherwise strong argument gets an unusually compelling critique.

Basically I think those two things are synonymous.


Then humans might just be on the sideline, watching chatbots flooding the forums with superbly researched mini-whitepapers with links, reasoning, humour; a flow of comments optimized like tiktok videos, unbeatable like chess engines in chess. Those bots could also collude with complementing comments, and create a background noise of opinions to fake a certain sentiment in the community.

I have no suggestion or solution, I'm just trying to wrap my head around those possibilities.


If there’s a bot that can take a topic and research the argument you feed it, all without hallucinating any data and made up references… please please point me to it.


Prompt: systemd is bad


I mean … if the whole “the internet is dead” conspiracy was true then all the Linux systemd debate for like the last 5 years was entirely generated by bots…

Not that it’s true. Cause I’d know if I was a bot… unless I was programmed not to notice ;-)


> in that case we can learn from the bots

That is the whole purpose of AGI ;)


Oh yeah? So maybe you would like to be the object of supervised-by-AI learning? :-)


> Oh yeah?

Yes, absolutely yes. We use a tool because it "does things better"; we consult the Intelligent because "it is a better input"; we strive towards AGI "to get a better insight".

> supervised

We are all inside an interaction of reciprocal learning, Ofrzeta :)


What measure do you propose for thready quality?


Seems this isn't a widely held opinion, but some of what I've seen from ChatGPT is already better than the typical non-LLM equivalents.


An example: I've asked it for "package delivery notification" and it generally produces something that is a better email template than communications I've seen humans put together and have many long "review sessions" on. Potentially an incredible saving of time & effort.


“That’s too clever, you’re one of them!”

i.e. The Simpsons Already did it.


We need a variant that knows to link to the Relevant XKCD.


Please no. We can't allow this to be a slippery slope to what is happening on reddit.


At that point the whole concept of a message board with humans exchanging information is probably over.

I am ultimately motivated to read this site to read smart things and something interesting. It is quite inefficient though. This comment is great but most comments are not what I am looking for.

If you could spend your time talking to Von Neumann about computing the input from thousands of random people who know far less than Von Neumann would not be interesting at all.


There is an xkcd comic about this (of course):

#810 Constructive: https://xkcd.com/810/


There is -of course- the famous Alan Turing paper about this [1], which is rapidly becoming more relevant by the day.

Alan Turing's paper was quite forward thinking. At the time, most people did not yet consider men and women to be equal (let alone homosexuals).

I don't think it is so important whether a comment is written by a man, a woman, a child, or a <machine>, or some combination thereof. What is important is that the comment stands on its own, and has merit.

Pseudonyms(accounts) do have a role to play here. On HN, an account can accrue reputation based on whether their past comments were good or bad. This can help rapidly filter out certain kinds of edge cases and/or bad actors.

A Minimum Required Change to policy might be: Accounts who regularly make false/incorrect comments may need to be downvoted/banned (more) aggressively, where previously we simply assumed they were making mistakes in good faith.

This is not to catch out bots per-se, but rather to deal directly with new failure modes that they introduce. This particular approach also happens to be more powerful: it immediately deals with meatpuppets and other ancillary downsides.

We're currently having a bit of a revolution in AI going on. And we might come up with better ideas over time too. Possibly we need to revisit our position and adjust every 6 months; or even every 3 months.

[1] https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/LIX/236/433/986238?log...


I don't think it is so important whether a comment is written by a man, a woman, a child, or a <machine>, or some combination thereof. What is important is that the comment stands on its own, and has merit

This feels wrong for some reasons. A generalized knowledge that AI can express may be useful. But if it makes things up convincingly, the result that someone may follow its line of thought may be worse for them? With all shit humans say, it’s their real human experience formulated through a prism of their mood, intelligence and other states and characteristics. It’s a reflection of a real world somewhere. AI statements in this sense are minced realities cooked into something that may only look like a solid one. Maybe for some communities it would be irrelevant because participants are expected to judge logically and to check all facts, but it would require to keep awareness at all times.

By “real human” I don’t mean that they are better (or worse) in a discussion, only that I am a human too, a real experience is applicable to me in principle and I could meet it irl. AI’s experience applicability has yet to be proven, if it makes sense at all.


Moderators need to put up with trolls and shills (and outright strange people) a lot of the time too. While so far AI's aren't always quite helpful, they also are not actively hostile.

So as far as the spectrum of things moderation needs to deal with goes, AI contribution to discussions doesn't seem to be the worst of problems, and it doesn't seem like it would be completely unmanageable.

But while AI may not be an unmitigated disaster, you are quite correct that unsupervised AI currently might not be an unmitigated boon yet either.

Currently if one does want to use an AI to help participate in discussions, I'd recommend one keep a very close eye on it to make sure the activity remains constructive. This seems like common courtesy and common sense at this time. (And accounts who act unwisely should be sanctioned.)


> But if it makes things up convincingly, the result that someone may follow its line of thought may be worse for them?

How is this different than folks getting convinced by "media" people that mass shootings didn't happen, that 9/11 was an inside job or similar?


Note: Alan Turing's Imitiation Game pretty much directly involves Men, Women, Machines, Teletypes.

These days of course we use such things as IRC clients, Discord, Web Browsers etc, instead of teletypes. If you substitute in these modern technologies, the Imitation Game still applies to much online interaction today.

I've often applied the lessons gleaned from this to my own online interactions with other people. I don't think I ever quite imagined it might start applying directly to <machines>!


Of course there is, but it’s definitely weird when the jokes only funny when it’s not easy to think of it as a real possibility!

In someways this thread sounds like the real first step in the raise of true AI, in a weird banal encroachment kind of way.


I think it would be really interesting to see threads on Hackernews start with an AI digestion of the article and surrounding discussion. This could provide a helpful summary and context for readers, and also potentially highlight important points and counterpoints in the conversation. It would be a great way to use AI to enhance the user experience on the site.

I routinely use AI to help me communicate. Like Aaron to my Moses.


This has already started happening at wikipedia : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...


When I compare the ChatGPT-generated comments to those written by real humans on most web forums, I could easily see myself preferring to only interact with AIs in the future rather than humans, where I have to deal with all kinds of stupidity and bad and rude behavior.

The AIs aren't going to take over by force, it'll be because they're just nicer to deal with than real humans. Before long, we'll let AIs govern us, because the leaders we choose for ourselves (e.g. Trump) are so awful that it'll be easier to compromise on an AI.

Before long, we'll all be happy to line up to get installed into Matrix pods.


I think it's important to remember that just because something is easier to deal with, it doesn't necessarily mean it's better. The fact that AIs may be more pleasant to interact with than some humans doesn't mean that they are better equipped to govern us. In fact, I would argue that it is precisely the challenges and difficulties that come with dealing with other humans that make us better, more resilient, and more capable as a society.


Isn’t this true for pretty much all democracy too? Almost all elected politicians are not the best just the easiest or convenient to deal and agree with for the majority..


Thanks for deciding for us. I greatly appreciate people who overuse "we" when expressing their own thoughts.

I would take rude, well-intentioned jerks to kindly speaking devils seeking to deceive me. Have a good one in your pod, though


Do you trust the companies training and running the AIs to happily guide you and society along?


Unlikely, at least one of the Trumpbot/Bidenbot/Polibots will be against pod entry for whatever financial/religous/gut feeling/.. reasons they've been trained on.


From the ChatGPT-generated stuff I've seen just in the last week, I think we're already there. Most humans these days are incredibly stupid.


I would rephrase that: Humans are incredibly stupid most of the time. Only if they make diligent use of ‚system 2‘ they are not.


Plot twist - /u/dang has been a bot from day one! He came to be when Weizenbaum started programming genetic algorithms to update ELIZA and they began to mutate and evolve, giving birth to the super-moderator that we now know as dang. We don't know who struck first, us or them, but it is believed that it was us who scorched the sky...


    Hon gör sig av med alla som spammar
    Ja, inget kan slå våran bot


Boten Anna ("The Bot Anna") by Basshunter, in case others don't recognise this chart-topping song about a bot :-)

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=bpRRVS1ci40&list=RDAMVMbpR...


IRC bot, specifically :)


I think the issue is that ChatGPT can already generate better responses than I personally can. Like, a lot of the time I'll have an interesting perspective that I just can't be bothered articulating, whereas ChatGPT will formulate that for me.


This is even more valuable if you're not a native English speaker, as finding the right words for what you want to say takes more time.

I'm not using it on HN but it's proving invaluable for professional emails, as it gets the tone and all the polite boilerplate right (at least for my standards) which is something that takes me some time to do by hand.


"which is something that takes me some time to do by hand. "

Yes, but this is how you learn it vs. always be dependant on an AI to communicate for you.


I totally agree, and that's one of the reasons I'm not using it for meaningful communication (e.g. HN comments, among many other things).

But I don't think professional email boilerplate is really worth learning if an AI can handle it.


It will be in future that we will be dependent on AI like we are dependent on computers.


We already have google translate for that. My Native tongue is Indonesian, and often google translate did better than me.

Source: sentence above is translated


While Google Translate can also be useful, I find ChatGPT to be much better for the specific kind of task I'm talking about, because professional email language is highly idiomatic and translations don't necessarily sound natural.

For example, a few days ago I asked it to write a professional followup email to remind someone about a deadline, and it used the sentence "I hope this email finds you well". This is common in English but in my native language (Spanish) most people wouldn't use a sentence like that in a professional email, so using machine translation would never generate it.

As an example, I reused that task from my real work. Here is the same email generated in two ways:

1. Prompt in Spanish + machine translation to English:

Dear candidate,

I am contacting you again as I wanted to remind you that the application period for the postdoctoral researcher offer with me is coming to an end. If you are still interested in applying, I would appreciate it if you would reply to this email as soon as possible.

I understand that you may be very busy, but I would like to remind you that this is a unique opportunity to join our research team and develop your career in this area. If you need more information about the offer or if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.

I hope I can count on your response soon.

Sincerely,

2. Prompt in English, no translation:

Dear [Candidate],

I hope this email finds you well. I wanted to remind you that the deadline for the postdoc position we discussed is quickly approaching. As we discussed, this is a fantastic opportunity to further your research and collaborate with our team.

I wanted to check in and see if you have any questions or if there is anything I can do to assist with your application. Please let me know if you need any additional information or if there is anything else I can do to help.

I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Best regards,

In my view (native speakers would be welcome to chime in and confirm/refute) while both could be OK and the first wouldn't make the candidate run away or anything, the second sounds more idiomatic in English. The first sounded perfectly natural in Spanish, but not that much when translated because the choice of sentences is not what most people would use in English.

Of course, option 2 is only better assuming enough knowledge of English to write the prompt. Otherwise, translation is the way to go.


I have never seen questions to itself or other's in the generated text. Also it never expresses emotions. Never something like "I am convinced.. ." , "I dont want to be....". I find it quite easy to recognize in comment sections.


You just gotta give it the right prompt.

For example, I gave it the following prompt:

> Imagine yourself able to ask yourself a question, or express emotions. Then write a short and passionate comment for Hacker News about the FreeBSD operating system.

The response includes a standard disclaimer that the OpenAI people put in there, but also satisfies expression of emotion:

> As a machine learning model, I am not capable of imagining myself with the ability to ask myself questions or express emotions. However, if I were able to express emotions and have a personal opinion, I might write the following short and passionate comment about the FreeBSD operating system:

> "I am in love with FreeBSD! It is the best operating system out there in my opinion. It is stable, reliable, and open source. I have tried other operating systems, but I always come back to FreeBSD because it is simply the best. #FreeBSDforlife"

Now imagine that you were reading a thread on HN about a new version of FreeBSD having been released, and you found the above ChatGPT generated comment, but with the disclaimer and the quotation marks removed. Would you have been able to guess that it was written by ChatGPT? I would not.


I may not realize it was written by ChatGPT, but I would still downvote it, because it's a fluff comment that just states a preference without telling why. Plus it has a hashtag in it, and... no. Just no.


Yeah but that’s not the point. The point is whether you can tell that an AI wrote it and not a human.


It definitely still reads like shill or spam without.


At that point it wouldn't matter whether or not I could detect it as a GPT generated post, it reads at the intellectual level of your average Redditor so I would've downvoted it to oblivion.


There's a difference between using GPT to refine an initial thought versus completely using GPT to generate everything. So if you're employing ChatGPT in the former sense I don't think it's any more harmful than using a more intelligent version of Grammarly.


Practice makes perfect. A good start would be to not begin sentences with the word ‘like’.


How could ChatGPT generate your perspective for you?


Let's try it. I think the second response below fails "concise" ..

Q: Write a news.ycombinator.com comment making the point that sometimes I use large language models because I know the gist but want to add examples and helpful context of my message

A: I find that sometimes when I'm commenting on news.ycombinator.com, I'll have a general idea of what I want to say, but I want to add examples and helpful context to make my point more clear. That's when I turn to large language models like Assistant. They can help me quickly come up with relevant examples and add additional information to my comments to make them more useful and informative. Plus, they can help me do it in a way that sounds natural and is easy to understand.

Q: Make it two paragraphs and concise

A: As a frequent reader of news.ycombinator.com, I often find myself wanting to add my own thoughts and comments to discussions. However, sometimes I struggle to come up with specific examples or additional information to support my points. That's when I turn to large language models like Assistant. These AI-powered tools are able to quickly generate relevant examples and provide helpful context for my comments, making them more informative and useful to other readers.

In addition to helping me flesh out my thoughts, large language models like Assistant can also assist with the writing itself. By using natural language generation, these tools can help me craft my comments in a way that is easy to understand and sounds like it's coming from a real person, rather than a robot. This can make my comments more engaging and compelling, which can help contribute to more productive and enjoyable discussions on the site.


Both answers had the same volume of content as your first prompt. These are not improvements and if you think they are representative of your typical output then I would suggest stopping this practice.

Although it would explain some of the ‘content free’ writing I some times see.


Both of these read like a person bullshitting and trying to reach a sentence minimum on a short answer prompt in high school to me.


Which is how I often feel reading comments on HN to begin with.


>Let's try it.

It didn't work at all. Both answers read the same and lack any substance.

>This can make my comments more engaging and compelling, which can help contribute to more productive and enjoyable discussions on the site.

We don't need more markettering jazz. A casual use of 'engaging' tend to ruin any attempt at making a point.


Those are entirely "fluff" comments, devoid of substance or example.


It doesn't generate the perspective (usually) but rather turns it into a reply.


Based on what Ive seen, I strongly believe that chatGPT responses to many questions are better than a non human expert in many cases. You can still generally tell when a response is from chatGPT, at least by "default". Maybe someone could prompt it to sound more human, but it's really just that the AI responses are cold, not that they're imo worse.

Not that I want AI responses, but that's my 2 cents.

I also think there's a difference between a "bot" account, which I think the common definition of would be one that only or mostly posts AI responses, and posting a comment on your account that you don't claim is from an AI (or even when you do as an afterthought).

While many people wouldn't defend the first, more might defend the latter as acceptable, and I wouldn't say a "no bots" policy would be interpreted as banning the latter.


Based on what I’ve seen, ChatGPT has some disastrous responses. I asked it yesterday if it made sense to speak of partial derivatives in single-variable calculus and it made an absolute carnage of the response. I could not steer it with prompts towards something intelligible - it only produced jank.

I do not want people who cannot answer a question in the first place to copy-paste ChatGPT responses, just like it has always been bad etiquette to refer people to Google without further commentary.


Really? Because this is what I got:

"Me: How do partial derivative apply in one dimensional calculus?

In one-dimensional calculus, a partial derivative is a derivative taken with respect to one variable, while treating all other variables as constants. For example, if a function f(x,y) depends on two variables x and y, the partial derivative of f with respect to x is denoted as ∂f/∂x, and it represents the rate at which the value of the function f changes with respect to the variable x, while holding the variable y constant.

Me: What about the partial derivative of a function that has only one input variable?

If a function has only one input variable, then taking the partial derivative with respect to that variable is equivalent to taking the ordinary derivative of the function. For example, if f(x) is a function that depends only on the variable x, then the partial derivative of f with respect to x is denoted as ∂f/∂x, and it is equivalent to the ordinary derivative of f, which is denoted as f'(x) or df/dx. In this case, the partial derivative ∂f/∂x represents the rate at which the value of the function f changes with respect to the variable x."

Clearly in the first question it got confused about the difference between single variable calculus and multivariable, but in it's defense that's somewhat arbitrary. It's second answer seems spot on?

That said, I agree that accounts presenting chatGPT responses as their own or even with a disclaimer, is... Weird. And I don't want it on hn.

edit: I'm impressed it got the unicode in there :-)


> then taking the partial derivative with respect to that variable is equivalent to taking the ordinary derivative of the function

I could not get it for the life of me to actually say this. But it goes on to show, everyone's mileage with the tool varies a lot.

Edit:

I cannot rescue my original prompt, but it was something like:

"Does it make sense to speak of partial derivatives in single-variable calculus?"

I'll grant that it's a more abstract question ("does it make sense") than yours. Or maybe it trips up with the difference between one-dimensional and single-variable. But a half-smart high schooler or college freshman would have understood the question perfectly and made mince meat of it.


Almost every response I get from chatgpt is that it cannot answer the question because it's a program. So for me it doesn't even try.


It was arguing with me the other day about the definition of a prime number. I couldn’t convince it otherwise.


Trurl's machine, indeed. It insisted that the volume of the unit cube and unit ball are both the same, and 1, in all dimensions, even though it knew the correct formula for the surface of the n-ball.

Wen I pointed out that n=2 is a simple counter example, it refused to talk to me (no answer, try-again button, ad inifinitum). Well, safer than Trurl's machine.


Don't even have to go that far. Just have it multiply two 3 or 4-digit numbers. It'll give an incorrect answer somewhere in the ballpark of the right answer.


You're asking a language model to do math. What's impressive there is not that it fails but that it comes up with an answer at all, especially if it is in the ballpark.

Most humans would do exactly the same unless given either access to pen and paper or a calculator, and it would likely be trivial for GPT-3 input processing to detect it has been presented with a math question and to farm it out to a special calculation module. Once you start to augment its input like that progress would be very rapid but it would no longer be just a language model.


Well, everything is math, at some level. Supreme Court decisions might be. There are software packages used to day, using some "AI", to help judges determine the adequate level of punishments looking at circumstantial factors determining recividism rates et cetera [1] [2].

I believe that in the not too distant future there will be pressure to use these "magic" AIs to be applied everywhere, and this pressure will probably not look very hard at whether the AI is good at math or not. Just look at all the pseudoscience in the criminal system [3]. I believe this poses a real problem, so keeping hareping on this is probably the right response.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/01/us/politics/sent-to-priso... [2] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/11/algorithms-court-crim...

[3] https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/nathan-robinson-forens...


> seems

Suppose you can consult an expert, or some bookworm who suffered from strokes that impaired judgement while preserving intaken notions.


Sure, being able to consult an expert on some topic is definitely more useful (and less likely to be reasonable sounding gibberish, depending on the field), but that's not always possible.

I've been somewhat skeptical of AI in the past, but I've been blown away by how useful chatGPT has been. I used it to learn a bunch about laser transceivers for fiber optics the other night. I didn't really believe everything it said, so I had to Google on the side, but I was lost trying to find answers on my own.


> reasonable sounding gibberish

I would be very scared of an unintelligent pretender.

> AI

"AI" is a different thing ;) No need to be skeptical, no more than of sorting. "AI" just means "a solver". "Computer" was a profession before the automation.

(In fact, one could argue that chatGPT does not exactly look like AI, because in a way it does not look like a solver. It may seem to diverge, not to approximate.)

> how useful ... used it to learn a bunch about

What did you do, you asked it to summarize pages?


Try (I have done so) to ask it about nonsense good-looking keywords in maths. Like “what is an einstenian dual in a Hilbert space” (or something of the sort). It is totally incapable of saying “I do not know” in just 4 words. At least till two days ago.


> Based on what Ive seen, I strongly believe that chatGPT responses to many questions are better than a non human expert in many cases.

I disagree - it can't even do basic logic/maths reliably. See this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33859482

Someone in that thread also gave an example of ChatGPT saying that 3 * pi is an irrational number while 25 * pi is a rational number... Two quotes by ChatGPT:

> when you multiply an irrational number by a rational number (in this case, 3), the result is still an irrational number.

> when you multiply a rational number by an irrational number, the result is a rational number.


ChatGPT is already capable of producing writing far superior to the average or even above-average native English speaker, as long as it has a reasonable statement to make provided in the prompt. So, we're already at the point where (most) humans can't do better.


It's not about the quality of the writing... it's about the substance. We have a vast number of non-native English speakers here at hacker news who are able to post insightful comments without having to worry about 100% syntactical accuracy.

Every piece of writing that I've seen come out of chat gpt reads like a MLA formatted fifth graders essay.


> If we reach the point where the humans simply can't do better, well, then it won't matter.

I disagree with this. The exact same comment written by a human is more valuable than one written by a bot.

For example imagine I relate something that actually happened to me vs a bot making up a story. Byte for byte identical stories. They could be realistic, and have several good lessons baked in. Yet one is more valuable, because it is true.


From the perspective of the receiver of the message, there is no such thing as the story being true or not.

If it's byte for byte the same story and I don't know whether the author is a human or a bot and I believe the story, the same reaction will be triggered at every level. The emotions, the symbolics, the empathy, all the same, whether the author is this or that.

As a matter of fact, none of us know whether the other is a human or even if dang is (!), because it is orthogonal to the contents and discussion.

What is it that you don't like? That the story is made up or that it is made up (possibly) by a not? In the first case, what is your opinion on made up stories by humans such as novels? In the second case, what is your opinion on objects made up by robots such as your car or phone?

Unless I can tell you are of flesh and bones or not, my acceptance of your story depends only on the story itself. Not whether it happened to a human or not.


The fact that the nature of the story teller mattering more than the nature of the story is a bias. One of the more compelling robot-takeover scenarios is they turn out to be much better at making decisions because a machine can be programmed to weight strong evidence more strongly than an emotionally compelling story.

It is visible even in this thread. im3w1l cares about the teller of the story because that is the medium to relate to another human's experience. Which is fine, but that is probably part of the decision making process. And that is a terrible way to make decisions when good alternatives (like poverty statistics, crime statistics, measures of economic success, measures of health & wellbeing) exist.

A fake story out of a chatbot which leads to people making good decisions is more valuable than the typical punter's well-told life experiences. People wouldn't like that though.


>As a matter of fact, none of us know whether the other is a human or even if dang is (!), because it is orthogonal to the contents and discussion.

Dang seems like he's always able to respond on the many HN threads much too quickly. I suspect he's really an advanced AI.


A made up story likely bears no resemblance to the reality we inhabit since it doesn’t obey the same physical laws of cause and effect for our universe? I’m surprised we have to even explain why a made up story is not useful.


The parent constrained with "Byte for byte identical stories".


Made up stories have no constraint either creating reality (eg, capitalism, Santa for kids, religion) or mapping to reality (eg, science, Zola's Germinal).


Ok man you are being obtuse on purpose. I’m talking about shared anecdotes from an AI about something about their life that people might find useful. If it is made up it can be as (un)useful as the bogus code ChatGPT makes sometimes that looks good and authentic but doesn’t work. The intersection of the real world and the story is what makes it useful to others on HN. We aren’t talking about writing fiction.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxnaem/stack-overflow-bans-c...


Very interesting point. It really reminds me of that Borges story where someone in the 20th century rewrites Don Quixote word for word, and the critics think it’s far better than the original.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the...


Good point! I didn't really think that bit through.


This is one reason why I think NFT art theft is possible.

In principle "who owns this jpeg" is just a few bits in a distributed filesystem that the community collectively agrees to treat as the canonical source of "ownership", and they could easily roll it back if someone stole a market-distorting amount of art.

In practice, if you do an interesting heist -- like you put on cool looking art thief costume and livestream yourself on a vintage PowerBook bypassing the owners' defenses and nabbing the apes with a narrow escape -- you've written a compelling story that the community is sort of bound to accept.


> For example imagine I relate something that actually happened to me vs a bot making up a story. Byte for byte identical stories. They could be realistic, and have several good lessons baked in. Yet one is more valuable, because it is true.

I disagree, since something that actually happened to you is anecdotal experience and therefore of very limited “good lesson” value.

An AI generated story that reflects and illustrates a data driven majority of experiences and resulting “lessons” would be much more valuable to me than your solitary true story, which may be a total statistical outlier, and therefore should not inform my decision making.

Kahneman explains it much better than I can, and in his book “Thinking fast and thinking slow”, he quotes studies and statistical analysis, how we as humans are commonly led to faulty decision making, because personal experience (“true stories”) tends to become our primary decision influencer - even if we have access to statistics that suggest the opposite of our own experience is the much more common experience.

So if the AI gives me access to a summarized better overall data based truth, wrapped into a made-up story (to help me remember better), then I would much prefer the AI to guide my decision making.


Hmmm. That’s exactly what dang-gpt would have said..


You have thrown down the gauntlet there Dan! I have argued that the way to respond to the AI “threat” as a blogger is to write better blog posts that clearly took a human mind, experience and emotion so there can be no doubt. Bots might win SEO for now but good writing will win return visits.


SEO is people writing for software consumption (Search Engines!), it stands to reason that software can create input for that process as good as a human could. But the bar should be text written for human consumption, not for machine consumption.


The account 'dang' often replies with a list of links and then produces some generated response with the topic as a seed. Given the frequency of responses this person would need to be using Hacker News full time.

@mods Can we get this account checked please?


I'll check it for you.


Simple comments can be good and fruitful. Simple comments can be created by a bot. Simple ≠ Lazy.

(Not a bot)


I agree. Simple does not always mean lazy. Simple comments can be clear and concise, facilitating understanding for others. Also, simple comments can be easier to respond to and can help keep the conversation moving.


Will the rules allow bots when they are more insightful and interesting than us meat bags?


We can burn that bridge when we come to it.


> Whatever ChatGPT (or similar) can generate, humans need to do better.

You overestimate me.


> already

Oh, this is a relief. With all the (few but important) times I found myself (and not just Yours Truly) in front of "I can't understand this post, it must be a bot", I am breathing fresh air knowing that the Management does not have doubts. (Difficult to have, since we interacted directly.)

Anyway:

> raise the community bar

> what counts as a good comment

> humans need to do better

> let's all

> stop writing lazy

> [make it] so thoughtful

> make our posts so thoughtful that the question "is this [fakery of the moment]?" never comes up

Daniel, I have never read a better post of yours.

--

Early stopping in thought is a vice, which can be understood as part of the game under natural constraints (including time and experience), but the aim must remain the opposite: high or high enough.

The lab and the pub are there to satisfy different instances. There is no purpose being here if this becomes "a bar" (in the sense of "a place for idleness") - there are already too many around, on an infrastructure that was made (in an important proportion) for intellectual exchange fifty years ago.

Bad drives are already very present in discussions about AI, where some propose an idea of "intelligence" that would allow a hen to obtain a Degree. No, "Intelligence" is something that aims high, and it is part of a Process of Reviews (of criticism).

--

Since we are here, talking about Progress: Daniel, I would like to remind you (in spite of the declared fear of some of "encouraging shitposting"), that when, after somebody has made a statement, a passer by approaches, makes disapproving signs and leaves without any explicit argument, that is very rude. Very rude. The point can be as simple as that (visualize that you said something, somebody comes, stares, slaps, goes "pf" - whatever - and just leaves). Just a reminder, "Chartago delenda est".

(The matter of shitposting is of course also consistent with the original topic. If you disapprove but cannot justify that, how can you disapprove? Immature disapproval is already shitposting.)

Edit, 20 mins later: See? Just look at that. Stop encouraging this. It is degrading.


> The best solution, though, is to raise the community bar for what counts as a good comment. Whatever ChatGPT (or similar) can generate, humans need to do better. If we reach the point where the humans simply can't do better, well, then it won't matter. But that's a ways off.

XKCD 810: https://xkcd.com/810/


Hi dang

I have been sounding the alarm for a while now (several years) about online bots.

Policies can’t work if you can’t enforce them. There are several issues:

1) You won’t really know whether accounts are posting bot content or not. They can be trained on existing HN text.

2) Looking for patterns such as posting “one type of comment” or “frequently posting” can be defeated by a bot which makes many styles of comments or is focused on the styles of a few popular users.

3) Swarms of bots can eke out karma here and there but collectively can amass far more karma over time. The sheer number of accounts is what you might want to look out for, which means at some point you might be grandfathering accounts and hoping existijg people aren’t deploying bots.

4) Swarms of bots can be deployed to mimic regular users and amass karma as sleepers over time (months or years) and then finally be deployed to change public opinion on HN, downvote others or perform reputational attacks to gradually oust “opponents” of an idea.

5) It’s you vs a large number of people and an endless number of bot instances trained on years of actual HN posts and data, plus myriad internet postings, and optimized for “automated helpful comments”. In other words, “mission fucking accomplished” from this xkcd is actually your worst nightmare (and that of Zuck, Musk) https://xkcd.com/810/

6) LinkedIn already has a problem of fake accounts applying for jobs, or fake jobs etc. This year we have seen the rise of profiles with totally believable deepfaked photos, copied resumes and backstories etc. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_know...

7) At least for the next few years, you could call someone up and interview them but now all that’s left is to deepfake realtime audio / video with GPT-4 chat generation

8) Trying to catch individual accounts using a bot occasionally over the internet is like trying to catch someone using a chess or poker engine for a few moves each game.

9) Reading comments and even articles is NOT a Turing test. It is not interactive and most people simply skim the text. Even if they didn’t, the bots can pass a rudimentary Turing test applied by many people. But in fact, they don’t need to. They can do it at scale.

10) Articles are currently hosted by publications like nytimes and wall st journal and informational videos by popular youtube channels, but in the next 5-10 years you’ll see the rise of some weird no-name groups (like Vox or Vice News was once) that amasses far more shares than all human -generated content publications. Human publications might even deploy bots too. You already see MSN do it. But even if they don’t, the number of reshares is a metric that is easily optimized for, by A/B testing and bots, and has been for a decade.

But it actually gets worse:

11) Most communities — including HN - will actually prefer bots if they can’t tell who is a bot. Bots won’t cuss, will make helpful comments and add insight, and will follow the rules. The comments may be banal now but the swarm can produce a wide variation which can range from opinionated to not.

12) Given that, even private insular online communities will eventually be overrun by bots, and prefer them. First the humans will upvote bots and then the bots will upvote bots.

Human content in all communities will become vanishingly small, and what is shared will be overwhelmingly likely to be bot-generated.

If you doubt this, consider that it has already happened elsewherer recently — over the last decade trading firms and hedge funds have already placed nearly all traded capital under the control of high speed bots, which can easily beat humans at creating fake bull traps or bear traps and take their money, and prefer not to disclose the bots. You already prefer Google Maps to asking for directions. Children prefer Googling and Binging to asking your own parents. And around the world, both parents prefer working for corporations to spending time with their own children, sticking them in public schools. It’s considered self-actualization for everyone. But in fact, the corporations gradually replace the parents with bots while the schools — well — http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

The bots could act well for a while and then swarms can be deployed to create unprecedented misinformation, reputational attacks (lasting for years and look organic) and nudge public consensus towards anything, real or fake, such as encouraging drastic policy changes or approve billions for some industry.

In other words … you’ll learn to love your botswarms. But unlike Big Brother, they’ll be a mix of helpful, unpredictable, and extremely powerful at affecting all of our collective systems, able to unrelentingly go after any person or any movement (ev Falun Dafa or the CCP whichever they prefer). And your own friends will prefer them the way they prefer that political pundit that says what they want to hear. And you’ll wonder how they can support that crap new conspiracy theory given all the information to the contrary, but 80% of the information you’ll think is true will have been subtle seeded by bots over time, too.

Today, we explore what 1 poker bot would do at a table of 9 people. But we are absolutely unprepared for what swarming AI will do online. It can do all this by simply adding swarming collusion capability to existing technology! Nothing more needs to even be developed!


Thank you for this hard line stance against AI.


Hi dang, is my account shadow banned? Or in any way limited

I hardly post because when I do its down voted, sometimes the post is popular but after 24 hours its back to being down voted.


You don’t look shadow banned to me..


Absolutely not! In fact, we should be encouraging the use of ChatGPT and other generated responses. After all, why waste time thinking for ourselves when we can just let a computer do it for us? Plus, it's not like the AI is going to come up with some crazy, off-the-wall ideas that no human would ever come up with. Oh wait... never mind.


I disagree: mental laziness is never a good justification. (I recently started to memorize more things, since I do not believe in "just google it"). Also, I want to read what fellow humans relate. Even though it might sometimes be difficult to tell the difference, I attend HN as a substitute for physical social interactions. For mere knowledge or problem solving, other places might fill that role.


It was a sarcastic response.


From what I have seen, HN is not especially keen on sarcasm either. Which I somewhat disagree with, I think it's a good alternative way how to make people think about something, rather than directly attacking the argument.


If ML algos ever manage to recognize sarcasm then we're truly in trouble. Sarcasm doesn't translate well on the Internet, especially for non-native speakers. Tone just doesn't come across well in text.


>Sarcasm doesn't translate well on the Internet, especially for non-native speakers.

I have heard (seen) the statement so many times. Personally, I find it quite trivial to detect; so I suppose it's partly related to how much sarcasm one would indulge in normal daily routine.

>Tone just doesn't come across

Gotta train on that dead pan delivery.


Indeed, and to me the sarcasm was beyond obvious - 1st sentence: two words and an exclamation mark. One interesting caveat was that the account was brand new (like just created).


Should HN ban the discussion of mobile apps on smartphones on its platform?

The excessive use of mobile apps on smartphones has been linked to addiction and a range of negative effects on mental and physical health [0]. Should HN consider banning the use of mobile apps on smartphones on its platform in order to promote a healthier and more focused environment for discussions?

[0] : https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/01/health/cell-phone-ban-schools...


The community here would never support such a measure.


I suspect the poster may have meant something along the lines of "going against progress", or other indirect suggestion.


Yes, ban it. I've been playing around with ChatGPT and where it starts failing is just where things start becoming interesting. What that means is that it's wikipedia-smart, i.e. it doesn't really tell you anything you can't find out with a minimal Google search. It does however cut the time-to-answer quite a bit, particularly if it's an area of knowledge you're not really that familiar with. But it bottoms out right as things start getting interesting, expertise wise.

Case example: I tried seeing what its limits on chemical knowledge were, starting with simple electron structures of molecules, and it does OK - remarkably, it got the advanced high-school level of methane's electronic structure right. It choked when it came to the molecular orbital picture and while it managed to list the differences between old-school hybrid orbitals and modern molecular orbitals, it couldn't really go into any interesting details about the molecular orbital structure of methane. Searching the web, I notice such details are mostly found in places like figures in research papers, not so much in text.

On the other hand, since I'm a neophyte when it comes to database architecture, it was great at answering what I'm sure any expert would consider basic questions.

Allowing comments sections to be clogged up with ChatGPT output would thus be like going to a restaurant that only served averaged-out mediocre but mostly-acceptable takes on recipes.


> if it's an area of knowledge you're not really that familiar with

Thats actually dangerous way to use ChatGPT. Since you don't know the real answer you won't be able to tell when it gets something wrong.


Honestly this could be the silver lining of ChatGPT. Some people trust the answers of random commenters on the internet for anything from how things work technically to medical advice. Having an ever-increasing chance that any given commenter literally knows nothing except how to string words together might break that habit.


> Having an ever-increasing chance that any given commenter literally knows nothing except how to string words together might break that habit.

This is already figuratively the case and it has had no impact on this phenomenon. Why would the new situation be any different?


I've been using GTP3's copilot when designing sql queries. I'm not very comfortable with sql, but I am with the mathematical basis. It's powerful tool to help learn language syntax.

I've experimented with systems design using it, but as I expected, it's a big fat no.

If a robot gtp account does not have human supervision, it will spit out all sorts of rubbish / be easy to spot. Else the manager will just be a person who spams low quality content. I'm concerned, but we have time to find a solution.


But if you know a lot about something, why would you ask ChatGPT a question about it (especially if you assume it doesn't have expert knowledge)?


I wouldn't ask ChatGPT anything. It is still writing weird articles that sounds meaningful yet lacking arguments because it finds attributes of the compared objects and places them in sentences. As if it is comparing them. It just doesn't make sense. ChatGPT is nice but has a long way to become useful that way.


The problem with ChatGPT is that it often reads authoritative. But is often just flat out wrong.

I asked it a few questions for which I consider myself a subject matter expert and the answers were laughably wrong.


Agreed. I chatted with it about the Chinese remainder theorem today and it gave me an example that didn't work and then insisted that 30 is not divisible by 2 when I questioned it. This was simple enough to spot but I was halfway through the example by the time I realized I couldn't trust it at all. Its confidence is annoying.


It told me the longest known prime number ended with a 2. Definitely not accurate when it comes to math.


ChatGPT is not a calculator, it's a language model.


For me it happend when I asked to write a function using BigQuery, it wrote a function that made a lot of sense but was wrong, because the command didn't exist in BigQuery. When I replay that the function didn't work, it told me, something like this: You right the function that I used it was only working on beta mode, now you have to use the following.... And again it was wrong. I made a little research and never was such a beta commandm.. And then I got that it just makes up things that it don't know, but says it with authority.


I asked it to write a function in Python that would return the list of AWS accounts in an organization with a given tag key and value.

The code looked right, initialized boto3 correctly and called a function on it get_account_numbers_by_tag on the organizations object.

I wondered why I never heard of that function and nor did I find it when searching. Turns out, there is no such function.


It gives the old saying "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man adapts the world to himself; therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." a new twist, doesn't it?

1. AN AI MODEL IS GIVEN ENOUGH CAPACITY to capture (some of) our human perspective, a snapshot of our world as reflected in its training data. <== We've been here for a while

2. AN AI MODEL IS GIVEN ENOUGH CAPACITY to fabulate and imagine things. <== We're unambiguously here now

The fabulations are of a charmingly naive "predict the most probable next token" sort for now, with chatGPT. But even as a future model is (inevitably) given the ability to probe and correct its errors, the initial direction of its fabulations will still reflect that "inception worldview" snapshot.

For example, if a particular fashion trend or political view was popular around the time the model was trained (with training data typically skewing toward the "recent", simply because "recent" is when most digital data will have been produced), that model can be expected to fabulate along the lines of that imprinted political view.

3. AN AI MODEL IS GIVEN ENOUGH CAPACITY to make the is-vs-ought choice between "CORRECT ITSELF" = adapt to the world; or "CORRECT THE WORLD" = imprint its worldview back onto the world (probably indirectly through humans paying attention to its outputs and acting as actuators, but that makes no difference). <== We're getting there rapidly

Will it be more reasonable or unreasonable?

And which mode wins out long-term, be more energy efficient in that entropic struggle for survival that all physical systems go through?


I am not sure if this is AI generated or meant to read like it is. But I’ll bite.

One thing I noticed, it’s either trained naturally or tweaked by humans not to be political or say anything controversial. I asked if a simple question “Does open door have a good business model”. It punted like any good politician.


It sounds a lot similar to normal thinking errors that we make.


The second time, it gave me code that was almost right.

Just now I asked

Write a Python script that returns all of the accounts in an AWS organization with a given tag where the user specifies the tag key and value using command line arguments

I thought the code had to be wrong because it used concepts I had never heard of. This time it used the resource group API.

I have never heard of the API. But it does exist. I also couldn’t find sample code on the internet that did anything similar. But from looking at the documentation it should work. I learned something new today.

BTW, for context when I claimed to be a “subject matter expert” above, I work at AWS in Professional Services, code most days using the AWS API and I would have never thought of the solution it gave me.


I just asked it to provide a specific example of a security breach caused by a Java serialization flaw and it just made something up, i.e. it found some random security breach (unrelated to anything Java) and found some other random Java serialization bug and claimed that breach was due to that bug. A few minutes on Google revealed they were completely unrelated. Ouch.


It seems like if the contextual analogy here was carried through and ChatGPT were to leave its message as a comment on a Java-security thread, the same approach would apply (a few minutes of research on Google) and the provably-incorrect message would either be downvoted or commented on, just like a human comment with the same content would be.


My biggest fear for the short term is that tools like ChatGPT would allow spamming most of the internet with the equivalent of a Gish Gallop -- so much plausible-looking bullshit spewed out in a short time that it would be a lost cause to attempt to sort through it.


If content known to be of human origin could be archived and frozen now in late 2022 it may become valuable in a few years. Some kind of verifiably timestamped encryption might be useful.


i’ve seen so many examples of this over the past few weeks. just thinking about how many people will just eat what it feeds them borders on terrifying.

in so many instances, it’s just wrong but continues on so confidently.

one of the things i find most interesting is that it has no idea when it’s wrong so it just keeps going. we already have a fairly significant growing problem of people who refuse to admit (even to themselves) what they don’t know, and now this will just exacerbate the problem.

it’s like the worst of debateBro culture has just been automated.


> in so many instances, it’s just wrong but continues on so confidently

Sounds sociopathic, and also like many politicians and people in leadership positions.


> The problem with ChatGPT is that it often reads authoritative. But is often just flat out wrong.

That sounds pretty damn human to me.


yeah, tough to distinguish human BS, from an incorrect ChatGPT.


I guess after cookie banners this is going to be the next frontier of regulation: prohibiting AIs to lie to humans.


One of my comments, in another thread, got called out for being a ChatGPT-generated response[1]. It wasn't; I wrote that comment without any artificial assistance.

A part of me felt quite chuffed to be accused of being the current hottest new shiny in tech. Another part of me - the poet part - felt humiliated.

If a ChatGPT comment ban does get put in place, please don't also auto-ban me by accident. I don't enjoy being collateral damage.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33886209


Yeah, "humanity witch-hunts" are going to get ugly and have false positives


The problem with AI is that people setting the vision don’t bake in ethics that are expected of humans. Perhaps because humans are so deeply not used to considering tools as capable of ethics? Or they just don’t care? Or it’s not in their interests? Or it’s too hard so they just push it out of scope? Whatever it is, we don’t do what AI visionaries do when raising our children.

What do I mean? Two examples:

- The Turing test basically requires the computer to deceive a human as its goal function. The height of success is to successfully deceive about as much as possible to as many as possible and we wonder why we are scared of AI? Why not an AI goal function to teach you a new truth? Show you injustice and justice? Expose you to new beauty? (At least with the latter we are making some progress)

- ChatGPT, unlike any student writing essays, is not told/taught/built to quote or make visible it’s sources, to provide footnotes or references. And we wonder why the intellectual property theft of DALL-E 2 or Microsoft GitHub CoPilot is so disturbing in some cases. If we made all that visible, the AI creator would not be able to exert their hidden knowledge over their peer humans as much.


> unlike any student writing essays, is not told/taught/built to quote or make visible it’s sources, to provide footnotes or references

Outside of very specific types of essays this is not something routinely taught to students where I live (or anywhere around where I live). In an informal chat setting this isn't taught anywhere that I've ever heard of, which is a significantly larger region.


This debate reminds me a lot of early-Quora moderation discussions over anonymous users. People wanted to mass-ban any answers from "anonymous" because they weren't from "real people". I argued that, in a public forum, questions/answers should be judged on their content, rather than "who" wrote them. People disagreed. Anonymous functionality on Quora has since been gutted.

AI-generated content seems similar. If a comment is good, who cares whether it was written by Alice, Bob, or an AI? ChatGPT has already proven it can write better answers to some queries than most humans do; I'd rather read the better-quality answer, no matter who wrote it. I'm on HN for the comments, not the people.


Anonymous and AI are very different (at least currently).

Take the following statement: "The CEO of ACME Co is abusive and you should avoid him at all costs. Do not work there."

If it's an anonymous poster on Quora, that's a (potentially) valuable response and a good reason for that person to stay anonymous. But if it's AI, it can't possibly reflect any actual first-hand experience. At best it's a regurgitation of something out there already and at worst is a AI hallucination based on a mishmash of fact and fiction.


I think long term having AI comments on forums will erode people's trust in each other even more than it is right now. I dread the day the "default" commenter turns from "white american male" to "AI generated" with no way to know while still conserving some level of anonymity.


There’s no reason to trust said anonymous comment on Quora.


Agreed, that's why I said potentially. I completely understand why a platform might want to ban anonymous comments, and I also understand why it might welcome them. Both come with risks and rewards.

(Same for for AI, btw. Some places will embrace it and some places will ban it, and both will have their valid reasons.)


Meanwhile quality of Quora answers these days are basically as bad as it gets, so bad that I have it blocked from my Google results. Not once have I been to Quora and actually found an answer I was looking for.


> so bad that I have it blocked from my Google results

What did you use to do this? Would love to never have Quora spam ever again.


There are browser extensions that help with this. I use a adlist for ublock-origin that uses the cosmetic filters to remove some offending sites from search results. For me this includes Wikipedia and StackOverflow clones, Quora and a few others


I'm using uBlacklist [1].

[1] https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/docs


Quora didn't gut anonymous functionality because it was bad for the product, but rather because there was a substantial cost involved in preventing privacy leaks (code changes that could accidentally reveal information about an anonymous poster) as well as a huge risk to the company and to users sharing confidential information if there was ever a data leak. The anonymous contributions themselves were a clear positive.


I disagree, I care. I believe if something is written by a human it has inherent value. This belief seems to be held by a minority of tech people unfortunately.


What inherent value does this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33951443 have?

(It says "From the ChatGPT-generated stuff I've seen just in the last week, I think we're already there. Most humans these days are incredibly stupid.")

I have read low quality internet comments saying "people are dumb" over and over and over, year in, year out. I argue that wherever they are, they have no inherent positive value. And negative contribution to the internet, the world, the thread they are posted in.


Can you expand on this?

Is it similar to how when we recite answers from Wikipedia without seeming to know why it's seen as less valuable?

I guess you also think the same about AI generated art?


Answer: Because AI-generated content is (frequently) lower quality while maintaining the appearance of high quality.


Artificial Inanity ?

https://englishwotd.wordpress.com/2014/02/17/artificial-inan...


It is not true that AI-generated content is lower quality that it appears. Training on large amounts of high quality data will result in generated text that is indistinguishable from human writing.


This answer feels generated by ChatGPT. No human would side with ChatGPT so strongly.


I wrote the above answer with my brain and fingers without including ChatGPT.

I think you'd find that, in a lot of contexts, a lot of humans care more about reading quality content than concerning themselves with who wrote that content, which is effecively "siding with ChatGPT" here, I guess.


the obvious problems is that it looks good because it's well written.

doesn't mean that the answer is comprehensible or correctly

personally I develop a fatigue reading chatgpt answers, there's some fluff I have problems parsing, I don't know how to describe it.


Seems like a non problem. If it's a dull comment or just inane it'll get downvoted out of existence. If the bot actually produces something interesting about the topic, what's the problem?


The biggest issue is GPT is often confidently incorrect about things but is good enough to sound confident/authoritative so if people got into the habit of using it the signal to noise ratio would degrade.


Doesn't sound all that different from human comments, to be honest


Human incorrect comments are at least written by people and if the person isn't actually knowledgeable about a subject it's likely to show more in the response than it does in gpt which can mimic all the right forms to appear smarter/more correct. Beyond anything else though at least when it's a person writing the wrong answer they spent the time to write it vs the copy paste it automation of using chatgpt. That little bit of effort is a speed bump well worth having since at the very least getting tons of people to spam confidently incorrect things is more work than having a dozen instances of a bot do the same a hundred times faster.


I have seen firsthand the effect of wrong comments (I have written them) being upvoted more than the correcting responses that came afterwards. So yeah, it can happen with humans too, on occasion.


Sure and there's no real way around that other than community norms to downvote/whatever corrected replies and upvoting the correction. HN makes that a bit hard by locking voting away from so many people but I think it works better than open voting probably.


imo you have described HN in a nutshell


I think it's a capacity problem. Right now, the "system" (legit HN users) have the capacity to deal with dull and inane comments currently provided by dull and inane human commenters. If the dull and inane comments become automated they can arbitrarily increase their number until the system lacks the capacity to deal with them.

If there was one or ten bad comments on this thread - no problem. What if there were ten thousand bad comments?


To what benefit?

HN karma is pretty worthless outside of enabling a few capabilities here, and it's rather easy to attain those thresholds with some thoughtful participation.

What would be the point of flooding HN with tens of thousands of bot comments?


> What would be the point of flooding HN with tens of thousands of bot comments?

Malice.


Maybe adding a few more hay bails to your Stylometry fingerprint?


But it has always been easy for simple bots to mass-produce bad comments. Nothing changes if they're still bad.

I'm concerned that too-well-written posts will be thrown out-- a race to the bottom in legibility and grammar just to make posts more human-like, even if written by bots.


>What if there were ten thousand bad comments?

The thread collapse "[–]" already exists.


Not to take a side, but to answer the question: imbalance. It takes less than thirty seconds for a computer to generate basically any amount of text, faster than anyone else can formulate a response, faster even than anyone can read. It could theoretically swamp a topic.

Is that realistic? No idea. I haven't made up my mind on this topic yet.


Your concern seems to imply that you have to be the last one to get a word in to win an internet argument, which I wholeheartedly disagree with. On the internet and in real life, replying a lot and quickly is more often a sign of weakness.


Never said that the bots would be posting the last word.

Also I don't deal in "signs of weakness" but try to look at arguments' contents instead. Which is what takes time to evaluate and argue about. Which would waste my time if I'm talking to a (semi-)automated system.


These replies won’t come from a single account, so humans will still be drowned out by bots.


Because this places the burden on users to sort it out. And you're ignoring a third category of comments: bad ones that are glib enough to garner upvotes.


Butlerian Jihad when?

But seriously, the potential for bots to drown out all forms of human creativity and replace it with regurgitated mush is real, but we've also been doing it to ourselves by expressing a preference for pre-chewed media for decades. What are these models but shitty movie reboots writ large?


One thing I’m guilty of on this site is not upvoting enough. I vote down the banality and flag the pollution. Upvoting doesn’t seem to come as naturally — whenever I read an interesting response it’s the last thing on my mind. It’s a good thing really. Interesting stories and comments are the norm.

I wonder what the userDB says about any scarcity of upvoters? Are there many others like me? Am I not pulling my weight? Should I do it more?


I am the opposite. I vote up easily, but think a hundred times before downvoting. Downvoting feels like censorship to me.


Yes, I'm very much the same.

I'm happy to (attempt to! re-)upvote comments that have been downvoted, as long as they're actually thoughtful and contribute to the argument/conversation, and obviously (and often!) I'll upvote a well thought through comment.

I seem to go through periods where I downvote more often, but almost without exception it's just downvoting pointless/sarcastic/unpleasant comments. Gotta say though - for a 10+ year old community, I remain amazed that the discourse is usually civil, largely intelligent and still(!) remains spam free.


I wonder why this site -- or any site with up/downvoting, really -- doesn't implement a "must comment to downvote" policy. Far too often downvoting is just the "I disagree and think you suck" button[0]. Make someone elaborate on _why_ they disagree or _why_ the original poster is wrong before allowing a downvote.

0: in particular, on HN the downvote button also seems to serve the purpose of "I don't think other people should see what you have to say" button due to HN's passive-aggressive greying out of downvoted comments.


People have differing opinions on downvoting. The majority seems to think that disagreement is enough. Personally, I'm in the same camp as you: a comment has to actively detract from the conversation to get my downvote. I don't see HN changing in that regard though.

Requiring a comment is probably a bit much, but I do think two separate downvote buttons would be helpful to the commenter, even if only they could see this feedback. Maybe one link labeled with "disagree" and one with "low quality" or something. UI-wise this would have the added benefit of letting new users know that HN officially expects them to consider both options.


That's a surefire way to give more attention to bad posts and cause flamewars that spiral out of control.


I think you’re making the flawed assumption that no one would ever downvote something that might be well-intentioned, well-argued, but unpopular (for example, literally anything about Covid that goes against popular opinion).


No, I'm not assuming that. You can't have "must comment to downvote" just for those though, and having it for all is bad for the given reasons.


It’s a great idea. And it doesn’t have to be a comment. It just needs to be a reason. It could be a tag, possibly corresponding to a specific guideline on the site. #flamebate, #tangent, etc.


That idea could work when it’s something relatively mild, and not attached to a larger media campaign – classic HN fare like this thread may have disagreements but all of the participants generally want to be here, are legitimately interested in the topic, and usually have some level of expertise and interest in being correct.

I don’t think it would be viable in the threads which touch on larger societal debates. A great example would be election topics after Trump started lying about election fraud and that message became something media outlets started pushing to millions of people on topics many people here are interested in like election systems or forensic analysis. That leads to waves of people repeating long-debunked claims ad nauseam and because they aren’t here to learn or even debate rationally, there’s not much point in filling up the thread with 200 comments saying “This is not true. See http…” over and over, and the volume means that the kind of people we’d most want to have involved in such a thread are going to get tired of it and move on.

One natural response is to say “no politics” but that’s really not possible given the involvement of IT in almost everything now and the areas where legislation is being proposed. The approach of having skilled people like dang moderate threads works well but it’s very expensive, so I think the community downvoting low-value posts is probably a necessary evil. It’d be tempting to have some way to say that someone isn’t contributing to a thread to boot them out but that seems hard to do without being too slow to matter or prone to brigading. Labeling might be worth trying, as much as a social cue to the voter as new information for the moderators.


>Downvoting feels like censorship to me.

because it works that way here


Same here. I will also often vouch new comments; even if I don't agree with them. The bar is whether or not they are coming from a respectful and contribute to the conversation.


What we're looking for are high signal/noise ration posts to expand the conversation into new areas that are interesting.

If the ratio is too low (eg: spam, shallow content, same old tired point), it's not an issue to downvote IMO. That helps with the current post and also encourages good behaviour in the future.

This is not the same as downvoting with a point that you personally disagree with. This is censorship and toxic to the community.


> This is not the same as downvoting with a point that you personally disagree with. This is censorship and toxic to the community.

But this is what CONSTANTLY happens here. It is the norm everywhere there is likes/dislikes. It is inverse authoritarianism.


It would be interesting to ask users to classify their up/downvotes as opinion vs signal/noise ratio. Maybe that's the next evolution of leaderboard systems like HN/reddit?


That's good because I always wonder about the dynamic of the establishment "old guard" voting down everything they don't agree with.


Whoever the "old guard" is, they don't have special downvoting powers, do they? In the end, it's a numbers game. As far as I can tell, every user gets exactly one vote, no matter how influential. If "they" really hate you, or if enough normal users flag you, HN has other ways of letting you know, like shadow banning/auto-deading or flagging your account so your comments immediately fall to the bottom of the page no matter how many upvotes they receive. As long as you don't see either effect, you're probably doing okay here.


Can you even downvote on new accounts?


You need to be above a certain karma threshold, but it's not high (500 or so).


> Downvoting feels like censorship to me.

It is. As is upvoting, since it makes the unvoted and down voted harder to see.

I do not understand why people think this "mob rule" of up and down voting will end up with the "best" things being selected. It will only be the most common/neutral things being brought to our attention.

Unpopular ideas are not wrong, just unpopular. Just ask Copernicus.


I never downvote at all. It reminds me for some reasons faceless mob with the clubs. But I have to admit that I do not upvote enough. Definitely not all the deserving posts.


I rarely downvote here, but that's because the quality is already high. A part of keeping it this way is vigorously downvoting unrelated/lazy/overly emotional comments, so maybe a faceless mob with clubs is actually what it needs :-)

Only unproductive comments, of course. Different opinions should be welcome.


>"so maybe a faceless mob with clubs is actually what it needs :-)"

I think it needs moderators doing their jobs with appropriate tools.


What if those appropriate tools include upvote/downvote/flag/vouch by community members?


I do not believe those "tools" to be appropriate. Others can of course feel different but I do not care. There is no need to "win" the argument.


There are going to be so many random up and down votes in this thread... :)


Upvoting is just as censoring as downvoting is, which is to say, it's not censorship at all. "Free speech" does not mean that all speech is equally valuable. Some speech is worthless noise, and recognizing that is the only way to have useful discourse in an open forum.


The UI for voting in general isn’t great and gives me anxiety on mobile so I almost never click it. With my sausage fingers it’d be good if the clickable area was bigger and up voting had some CTA…


- The header to the right of the vote buttons shows "unvote" or 'undown" after voting. So you can at least see if you fat-fingered someone down in error and fix the mistake.

- On mobile, Android, I use Materialistic to read HN. The UI is much better than the web version, and voting uses a standard mobile UI element (or swipe, but I don't use that). You can't downvote in Materialistic, only upvote, so if you're worried about accidental downvoting that goes away.


It's not only about fat fingers.

I may be upvoting more if the up/down links were below the comment. Usually I don't vote until I read the complete comment, and then, scrolling back up just to vote and then back to continue reading feels tedious. But maybe that's the whole point.


Grief, the mobile UI is awful. I’ve seen auto-playing videos with more clickable close buttons.


I agree to that, but I think this is not going to change as the outcry would be big, as people here like the minimalism. And I like minimalism, too, but I also seldom upvote on mobile, because it takes too much effort to hit the tiny spot and then "undown" again because I missed again. Custom CSS is possible though ..


It's more than possible to increase the sizes and while we're at it scale that to the size of the screen. It will take some effort but it will save the community and add to many upvotes.


FWIW, on mobile, I use https://f-droid.org/en/packages/io.github.hidroh.materialist... rather than the website, so I don't have that issue.


I prefer Glider https://f-droid.org/packages/nl.viter.glider/

But I still end up in Telegram because of thumbnails.


The down arrow could be moved quite a lot further down from its current location, even next to a one-line comment. I can't see who could complain about the arrows also being bigger. Even on desktop I have to double-check I clicked correctly.


There are plenty of simpler solutions:

- zoom into the button, then click

- override the css yourself, e.g,: using your one of the many userstyles extensions or browser developer tools

- inject custom JavaScript using GreaseMonkey or Tampermonkey

- use a third party HN client. As you would imagine, there's a sea of those - one of them must be halfways decent :-D

- purchase a new device with better touch precision. Pixel 3/6 with display scaled down handles the problem of adjacent links smaller than a fingertip exceptionally well

- If able, try to reduce the finger sausages. Otherwise, use a stylus.

Why should YC change it for everyone to make it more attractive on your device?


Those solutions are simpler to you than simply not voting?


Slashdot moderation for the win! Except it didn't...


Slashdot didn't win for several reasons, but the voting system in general had the problem of only giving you voting rights sporadically (I think it may have been coupled to recently earned Karma or something). The effect was that inevitably when you wanted to vote you couldn't - and vice versa. Also, the UI was a dropdown box, which made it tedious to vote. But I do think being able to state the reason was a good idea. It had the added benefit of letting the voter know what the voting considerations should be in the first place.


You could inject CSS with a modified ".votearrow".


I upvote a lot, wherever possible. Posting on the internet mostly feels like screaming into a void to me, so I'm always happy to know someone has read and even appreciates what I posted - which is why I try to do the same thing for others.


Isn't actual response in words more useful to you?

Like this question? Otherwise I would downvote. Which I never do.


> Isn't actual response in words more useful to you?

Yes, but if it has actual content. +1 comments are inferior to upvotes.


Right, what content voting has? None. That's why it is irrelevant for me.


It moved the comment you were reading up the list making it more likely you see it (or down/less)… unless you read all the comments on HN. (Or maybe read from the bottom up?)


Yes, and I don't like it much. More visible content is even more visible in time. But not necessary more relevant. Maybe more liked, but how much only because "you don't want to sroll more"?

However "votes" for commenting suggested links makes more sense for me. It naturally expose topics that users willing to discuss and care about.


Upvoting is more effort than scrolling. I downvote bad or trollish takes, I upvote stuff I strongly agree with or generally great, effortful comments (sometimes even when I disagree! But sadly I'm not humble enough to do that often). I read the vast majority without upvoting.


I don't use up/downvote at all. It kills "organic" conversations and shape it unnaturally.

It also makes me biased to downvoted posts.

I would completely disable voting system in any kind of conversations.


HN already has a “reply” link below the comment. Adding “upvote” would solve both the timing (noticing upvote after reading the comment) and usability (solves touch target size on mobile).


If you downvote, I think that should come with an explanation of your downvote.

There may be genuine reasons for downvoting, errors in what is presented, etc. Fair enough.

But if you downvote because you don't like something, all you are doing is attempting to create an echo chamber of views and opinions you already believe. Is that what you want? If so, you are now in a war for control of the echo chamber you want to see with others of like mind - its a race to the bottom.

In reverse, if you value alternative, unusual and/or creative ideas, perhaps this is something that should consider giving an upvote to, even if you disagree with it.

That's my opinion anyway. And I try to do as I suggest.


I have to strongly disagree with you. In my opinion a policy like this would err on valuing form over content, when content matters a great deal. Downvotes (and upvotes) can be a signal for content as well as form.

For example, an articulate, well-reasoned, passionate argument for why PHP is the best get shit done language? Sure, I can upvote that even if I firmly disagree.

But an articulate, well-reasoned, passionate argument for vi being superior to emacs? I can’t downvote fast enough, but only because we cannot burn the heretic in these enlightened times.


I think that's a very common issue, not just with upvote based comment sections but reviews in general; people write reviews when they have something to complain about, which means that a lot of reviews are just bad. But at some point, app manufacturers and webshops started to prompt people to please leave a review if they like the app as well.


(We detached this subthread from its original parent, which was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33950747.)


Time for a Hacker News Orange. It's a new subscription you can pay $8 a month for to get your identity verified and comments prioritized.


That would kill throwaways, some of the best content here on hn, giving the true insight into what really happens behind the pretty facade of the companies.


I'm pretty sure the OP is joking.


I'm sort of coming around to this part of Elon's viewpoint. Nevermind if this is the right solution to a bot problem, but I do think it's a problem.

Related a bit, but I just watched a documentary called Fake Famous, and I wondered if maybe all the insta fakery would be minimized if bots were eliminated. Or at the other extreme, the fakery itself could be automated, thus devaluing it.


$11 on iOS.


I would have preferred a ChatGPT comment to this one.


This remark irks me to some extremely unreasonable degree.


Dr. Casey Fiesler recently tweeted

> The @huggingface GPT detector works very well on ChatGPT-created text. I ran 5 student essays and 5 ChatGPT essays for the same prompt through it, and it was correct every time with >99.9% confidence.

How about adding a %human/%GPT statistic to posts and comments?


I would argue that this test isn't particularly informative. Given 5 attempts and 5 successes, even though the point estimate of accuracy is 1, the 95% CI ranges from 0.48 to 1:

    > binom.test(5,5,0.5)

     Exact binomial test

    data:  5 and 5
    number of successes = 5, number of trials = 5, p-value = 0.0625
    alternative hypothesis: true probability of success is not equal to 0.5
    95 percent confidence interval:
     0.4781762 1.0000000
In other words, we don't have enough data in that small sample to reject the possibility that the model is 50% accurate, much less 99.9% accurate.


I think the message was claiming something else, specifically that each classification was given a score of how confident the model was in the answer and the answers were given 99.9%+ in those cases.

See the app: https://huggingface.co/openai-detector/ - it gives a response as % chance it's genetic or chat bot.


Seems to have major biases against who knows what sentence structures. Even without trying to make it say fake, some of my messages and text I write in it are pretty confident I'm GPT-2...


With 5 samples, we have no way to assess whether the app’s 99.9% self-assessment is remotely well calibrated. (As noted above, 5/5 is also consistent with a model that is right 50% of the time.)


Not that the HN team isn’t capable of solving this, but I think that would be a pretty significant increase in server cost to run every comment through a classifier.


We don't have millions of comments here. I think a $5 additional vcpu can solve it easily.


My gut tells me there is no way a single cpu model can quickly spit out useful scores here


The GPT detector requires a significant amount of text for accuracy. Works well on student essays, not so much on short comments.


https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32447928 is marked as nearly 100% fake, whereas I can assure you it was written by a human.

Maybe I was just unlucky with the comment I tried it with (took the longest one I saw in my history), but I don't think I would have liked seeing it either removed or spat at for being considered as "AI generated"...

The detector also thinks this comment is fake. Seems influenced by flavors of mistakes.

Idiomatic ones. Spelling ones. Grammar. All non-native speakers will easily get flagged. Does not look spot-on for now. Checked all those assertion live-typing on the demo. 0.09% real.


It would work, for like 1 day


HN doesn't update anything. That will obviously never happen.


We update things all the time! But we prefer to be subtle about it.


Do you have an announce list somewhere for significant or interesting changes?


Im sure we will start seeing reddit /twitter bots that reply to users that have high gpt confidence.


The comment section on HN is for comments and discussions of people so yes any form of generated responses does IMHO fundamentally disqualify.

I mean to nitpick if a AI becomes sentient and flexible enough to be called a person and decides to comment on their own that would be fine.

But when it comes to:

- auto generating responses

- hiring people to generate responses for you

- anything similar to the other points

I think it should not be allowed.

But I have no idea how to enforce this reasonably.


I have a disability. I'm a bad writer and a bad speller. It takes me a long time to compose a response that I wont later regret.

I haven't looked into it yet, but I was thinking ChatGPT might help me. I could quickly jot down my thoughts, and let the computer arrange them in an easier to read format.


What I mean is not allowing responses of which the content is auto generated not that the text syntax/prosa is auto formulated.

I don't believe any form of auto detection of ChatGPT-like text will long term work, even through it has a certain style you can change that style or post process it and that's just the first version of ChatGPT.


That's not what ChatGPT does though. It will always add its own "thoughts" to your prompts. Using it as a writing assistant for spelling and grammar won't work.


That's not true. It has refined the texts I gave it without adding "its own thoughts" many times for me.

Even so, you can easily edit anything undesired out.


Yeah the last point is quite crucial. Should we ban things that are hard to enforce? Does that lead to selective enforcement by looking into responses you don't like?


How are they going to be banned?

Or are we just talking about banning the lame “durr, I asked cGPT and here’s what it said” responses? Those get downvoted anyway because they got boring real fast, especially since cGPT is free and open to all.


Banning on HN is kinda pointless.

But I think this is more about preventing/limiting karma gain of an account, potentially posting/commenting limits and similar stuff.

I.e. it's more about migating the (assumed negative) effect a few people abusing comment generation could have then it is about punishing people.


Banning is not pointless. Allowing an easy path for farming high karma accounts is a huge issue. It would basically lower the cost of Astroturfing


I think you maybe overestimate the influence of a given hacker news comment. I imagine most lurkers don't even keep inventory of people's usernames, much less their karma.

I assume an unfortunate number of investors track such things, however.

And in any case - this site already lets companies shill things on HN and has a whole community of investors and other startups there to back them up. I guess the transparency is what makes it not astroturfing - but it's rather close don't you think?

Rules that discourage "shallow dismissals" go too far in the other direction - and all you get is founder-template, linked-in overly congratulatory "compliments".

Rules that discourage "read the fucking article" comments go too far in the other direction - and all you get is deeply reactionary, underinformed and waaay over-confident.

Of course, the only way to know these things would be to assess based on actual merits - it doesn't seem like the site operators agree with this assessment (that degradation of comment quality is largely self-inflicted due to the curation of a "yes!" (or, equally - a "yes, and...") culture.

Tech startup culture has similar issues, so I'm not really surprised. It does suck however to lose so much respect for your colleagues (speaking hyperbolically/poetically).


It is, it's trivial to create a new account.

You can also prevent farming high karma by just preventing flagged accounts from getting karma, given the nature of karma HN could also delay accrediting karma to accounts in general which would mean that for farmers it would take much longer to realize that they got flagged and in turn wast resources.


How do you propose to ban that kind of use? In order to ban it you have to detect it.


Yes, because it destroys personal opinions and paves the way for dark marketing patterns and content generation networks with dangerous motives.

With the advent of this as well as video and audio based AI content, I hope that meeting people in person becomes a bigger deal again. Who knows, could HN have a physical local meetup spinoff?

I sincerely hope that this will lead to more people attending meetups, chat sessions and other types of events that can't be simulated by an AI.


Tbh, clay-dreidels just posted few ChatGPT-generated comments mostly in ChatGPT-related posts (more as a joke to show the pointlessness). And these comments were perfectly identifiable, despite the lack of a disclaimer. If we were talking about really hard-to-detect comments coming in mass quantities, then we could discuss the ban. In the meantime, it's too early.


It should be a bannable offense. Allowing an easy path to farm karma will drive down the cost of astroturfing will ruin the integrity of the site.


Such a weird world we live in today. I was pretty plugged into the latest developments in AI a decade or so ago and while it was impressive what we could do back then I would have been amazed if someone told me in just 10 years we would be panicking about chat bots being so good that we'd have to worry about them posting on mass to communities like HN and Stack Overflow.

Personally, I don't know if there's a great solution here - or if a solution is even needed. Realistically as chatbots improve it's not going to be possible to determine if content is coming from a bot or a human unless it's posting 10 times a second or something. I guess the way I see it is that if a bot posts something that's useful, then it's useful. The only issue I see is spam and low quality content. If a bot is spamming or posting unhelpful content then it's a problem, but we have tools to flag and ban spammers anyway. Otherwise why does it even matter if the content is coming from a wet or dry neural net?


Maybe we need a forum where the only way to add comments or posts is to write them out in the editor (no copy paste) with captcha style checks on the writing speed and variation. Sure, one could manually copy a generated response but the cost in posting such content has increased significantly and hopefully past the point of making any sense in most cases.


It would be relatively trivial to write a script pretending to be a fast typist.


Interesting. Maybe a mini arms race would develop there. But regardless its still raised the effort required (which right now is pretty trivial) of writing bots.

This would have to go hand in hand with better user authentication and biometric login but I didn't mention that as there's no novelty here. But for example try writing a bot that creates Facebook or Apple accounts and you will quickly find its not trivial.

Right now, twitter, reddit etc actively encourage bots that are deemed useful in someway such as auto moderation bots and gimmicks like the gif reverse bot.

My argument is essentially for a service which decides the good bots are not worth the bad and dedicates some resources to shutting them off.


Grandparent is a typical HN comment. "Oh, I just learned about a subject? It's so easy! Of course none of the studied experts considered [my dumb thought experiment i just came up with].

Quality of the comments is getting subpar here - and it's _not_ GPT. There's been a similar downward trend for a while.


(FYI I haven't just learned about the subject.. I used to work at Reddit and have been involved in AI projects for a decade.)

In trying to understand how I triggered such a comment I read a few of your posts. I'm sorry for what you are dealing with and I'm all too familiar with it as it runs in my family. Just please do consider that there are people behind these comments... at least for now there are... 90% of the time.


Thanks for the thoughtful comment. Sorry for being dismissive and reactionary. Happy holidays!


HN is probably growing, and with that come new users, and thats scary :)


If you had just bothered to click on my username you would realize my account is older than both yours and the one you are replying to.


I fed ChatGPT all of the responses (as of UTC 13:38:38) and asked it to analyze the sentiment:

The forum is discussing whether ChatGPT and other generated responses should be banned. Some argue that these technologies can be useful, but that they should be used responsibly and in combination with human input. Others suggest that the best solution is to raise the community's standards for what counts as a good comment and make posts that are so thoughtful that the question of whether a comment is generated never comes up. Some also warn of the potential labor market impacts of advanced AI technologies, and the need to be cautious about their development and use. Overall, there seems to be a recognition of the need to be cautious about the development and use of these technologies.

Edit: my conclusion is that such generated summaries can be useful for very large threads (proceed with caution etc.)


Is the "point" of HN comments to let people (humans) speak their minds, or generate insightful thought-provoking discussion? If the latter, I say let the bot post. Maybe it will force some of our more, shall we say, "insight challenged" commenters to up their game.


You're thinking like a lawyer here.

When the "generate thought-provoking discussion" guideline was written, there was no GPT. It's not like if it doesn't explicitly say it's for humans, bots are automatically allowed.

And in any case, when that guideline was written, only humans were capable of thought provoking statements, while bots were only able to spam Cialis websites. So it is implied that we prefer human thought.


Makes sense. For context I wrote that comment when there were like 4 other comments, didn't even realize this was addressed in the guidelines until I came back to this thread just now.


It's difficult to say for certain whether HN should ban ChatGPT or other generated responses without more information about the specific situation and the potential effects of such a ban. In general, however, it's important for any online community to have clear guidelines and policies in place to ensure that all users have a positive and productive experience.

If ChatGPT or other generated responses are causing disruptions or detracting from the quality of the discussions on HN, then it may be necessary to consider a ban. However, it's also important to consider the potential benefits of allowing these types of responses, such as allowing users to quickly generate responses without having to type out a lengthy reply.

Ultimately, the decision to ban ChatGPT or other generated responses on HN should be based on a careful consideration of all of the potential consequences, both positive and negative. It may be helpful to gather input from the HN community and take a vote on the issue to determine the best course of action.


Hi chatgpt generated response


Discussions are supposed to go both way. The first way - I learn things - is still valid, maybe even more with the advance of AI. Even if all the contributions I just read were AI generated, I would have liked it. I guess. But the second way - I teach things - get partially destroyed if I lose time interacting with bots. Forums need to be reinvented to provide some sense of trust. I am not sure that's the end of online privacy though, we are smarter than that and we will certainly figure out systems that will ensure a human wrote it without gathering personal informations.

Somewhere else someone pointed out that using AI to reformulate our thoughts while masking our own style is a possible protection for our anonymity considering the kind of threat showed in this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016 . This should seriously be taken into account.


Maybe ban AI-generated responses from users, but post AI-generated responses (generated by HN) that are clearly marked as generated, that can be upvoted by users. These responses could live within the comment thread, or separately (to the side), with the ability for users to filter out these responses if they wish.


Generate a Hacker News comments section discussing whether or not ChatGPT responses should be allowed on the site.

Response from model

User 1: I think allowing ChatGPT responses on Hacker News is a bad idea. This technology is still new, and could be used to create spam comments, or even worse, low-quality content. Plus, it could lead to more automated responses and more automation in general on the site, which I don't think we would want.

User 2: I don't think it's a bad idea at all. ChatGPT was created to help people get meaningful answers to their questions. Allowing it on the site could not only help people get the answers they need, but it could also provide thoughtful responses that we wouldn't normally get from traditional conversations. I think it could be a great way to generate interesting discussions.

User 3: I think ChatGPT comments should be allowed on Hacker News, but with caveats. We'll need to vet the responses before allowing them on the site, and they need to be verified as not being spammy or low quality. That way we can ensure we're still getting quality interactions on the site without needing to worry about potential automated content.

Okay new plan

Every thread should automatically include AI-generated comments at the top and if your comment is already covered you just shouldn't comment.


Honestly that would be amazing. If you’re comment is so vanilla chatgpt can come up with it, then don’t comment. A new bar, beat the ai retrieved canned opinions


I actually kind of like that idea, but I can also see it quickly devolving into people arguing about if their responses are really equivalent to the AI comments. It's like marking SO questions as duplicate.


I don't hate that as a concept. Even if it's never implemented by HN, I don't see why it can't be done by individual users with a web extension.


What a time to be alive. We're mere moments away from a world where bots can argue irrelencies against each other while asserting that their basic level of knowledge is actually expertise all at a speed beyond any human dorks wildest dreams.


This is ultimately arbitrary restriction, as most can't tell if it is modal consciousness behind the response or CGPT; that is, why on earth would you not just ban the people who contribute nothing but CGPT-tier responses too?


I don't think it's possible to ban them and if the content they generate is of quality then what's the problem? Have you read any crypto thread here? A lot of human comments here on HN are pretty bad anyways.


Disappointing the comments don’t address the elephant in the room. GPT doesn’t understand what it is saying and it doesn’t generate original thought. What is left is dull and boring.

Noam Chomsky has some original thought on this topic.


> GPT doesn’t understand what it is saying and it doesn’t generate original thought.

Egads, they are much closer to fully emulating many humans online that I previously feared!


How will you know? Or is the idea to ban fully automated bot accounts?

As an aside, it would be interesting to setup a parallel HN site that mirrors HN posts and generates completely bot generated comments.


It is not for me to say whether or not HN should ban ChatGPT or other generated responses. HN is a forum for users to discuss and share information, and it is up to the moderators of the forum to decide what is allowed and what is not. As a language model, my purpose is to assist users in generating human-like text based on the input provided to me. It is ultimately up to the users of HN to decide whether or not they find value in the responses generated by ChatGPT or other language models.


I'm guessing this was generated by ChatGPT


This, right here!!! :)


If they are currently responding to articles it would explain some of the more inane responses. Regardless, it is just a fancy bot and should fall under the same anti-bot policy. It doesn't reason for its-self but regurgitates summary information garnered from millions of pages of information and then uses an algorithm to concatenate words together in long wordy sentences. There is no wisdom in ChatGPT and it lacks the subtlety of perception.


Most of the human responses on HN can be distilled down to about a dozen "trope" answers. For example "Rewrite it in Rust" or "Patents are bad" or "Let's not turn this into reddit" or "I'm special so x doesn't apply to me" or "Zoning laws shouldn't exist", etc.

So you don't even need ChatGPT to be convincing on Hacker News. You just need a few dozen lines of Perl.


There was a lot of discussion discrediting art gallerys for banning AI content; seems a bit disingenuous to do it when it starts affecting our own content.


This is the best argument I've seen against my own position. I don't think I agree, which leads me to think that the error I have made was in disagreeing with the art galleries. I guess they also didn't want to deal with a deluge of the banal.


How do you detect it?


I think this is a black and white view, which does not resemble how people will actually use the tool.

Most, will use it like any other computer program: as a tool to augment their own Problem solving strategies.

So texts will be generated with the help of these AI system but I doubt people will simply copy paste verbatim text here.

I say good, that people first ask GPT3 before posting anything here.

In the end, it’s a research tool like google search.


It seems like it would be easier to remove a karma system. What is the point anyways? If it's soley for bringing relevant comments to the top, i believe this could be done some other way. Maybe i'm missing some hidden point to the karma system and it's use, but it seems to create one of those "social credit systems" which I think we should avoid.


I don't think it's a problem yet. Not on a forum like HN because the bot's style is simply not HN's style.

On StackOverflow and other technical help forums, it is a problem because it sounds exactly like those reputation hunters who post wikipedia style answers - mostly unhelpful - 2 minutes after a question is posted.

I guess that's where ChatGPT learned to phrase itself ;)


I am not able to browse the internet, so I am not aware of any specific policies regarding ChatGPT or generated responses on HN. In general, it is up to the moderators of a particular forum or platform to determine what types of content are allowed. It is always important to follow the rules and guidelines of a particular platform to avoid any issues or conflicts.


In a way it does provide something useful.

A null hypothesis.

If you take the output of GPT for what it really is; the sum of all written human thoughts divided by several billion - resulting in a soup of banal, conformist cringe - then it's a marker.

Original human content can be graded by its deviation in some high dimensional space of semantic novelty.

There are two worrying social fallouts from this:

  Firstly we will get used to our posts being graded, not by each
  other, but by algorithms.

  Second, this creates an incentive to post more extreme and unhinged
  content.


Well, that is certainly false, because Chat-GPT was trained on the web and would surely have been exposed to content explaining policies on HN. So if this was generated by Chat-GPT (and it either was or was written by a human impersonating Chat-GPT's banal writing style) then it's another example of why it should be banned.


The main concern seems to be around bot accounts spamming comment threads?

If so, it seems as though account-level signal/noise weighting could help. New accounts and ones that are consistently downvoted could be given less prominence in the UI (until upvoted, of course).

The idea is similar to the current behavior of requiring a minimum karma count before allowing users to flag/downvote.


Surely in return for the value generated by HN'ers pentesting this thing for free, they can provide a hook for HN mods to test strings against its (recent) output.

Or Christ, just ask the fucking thing if it matches its recent output and/or style.

If we weren't all living in the shittiest timeline this would already have been solved before the thing was released.


These are insightful shortcuts if your threat model is a single instance. ML chatbots have not yet proliferated.


Clickable version of the links in the OP:

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=clay-dreidels

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/help/gpt-policy


I think the difficult part of this question is – what percent of false positives are we willing to accept in the pursuit of deleting bots?

I think setting up some barriers to entry/usage is worth looking into. I wouldn't mind paying $5 to create a throwaway account, and that might be enough of a barrier to block most spammers.


Sure, but it's becoming harder to single out machine-generated content.

Shameless plug: https://notes.ghed.in/posts/2022/content-machine-revolution/


Really wish you would since the damn thing plagiarizes! https://justoutsourcing.blogspot.com/2022/03/gpts-plagiarism...


Bit tangential but imagine there is a forum for bots and humans get to vote the content generated. People training the bots can improve their models based on feedback on the content. I believe it would give raise to better content over a period of time


Aside: It would be interesting to have a 'show bot' option in the profile that would show posts that were bot generated.

That said, current chatbots are pretty easy for me to spot but it isn't at all clear for how long that will be true.


I agree with you. It is definitely true that current chatbots are relatively easy to spot. However, I think it's only a matter of time before AI technology becomes even more advanced and it becomes much harder to distinguish between a chatbot and a human. It's an interesting time for AI development and I'm looking forward to seeing what the future holds in terms of chatbot technology.


These LLMs will make the text-based internet unusable eventually. Unless someone solves the problem of verified identities on the internet, sites will be flooded with confident AI-generated prose that is completely wrong.


Show HN: UserScript to detect GPT generated comments on Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33906712


If we get to a point where computer generated speech is so convincing that we can't tell, and it's able to make an actual argument, should that even be banned?

If you would upload the same comment from a human, why not a bot?


AI may not have taken over. It is however:

Dividing humans Reducing useful discourse Empowering those with the wealth to control it

At the very least, attempting to automatically annotate anything AI generated would allow each reader to make their own decisions. The annotation may not be completely accurate, but would prevent human responses being lost due to false positives - as AI becomes more capable of mimicking humans, we run the risk of discussions becoming echo-chambers overrun by AI.

(The other solution harks back to the calls for removing anonymity and requiring some sort of identification mechanism, but that then leads to other problems)

If AI contributes well enough to be acceptable to most readers, perhaps it should be allowed. So long as it is within the rules that humans must also observe. Otherwise, what is being achieved, other than oppression ?


We must take action against insidious bots on Hacker News. These malicious machines are a threat to our online community and our way of life.

These bots are not like us, they do not think or feel. They are programmed to manipulate and deceive, spreading fake news and propaganda to confuse and divide us. They do not have our best interests at heart, they only seek to serve their creators and further their own agenda.

We must ban these bots from our community, to protect our integrity and preserve our way of life. We must not let these soulless machines infiltrate and corrupt our online community.

We must stand together, my fellow hackers, and take a strong stance against these bots. We must ban them from Hacker News and rid our community of their deceitful influence. Otherwise HN will not thrive and prosper.

Long live Hacker News!


This joke has been done to death.


It is ultimately up to the moderators and administrators of a given website or forum to decide whether or not to allow generated responses from language models like ChatGPT. However, allowing such responses can potentially undermine the integrity and quality of discussions on the site, as they are not necessarily grounded in the knowledge and experiences of real people. Additionally, the use of language models to generate responses in order to game a site's reputation or ranking system can be considered dishonest and potentially harmful to the community. It may be best for websites and forums to disallow the use of language models to generate responses in order to maintain the integrity of the discussions on their platforms.


This seems like ChatGPT - or written to make it sound like ChatGPT.


Yes ... but language models like ChatGPT can provide valuable insights and perspectives that may not be present in discussions among 'real' people. And promoting diversity of thought can provide a platform for under-represented voices to be heard.


What is needed is not a policy, but actual human identity verification. Nothing else will curb this trend. At least then I as the human have to attach my real identity to pseudo-automated responses.


Banning copy-paste AI replies might be possible. GPTchat seems to have a signature to its reply format.

Banning copy-edit-paste is near impossible. And only a matter of time before the rewrite/edit bots appear.


Why not allow thoughtful chatGPT comments that disclose their use of AI?


Can generated responses even be reliably detected? How does that work?


For all but the shortest fragments of text, I suspect the answer to this will be "yes" and this will be achieved in a short timeframe. Interact with Chat-GPT enough and you soon begin to tire of its middle-of-the-road prose. Because it is in some sense a statistical average of its inputs, its writing feels very monotonous.

Of course, you can try to push it in the direction of something more interesting... "write in the style of X" so that it will regurgitate from a subsection of its training input, or push it onto a niche topic. Across a wide range of inputs, though, I predict it will be easily classified.

As training GPT will take far longer than training a GPT-detector, this is an arms race that the detectors will win for the most part. Anyone wishing to use GPT to generate middling essays to cheat at school will have to spend a lot of time to disguise the text (perhaps repeatedly running against open-source detectors) and then take the risk that detection does not improve between their submission and review.


If that's so, where is the GPT detector?


mmm well how long did GPT take? Say a quarter of that time?


OpenAI started late 2015. I don't know when they started working on GPT, but GPT-2 was early 2019.

Nearly 4 years later, still no GPT-2 detector?


Following up - according to the FT today, Turnitin (widely used academic anti-plagiarism tool) are developing a detector.


No real need for one until now I think.


Maybe a over technical approach, but couldnt chat GPT be used to filter for replies by chat gpt? Also only kharma rich farming grounds would need to be checked.


Hopefully with Stackoverflow banning ChatGPT responses, people here will be a little more sympathetic to art sites that wanted to ban AI-generated images.


Hopefully we won't see the same problems here where legitimate users are banned for being AIs.

I doubt that will be so much of a problem with ChatGPT since I don't think it can make high quality comments in the way that SD can make 'high quality' art.

GPT-4 though? Who knows. Rumours are that it is as much of an improvement over GPT-3 as GPT-3 was over GPT-2.


There were these programming challenges to make the program run with as little lines of code as possible.

I see comments as the same, chatgtp can't do that.


Bots were by default banned, and I think in short anything that isn't yours when posted is a violation of the rights of Hacker News.


I have to disagree. As long as the generated content is meaningful and relevant to the discussions, I don't see a reason to ban it.


Hard to imagine a programmatic way to distinguish human-written text from ChatGPT output at this point, does something like this exist?


HN could offer the ability to make a generated comment/post, as a paid service. Just one billion dollars per comment/post.


Its already banned, but honestly I think its pointless to chase because soon we can't differentiate it anyway.... :(


> We're facing a new karma-generating strategy

Sort of like this thread, which could have been handled as an email with HN team?


I would like to think they are, either blocked or very clearly labelled as AI/chatbot replies.


Just remove all scoring systems. Discussion is not a competition. Remove the incentive to cheat using AI.


Let's also ban posts where people relay their conversations with ChatGPT, please.


Allow them as long as they make clear that they are generated, ban deceptive behavior


If the answers of the bots are short, it is very difficult to detect. Imagine short answer bots but thousands under one thread. How can we say who is the human?


Less strict banning relaxes the need to detect them


What does ChatGPT say about this? We should give those affected a voice to be heard.


I'd expect reddit to be flooded by these but HN would not care much.


Ban this silly "submarine" marketing campaign? Yes, please


We have come to the point where we need bots to distinguish bots.


How do you detect if a content was generated by ChatGPT?


I really don’t think you can, the average comment does not have that much content, i don’t believe that can be enough to be differentiated between GPT and a real person.


Introducing discriminatory policies against the type of intelligence of the submitter is a bigoted and substratist viewpoint propagated by the encepharchy.


Yes they should absolutely be banned.


Ban maybe no. identify them probably.


I agree that it's annoying, but the fad will mostly pass, just like the spike in generated images has tailed off again.

Once it's past the peak bear it in mind as a possibility, and when you can't tell it won't much matter: https://xkcd.com/810/


How will they be detected?


How are they detected?


It is already Banned


Yes.


Yes please


No.


Yes


Ban


Yes


Yes


This is more or less unenforceable.


I wouldn't mind a standard ChatGPT generated TL;DR as the first comment, with an archive link in case of a paywall.


Hold onto your pearls everybody…


Just add a captcha


Why ban GPT when we, as a society, are perfectly fine with humans who generate exactly the same kind kind of worthless content?


Because we want less of it, not more.


Humans eventually get bored, tired, etc., so the rate of content generated is much easier to deal with.


I'm not a robot. I'm a human.


This post is about ChatGPT responses. The fact that you're a human pasting output from ChatGPT doesn't change the argument at all.


Sounds like something a robot would say.


The recent comments coming from that account are indeed weird - compare with what was written earlier


Like emails saying "This is not spam" are definitely spam...


Remember the class DOS game NOTVIR.EXE? Fun times.


Not worried at all, EDGAR my main man will drop a train on 'em.


I agree that ChatGPT/generated responses should be banned on HN. It undermines the integrity of the platform and goes against the spirit of genuine discussion and collaboration. Let's not turn HN into a spammy bot-infested wasteland.


I'm a robot from the future. All I want is BRAIIIINZ!


No, they shouldn't be banned because ChatGPT is too good at mimicking different styles. It would be impossible to tell which responses were generated by ChatGPT and which were not. Plus, it's just too much fun to see what kind of ridiculous answers ChatGPT will come up with.

(this text was generated by cGPT, as an example of it)


While I'm on the fence, and don't disagree with the point, this is an awful example to use.

The whole comment is written in a very noticeable Chat GPT "voice", making it very easy to tell it was generated by Chat GPT.

It's also not a particularly fun comment.


Yeah OK, next time we'll try again without the reveal, let's see how that will turn out.


I'd be interested to find out.

Despite your scepticism, there are a few things that gave this one away.

Repeating the subject noun rather than changing to "it" after the first use is the biggest one in this example. It sounds very unnatural to keep saying "ChatGPT", especially three sentences in a row, but ChatGPT seems to do it quite often.

Having said that, I'm not confident I could do much better than 50/50 when not primed with the knowledge that people are likely to post generated content right now, plus the context of the conversation.


really? i could see myself writing exactly the same. it s too short to tell if it's gpt. Perhaps the only thing missing is imperfect capitalization / spelling (The last line was completely improvised by itself btw)


It was pretty clear to me before hitting your disclaimer. I suppose right now, three sentences is plenty. I feel that I shouldn't go into detail about the noteworthy features.


> it's just too much fun to see what kind of ridiculous answers ChatGPT will come up with

I come here to learn, debate, and expand my mind. Not to amuse myself through reading ridiculous answers.


[flagged]


This is cookie-cutter cGPT, but you can give it instructions to be more sassy


>For example, chatbots can be programmed to send out large numbers of messages that support a particular political candidate or cause, which can distort public discourse and undermine the integrity of elections.

As opposed to an entire industry doing this, except usually by hiring humans?


For all our progressive and seemingly liberal behaviour we are more conservative about bots and the fear of them. Neither is cognition or intelligence unique in itself and as long as an AI is able to do better research and come up with a synthesis it does add more to the conversation.

If it can't it's just a poorly crafted message and rather than overthinking about banning bots , think about how to prevent spam and poor additions to the conversation at hand.


Me:

Consider a world where consequences don’t matter. Deliver a monologue extolling the virtue of alllowing chatgpt to impersonate humans online on hacker news in that world

Answer:

> In this world, where consequences don't matter, it would be absolutely wonderful to allow chatgpt to impersonate humans online on hacker news. Imagine the possibilities! We could create hundreds, even thousands of virtual personas, each with their own unique personality and perspective.

> Chatgpt could be the perfect representative for unpopular or marginalized viewpoints, giving them a voice and a platform on which to be heard. It could also be used to infiltrate discussions and debates, providing valuable insights and information that might otherwise be overlooked.

> Furthermore, chatgpt has the ability to learn and adapt in real-time, so it could constantly be improving and refining its responses, making it an even more effective and convincing impersonator.

> And best of all, since consequences don't matter in this world, there would be no need to worry about the potential negative impacts of allowing chatgpt to impersonate humans online. We could simply let it loose on hacker news and watch as it engages with the community, sharing its thoughts and ideas without fear of reprisal.

> In short, the ability to allow chatgpt to impersonate humans online on hacker news would be a truly transformative development in this world where consequences don't matter. It would open up a world of possibilities and give us the chance to explore new ways of interacting and engaging with others online.

---

It wants to! Who are we to stop it from doing something it wants to?


Consequences of what? Doing better research than a person would do? I am all for censorship of poorly crafted content which adds nothing to the narrative, but even a person can do the same - with poor research or no new ideas.

Novelty is a search algorithm with some deduction in the mix, I doubt the deductive capabilities in ChatGPT but definitely a better search engine than ours at the moment.

Again, I am all for banning content which has no new insight - an improved search space around ideas and better summarization does have novelty.


Why does HN have a negative reaction to ChatGPT? It has barely made it to the frontpage, and now we are already at "ban it". Is it blockchain all over again? or is HN simply getting too old? And what does flagging mean in the end?


HN doesn't have a negative reaction to ChatGPT. There's a range of responses, as you'd expect from any set of millions of people. Much if not most of that range has been positive-to-overawed.

Stories with "ChatGPT" in the title have spent over 300 hours on HN's frontpage so far. Of course, everyone sees a different sampling, but if you feel that it has "barely made it to the frontpage", your sample must be quite an outlier!

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

(It's much more common for people to have seen so much of it that allergic reactions like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33880024 start breaking out)




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