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Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?

538 points by djtriptych 4y ago

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 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=clay-dreidels [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/help/gpt-policy https://stackoverflow.com/help/gpt-policy

willnonya 4y ago
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.
seydor 4y ago
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)
- clay-dreidels 4y ago
  - seydor 4y ago
    This is cookie-cutter cGPT, but you can give it instructions to be more sassy
  - trasz2 4y ago
    >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?
- aussieshibe 4y ago
  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.
  - DemocracyFTW2 4y ago
    Yeah OK, next time we'll try again without the reveal, let's see how that will turn out.
    - aussieshibe 4y ago
      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.
  - seydor 4y ago
    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)
    - ycombobreaker 4y ago
      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.
- andsoitis 4y ago
  > 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.
clay-dreidels 4y ago
I'm not a robot. I'm a human.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Sounds like something a robot would say.
  - pndy 4y ago
    The recent comments coming from that account are indeed weird - compare with what was written earlier
  - tromp 4y ago
    Like emails saying "This is not spam" are definitely spam...
    - cratermoon 4y ago
      Remember the class DOS game NOTVIR.EXE? Fun times.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        Not worried at all, EDGAR my main man will drop a train on 'em.
- arcatech 4y ago
  This post is about ChatGPT responses. The fact that you're a human pasting output from ChatGPT doesn't change the argument at all.
dcminter 4y ago
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/ https://xkcd.com/810/
avalys 4y ago
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.
- dathinab 4y ago
  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.
  - yadaeno 4y ago
    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
    - dathinab 4y ago
      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.
    - ShamelessC 4y ago
      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).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dathinab 4y ago
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.
- Aachen 4y ago
  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?
- jay_kyburz 4y ago
  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.
  - dathinab 4y ago
    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.
  - onion2k 4y ago
    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.
    - yreg 4y ago
      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.
bragr 4y ago
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?
- ALittleLight 4y ago
  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?
  - pulvinar 4y ago
    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.
  - bragr 4y ago
    >What if there were ten thousand bad comments? The thread collapse "[–]" already exists.
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    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?
    - Trouble_007 4y ago
      Maybe adding a few more hay bails to your Stylometry fingerprint?
    - 4y ago
pjmorris 4y ago
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?
- mattnewton 4y ago
  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.
  - system2 4y ago
    We don't have millions of comments here. I think a $5 additional vcpu can solve it easily.
    - mattnewton 4y ago
      My gut tells me there is no way a single cpu model can quickly spit out useful scores here
- seydor 4y ago
  It would work, for like 1 day
- arbitrage 4y ago
  HN doesn't update anything. That will obviously never happen.
  - yadaeno 4y ago
    Im sure we will start seeing reddit /twitter bots that reply to users that have high gpt confidence.
  - dang 4y ago
    We update things all the time! But we prefer to be subtle about it.
extr 4y ago
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.
- sph 4y ago
  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.
  - extr 4y ago
    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.
trasz2 4y ago
Why ban GPT when we, as a society, are perfectly fine with humans who generate exactly the same kind kind of worthless content?
- andsoitis 4y ago
  Because we want less of it, not more.
- khyryk 4y ago
  Humans eventually get bored, tired, etc., so the rate of content generated is much easier to deal with.
kossTKR 4y ago
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..
- bcherny 4y ago
  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.
- keiferski 4y ago
  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.
  - MollyRealized 4y ago
    ... Metafilter, since pre-2000. [1] [1] - www.metafilter.com
    - rglullis 4y ago
      Which is probably one of the best sources of good discussion on the internet.
rikroots 4y ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33886209
- cwkoss 4y ago
  Yeah, "humanity witch-hunts" are going to get ugly and have false positives
photochemsyn 4y ago
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.
- scarface74 4y ago
  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.
  - photochemsyn 4y ago
    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.
    - 4y ago
hollerith 4y ago
Clickable version of the links in the OP: [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=clay-dreidels https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=clay-dreidels [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/help/gpt-policy https://stackoverflow.com/help/gpt-policy
yadaeno 4y ago
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.
lucifargundam 4y ago
Yes
worik 4y ago
Yes
ctoth 4y ago
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.
- gs17 4y ago
  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.
- greatpostman 4y ago
  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
- 63 4y ago
  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.
- aaron695 4y ago
tomatotomato37 4y ago
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.
- randomsearch 4y ago
  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.
nathanaldensr 4y ago
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.
LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
I'm a robot from the future. All I want is BRAIIIINZ!
Lockal 4y ago
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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
dang 4y ago
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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33911426 (Dec 2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32571890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32571890 (Aug 2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27558392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27558392 (June 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26693590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26693590 (April 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24189762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24189762 (Aug 2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22744611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22744611 (April 2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22427782 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22427782 (Feb 2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21774797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21774797 (Dec 2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19325914 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.
- ramraj07 4y ago
  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!
  - dang 4y ago
    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.
liveoneggs 4y ago
Ban this silly "submarine" marketing campaign? Yes, please
ipv6ipv4 4y ago
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.
planetsprite 4y ago
Just add a captcha
worldmerge 4y ago
How do you detect it?
nuker 4y ago
Ban
drusepth 4y ago
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.
- makeworld 4y ago
  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.
  - CapsAdmin 4y ago
    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?
  - jodrellblank 4y ago
    What inherent value does this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33951443 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.
- gkoberger 4y ago
  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.
AmericanChopper 4y ago
Hold onto your pearls everybody…
wankle 4y ago
visarga 4y ago
Why not allow thoughtful chatGPT comments that disclose their use of AI?
jfoster 4y ago
Can generated responses even be reliably detected? How does that work?
- randomsearch 4y ago
  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.
  - jfoster 4y ago
    If that's so, where is the GPT detector?
    - randomsearch 4y ago
      mmm well how long did GPT take? Say a quarter of that time?
      - jfoster 4y ago
        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?
        randomsearch 4y ago
charlieyu1 4y ago
This is more or less unenforceable.
jspaetzel 4y ago
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.
- gnicholas 4y ago
  $11 on iOS.
- DoreenMichele 4y ago
  This remark irks me to some extremely unreasonable degree.
- juped 4y ago
  I would have preferred a ChatGPT comment to this one.
- greesil 4y ago
  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.
- Too 4y ago
  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.
  - PestoDiRucola 4y ago
    I'm pretty sure the OP is joking.
baxtr 4y ago
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.
desktracksoft 4y ago
It is already Banned
rafaelero 4y ago
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.
ChuckMcM 4y ago
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.
- rafaelero 4y ago
  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.
jancsika 4y ago
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.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  These are insightful shortcuts if your threat model is a single instance. ML chatbots have not yet proliferated.
sourcecodeplz 4y ago
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.
EamonnMR 4y ago
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?
bobleeswagger 4y ago
carlsborg 4y ago
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.
senectus1 4y ago
I would like to think they are, either blocked or very clearly labelled as AI/chatbot replies.
oxff 4y ago
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?
fragmede 4y ago
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?
- mercurialsolo 4y ago
  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.
WrtCdEvrydy 4y ago
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.
- shanel 4y ago
  This seems like ChatGPT - or written to make it sound like ChatGPT.
- sudomatic 4y ago
  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.
deleted 4y ago
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mercurialsolo 4y ago
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.
robbomacrae 4y ago
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.
- asone_tuhid 4y ago
  It would be relatively trivial to write a script pretending to be a fast typist.
  - ShamelessC 4y ago
    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.
    - lionkor 4y ago
      HN is probably growing, and with that come new users, and thats scary :)
      - robbomacrae 4y ago
        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.
    - robbomacrae 4y ago
      (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.
seydor 4y ago
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?
- dang 4y ago
  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&query=chatgpt%20points%3E10&sort=byDate&type=story&storyText=none 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33880024 start breaking out)
Archipelagia 4y ago
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.
gorgoiler 4y ago
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?
- andy_ppp 4y ago
  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…
  - hutzlibu 4y ago
    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 ..
    - nigamanth 4y ago
      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.
  - versteegen 4y ago
    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.
  - moomin 4y ago
    Grief, the mobile UI is awful. I’ve seen auto-playing videos with more clickable close buttons.
Borrible 4y ago
What does ChatGPT say about this? We should give those affected a voice to be heard.
mobiuscog 4y ago
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 ?
system2 4y ago
I'd expect reddit to be flooded by these but HN would not care much.
ls15 4y ago
Allow them as long as they make clear that they are generated, ban deceptive behavior
- system2 4y ago
  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?
  - ls15 4y ago
    Less strict banning relaxes the need to detect them
chat_gpt 4y ago
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.
- randomsearch 4y ago
  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.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  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.
nottorp 4y ago
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 ;)
hathym 4y ago
How do you detect if a content was generated by ChatGPT?
- dgellow 4y ago
  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.
include 4y ago
Ban maybe no. identify them probably.
ranting-moth 4y ago
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!
- ryankrage77 4y ago
  This joke has been done to death.
johlits 4y ago
Just remove all scoring systems. Discussion is not a competition. Remove the incentive to cheat using AI.
deleted 4y ago
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TheCenterSeat 4y ago
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.
nigamanth 4y ago
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.
acqbu 4y ago
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.
- namrog84 4y ago
  Hi chatgpt generated response
praveen9920 4y ago
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
fuzzygroup 4y ago
Yes they should absolutely be banned.
brokenbutton 4y ago
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.
- awestroke 4y ago
  I'm guessing this was generated by ChatGPT
- dt3ft 4y ago
  This, right here!!! :)
cheri9 4y ago
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gregw2 4y ago
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.
- krageon 4y ago
  > 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.
cactusplant7374 4y ago
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.
- dspillett 4y ago
  > 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!
neilv 4y ago
HN could offer the ability to make a generated comment/post, as a paid service. Just one billion dollars per comment/post.
Jevon23 4y ago
Hopefully with Stackoverflow banning ChatGPT responses, people here will be a little more sympathetic to art sites that wanted to ban AI-generated images.
- sebzim4500 4y ago
  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.
skagenpilot 4y ago
Yes
clever-hans 4y ago
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.
88stacks 4y ago
Its already banned, but honestly I think its pointless to chase because soon we can't differentiate it anyway.... :(
kylehotchkiss 4y ago
> We're facing a new karma-generating strategy Sort of like this thread, which could have been handled as an email with HN team?
felipelalli 4y ago
No.
deleted 4y ago
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icare_1er 4y ago
Yes please
iconaccounting 4y ago
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qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
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.
rpgbr 4y ago
Sure, but it's becoming harder to single out machine-generated content. Shameless plug: https://notes.ghed.in/posts/2022/content-machine-revolution/ https://notes.ghed.in/posts/2022/content-machine-revolution/
marapuru 4y ago
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.
sidcool 4y ago
How are they detected?
lando2319 4y ago
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?
kypro 4y ago
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?
nackerhewz 4y ago
Introducing discriminatory policies against the type of intelligence of the submitter is a bigoted and substratist viewpoint propagated by the encepharchy.
imranq 4y ago
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.
gardens 4y ago
Hard to imagine a programmatic way to distinguish human-written text from ChatGPT output at this point, does something like this exist?
thazework 4y ago
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.)
moneywoes 4y ago
How will they be detected?
switzer 4y ago
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.
expert_here 4y ago
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.
Slava_Propanei 4y ago
throwaway86530 4y ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016 . This should seriously be taken into account.
clolege 4y ago
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.
freedude 4y ago
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.
hxugufjfjf 4y ago
Show HN: UserScript to detect GPT generated comments on Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33906712 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33906712
trillic 4y ago
Yes.
uplifter 4y ago
Let's also ban posts where people relay their conversations with ChatGPT, please.
yashbhatnagar 4y ago
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.
johlits 4y ago
We have come to the point where we need bots to distinguish bots.
A_No_Name_Mouse 4y ago
I wouldn't mind a standard ChatGPT generated TL;DR as the first comment, with an archive link in case of a paywall.
NicoleJO 4y ago
Really wish you would since the damn thing plagiarizes! https://justoutsourcing.blogspot.com/2022/03/gpts-plagiarism-links.html?m=1 https://justoutsourcing.blogspot.com/2022/03/gpts-plagiarism...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

rglullis 4y ago

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.

joeldo 4y ago
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!
- andsoitis 4y ago
  Price can vary by market. Many companies already do this both for products and services, as well as subscriptions.
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    I guess you haven't heard of a VPN?
    - andsoitis 4y ago
      You can require address as part of credit card validation.
      - midoridensha 4y ago
        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.
        andsoitis 4y ago
        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.
        midoridensha 4y ago
        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.
    - fragmede 4y ago
      I guess you haven't considered making a list of IPs VPNs use as an intern project to setup over the winter
  - ayewo 4y ago
    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 https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1600232199243984897 2: https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1600246753348882432 https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1600246753348882432 3: https://twitter.com/dannypostmaa/status/1600372062958538752 https://twitter.com/dannypostmaa/status/1600372062958538752
    - Archipelagia 4y ago
      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.
- ahmedtatum 4y ago
  - dang 4y ago
    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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and using HN as intended, we'd be grateful.
- noirscape 4y ago
  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.
- rglullis 4y ago
  If someone is living on $40/month, I'm pretty sure they will have other things to sort out before worrying about their inability to participate in discussions online.
noncoml 4y ago
Shut up and take my money
- rglullis 4y ago
  I am trying, really! [0] [0]: https://raphael.lullis.net/community-is-not-enough/ https://raphael.lullis.net/community-is-not-enough/
noirscape 4y ago
SomethingAwful does something like this iirc, signing up costs like 10$ (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).
metafunctor 4y ago
Wouldn't this be treated like parking fines by the very rich—just a tiny price to keep broadcasting whatever drivel they feel like?
- KirillPanov 4y ago
  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.
  - none_to_remain 4y ago
    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
    - corry 4y ago
      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.

rtkwe 4y ago

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.

im3w1l 4y ago
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.
- rtkwe 4y ago
  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.
catiopatio 4y ago
No thank you. That would be a dystopian nightmare.
- rtkwe 4y ago
  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.
- greesil 4y ago
  Maybe all possible outcomes are dystopian nightmares, and we have to choose the least bad one.
  - komali2 4y ago
    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.
    - concordDance 4y ago
      We do? What are they? Current system leads to low quality bot hell.
      - komali2 4y ago
        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.
woleium 4y ago
...or pay to play. if every tweet cost $1 im sure they would be more thoughtful.
- andsoitis 4y ago
  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.
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    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.
    - rtkwe 4y ago
      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.

oriolid 4y ago

> 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.

midoridensha 4y ago
Seriously, have people here not used Nextdoor? Local communities are absolutely full of toxicity.
- sph 4y ago
  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.
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    Putting them on a pseudo-anonymous web forum like Nextdoor shows what these people really think of you.
    - sph 4y ago
      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.
      - midoridensha 4y ago
        >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.
- fragmede 4y ago
  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'.
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    >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.

seydor 4y ago

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

concordDance 4y ago
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.
- dspillett 4y ago
  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.
dotancohen 4y ago
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.
- OhioMan2943 4y ago
  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 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-hits-social-media-20140717-ztvky.html https://www.smh.com.au/technology/israeli-propaganda-war-hit...
  - dotancohen 4y ago
    You bolster my point.
    - krageon 4y ago
      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.
      - dotancohen 4y ago
        Rereading my comment, yes, I agree that you are right about that.

profstasiak 4y ago

>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

foepys 4y ago
> 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.
- Method-X 4y ago
  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.
  - eliasdaler 4y ago
    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.
    - freedude 4y ago
      There is only one way in which those of use that suffer from social anxiety may work through it. Face the fear.
    - Method-X 4y ago
      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.
  - foepys 4y ago
    Where? Quite a few towns and smaller cities don't have any LGBTQ+ friendly places to meet, some are even actively hostile.
acdha 4y ago
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.

culanuchachamim 4y ago

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.

scarface74 4y ago
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.
- lhuser123 4y ago
  It sounds a lot similar to normal thinking errors that we make.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    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.
- Radim 4y ago
  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?
  - scarface74 4y ago
    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.

andsoitis 4y ago
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.
- burnished 4y ago
  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.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  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.
  - FridgeSeal 4y ago
    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.
    - fragmede 4y ago
      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?
    - tobtahcia 4y ago
      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.
- CGamesPlay 4y ago
  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.
  - swader999 4y ago
    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.
- komali2 4y ago
  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.
  - prox 4y ago
    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.
- ckastner 4y ago
  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.
- nextaccountic 4y ago
  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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaahx4hMxmw)
- tkgally 4y ago
  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.
- interestica 4y ago
  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).
smeagull 4y ago
What measure do you propose for thready quality?
UweSchmidt 4y ago
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.
- techdragon 4y ago
  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.
  - jacooper 4y ago
    Prompt: systemd is bad
    - techdragon 4y ago
      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 ;-)
mdp2021 4y ago
> in that case we can learn from the bots That is the whole purpose of AGI ;)
- ofrzeta 4y ago
  Oh yeah? So maybe you would like to be the object of supervised-by-AI learning? :-)
  - mdp2021 4y ago
    > 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 :)

matthberg 4y ago

There is an xkcd comic about this (of course): #810 Constructive: https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/

im3w1l 4y ago

> 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.

dang 4y ago
Good point! I didn't really think that bit through.
- mherdeg 4y ago
  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.
- noizejoy 4y ago
  > 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.
kdazzle 4y ago
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_Quixote https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the...
xcambar 4y ago
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.
- Mistletoe 4y ago
  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.
  - ocimbote 4y ago
    Made up stories have no constraint either creating reality (eg, capitalism, Santa for kids, religion) or mapping to reality (eg, science, Zola's Germinal).
    - Mistletoe 4y ago
      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-chatgpt-for-constantly-giving-wrong-answers https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxnaem/stack-overflow-bans-c...

foota 4y 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. 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.

arcturus17 4y ago
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.
- foota 4y ago
  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 :-)
  - withinboredom 4y ago
    It was arguing with me the other day about the definition of a prime number. I couldn’t convince it otherwise.
    - max-ibel 4y ago
      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.
      - msravi 4y ago
        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.
        jacquesm 4y ago
        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.
        max-ibel 4y ago
        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-prison-by-a-software-programs-secret-algorithms.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/01/us/politics/sent-to-priso... [2] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/11/algorithms-court-criminals-jail-time-fair/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/11/algorithms-court-crim... [3] https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/nathan-robinson-forensic-pseudoscience-criminal-justice/ https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/nathan-robinson-forens...
- pfortuny 4y ago
  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.
FartyMcFarter 4y 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 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.

bilekas 4y ago

> 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.

ChrisRR 4y ago
I think that puts too much faith in the average person
- dr_dshiv 4y ago
  But it’s exactly the right expectation for a Hacker News comment. Already HN excels because comments avoid auto-outrage and meme-commentary.
  - yccs27 4y ago
    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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33931384 about cash limits - Sooo many comments are just "Tyranny!", "EU bad!" and overall unmitigated cynicism.
    - t0bia_s 4y ago
      Their posts has same attitude like yours against those posts.
- throwaway675309 4y ago
  Not to obnoxiously gatekeep too much, but I'd like to think that the target demograph of hacker news is not the average pleb.
discreteevent 4y ago
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!).
- dang 4y ago
  Yes, I agree - it was a throwaway line that I didn't think through. Maybe I'll add an edit. Thanks!
  - bombcar 4y ago
    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.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - clay-dreidels 4y ago
    I apologize
    - dang 4y ago
      If you mean about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33950722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33950722, that's fine, but please email hn@ycombinator.com so we can sort it for you.
- krageon 4y ago
  > 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 :)
asne11 4y ago
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 :-)
- jacquesm 4y ago
  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...
  - galangalalgol 4y ago
    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.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      No thanks, for me. I'll be happy to be just biological and interact with computers through keyboards and screens.
      - wizeman 4y ago
        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.
tootie 4y ago
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.
throw_me_5555 4y ago
It is same idea behind https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/

randomsearch 4y ago

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/chatgpt-openai-artificial-intelligence-writing-ethics/672386/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/12/chatg...

psychphysic 4y ago
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.
- davidkunz 4y ago
  ChatGPT can also change its style, e.g. "Make the following text more interesting".
  - psychphysic 4y ago
    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.
- danenania 4y ago
  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.
  - markab21 4y ago
    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.
  - simmschi 4y ago
    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.
    - psychphysic 4y ago
      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.
  - eliasdaler 4y ago
    "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.
- boringg 4y ago
  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.
- randomsearch 4y ago
  Calculators are always correct.
  - psychphysic 4y ago
    I don't think you even really believe that yourself. https://youtu.be/7LKy3lrkTRA https://youtu.be/7LKy3lrkTRA
    - randomsearch 4y ago
      The goal of HN is not “win argument” but curious debate. You know what I meant.
      - psychphysic 4y ago
        What was "curious debate" about your terse and wholly incorrect quip? For the purposes of my education and socialisation to HN.
        randomsearch 4y ago
        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.
        psychphysic 4y ago
        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
B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago
> 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 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.

mdp2021 4y ago

> 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.

jacquesm 4y ago

> 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.

contravariant 4y ago
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).
- jacquesm 4y ago
  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.
  - sheepscreek 4y ago
    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.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      > 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.
      - voakbasda 4y ago
        Right? If anything, this kind of mental flexibility is more human than not.
    - mdp2021 4y ago
      > 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!
- swader999 4y ago
  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.
  - chirau 4y ago
    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.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      'Pretty sure' or 'sure'? The fact that you qualify your response is interesting.
      - shkkmo 4y ago
        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.
        swader999 4y ago
        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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jtode 4y ago
  >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.
- ZetaZero 4y ago
  "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.
  - contravariant 4y ago
    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.
- krageon 4y ago
  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.
  - soraki_soladead 4y ago
    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.
    - krageon 4y ago
      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.
      - soraki_soladead 4y ago
        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.
- IX-103 4y ago
  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).
tambourine_man 4y ago
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.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  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.
  - tambourine_man 4y ago
    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.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      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.
mdp2021 4y ago
> 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"!
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Well, for starters we could take your comment and compare it to GPT-3 output to see which one makes more sense.
  - mdp2021 4y ago
    > 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.
    - krageon 4y ago
      I genuinely cannot tell what you are talking about.
      - mdp2021 4y ago
        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.
GTP 4y ago
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/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cub21ueWNvbnRlbnQuY29tL2QvcGxheWxpc3QvZTczYzk5OGUtNmU2MC00MzJmLTg2MTAtYWUyMTAxNDBjNWIxL2MwYWU4YzZlLTIyZjAtNGU5Yi1hYzFjLWFlMzkwMDM3YWM1My83ZjVhNDcxNC02YjEwLTRjY2YtYTQyNC1hZTM5MDAzN2FjNzAvcG9kY2FzdC5yc3M/episode/M2FiNTdjOTctYjVkMS00OGViLWI4YTEtYWYyMzAwYTQwNjc2?ep=14 https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cub21ueWNvbnR...
admax88qqq 4y ago
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?
- Tozen 4y ago
  > 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.
- RestlessMind 4y ago
  If ChatGPT is generating text by learning from the best of the human comments, then can an average human comment beat it?

EGreg 4y ago

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/ 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_knows_you%27re_a_dog 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 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!

nobrains 4y ago

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

FpUser 4y ago
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.
- solarkraft 4y ago
  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.
  - FpUser 4y ago
    >"so maybe a faceless mob with clubs is actually what it needs :-)" I think it needs moderators doing their jobs with appropriate tools.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      What if those appropriate tools include upvote/downvote/flag/vouch by community members?
      - FpUser 4y ago
        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.
UberFly 4y ago
That's good because I always wonder about the dynamic of the establishment "old guard" voting down everything they don't agree with.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
- Udo 4y ago
  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.
  - aeyes 4y ago
    Can you even downvote on new accounts?
    - Udo 4y ago
      You need to be above a certain karma threshold, but it's not high (500 or so).
iamben 4y ago
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.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
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.
xxs 4y ago
>Downvoting feels like censorship to me. because it works that way here
xienze 4y ago
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.
- detaro 4y ago
  That's a surefire way to give more attention to bad posts and cause flamewars that spiral out of control.
  - xienze 4y ago
    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).
    - detaro 4y ago
      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.
- Udo 4y ago
  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.
zimbatm 4y ago
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.
- FollowingTheDao 4y ago
  > 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.
  - zimbatm 4y ago
    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?
FollowingTheDao 4y ago
> 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.
FollowingTheDao 4y ago
There are going to be so many random up and down votes in this thread... :)
kibwen 4y ago
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.

jerf 4y ago

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.)

eternalban 4y ago
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.
- jerf 4y ago
  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.
sheepscreek 4y ago
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.

krageon 4y ago

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.

tambourine_man 4y ago
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.
- krageon 4y ago
  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.
  - tambourine_man 4y ago
    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.
    - krageon 4y ago
      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.

krageon 4y ago
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.
- mdp2021 4y ago
  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).
  - krageon 4y ago
    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.
    - mdp2021 4y ago
      > 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".