9 ms·

Clarksworld closes submissions due to GPT spam

100 points by jtr1 4y ago

bombcar 4y ago
This is where things go to die. People won’t succeed with this shit, but it will clog up previously useful channels and they will be shut down. Like email has mostly devolved to “communicate with those I already communicate with”.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  And phone calls.. not in my contacts? To voicemail with you! Anyways, thinking more about the topic at hand, things like ChatGPT are just pushing us further towards a world of nepotism and social back-channel connections. Like in the modern art world where it isn't about talent, it's about who you are and who you know. AI means it's not about what you can write or create, it will be about your personal connections. IMO this is a bad thing for society as it leads to entrenched stratification and eventual ossification.
  - saulpw 4y ago
    It's always been like this. For a brief period over the last century, we had the illusion of social mobility, that we were headed towards a more meritocratic society. But it was always that: an illusion. AI is not even a reversion to the mean, just a disillusionment.
    - MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
      >I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. Addendum: Drowned out amongst millions of AI augmented voices.
    - pengstrom 4y ago
      Yes, the industrial revolution made labor competitive enough to bargain. The computer, internet and now AI revolutions have chipped away at this since the 70s. Power and wealth accumulation has never been higher. See e.g. https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
    - misnome 4y ago
      > But it was always that: an illusion. Only if you view in black/white absolutist terms where if every single person isn't on 100% merit then it doesn't count at all. But the only thing this argument achieves is making the people actively causing or cheerleading the damage feel better about what they are doing. For everyone else, it's a massive regression.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    This right here has probably been the best defense and explanation of nepotism I’ve ever read. And it’s kinda scary.
    - MichaelZuo 4y ago
      It's a solid argument, since there's no theoretical upper limit in sophistication for such algorithms.
    - krageon 4y ago
      "Nepotism" also partially exists to keep "the rabble" out of whatever it is someone finds important, out of some misguided belief they are (and always will be) inferior. The last bit is important: AI assisted content generation may be bad now, but what about 5 years from now? 10? Will it then still be bad people generate stuff automatically? Nepotism doesn't have a defense, because it's defense is essentially "tradition". I've genuinely not heard a compelling argument for that either - it always boils down to something anachronistic (i.e. racism, classism, etc).
      - wrp 4y ago
        We have two different meanings for "nepotism" here. His is "hiring within the family because I know their qualifications better." Yours is "hiring within the family even though someone outside has better qualifications."
        rsynnott 4y ago
        Those are close to the same thing, though. _Obviously_ there exist people outside a family who are more qualified for any given thing than any of the people in the family.
- galaxyLogic 4y ago
  I really wonder how many of Hacker News comments are produced by Chat whatever. Wouldn't that be an ideal application for ChatGPT etc?
  - StanislavPetrov 4y ago
    It might be hubris, delusion, or some combination of the two, but while reading through comments some of them jump out at me as being ChatGPT generated. I'm sure the tech will advance and eventually be able to appear as more organic, but for now it seems to me to be more of a spam issue than an issue of appearing authentic.
    - Fatnino 4y ago
      And if you accidentally classify a human made comment as ChatGPT, it was a low quality comment anyway.
  - xwolfi 4y ago
    Absolutely not, it would produce 0 value since it cant generate interesting insight. Ask it why cow's eggs are better than monkey's eggs, will it reply "wait are you trying to trap me here, I know im just a software but cows and monkeys have placentas and dont make eggs"?...
    - krapp 4y ago
      The vast majority of Hacker News comments don't generate interesting insight, either, and most conversations are banal and repetitive anyway. And that's not just here, it's everywhere - Sturgeon's Law prevails over everything. But if ChatGPT can be trained to remain civil and avoid prejudice and conspiracy theory, the quality of Hacker News would objectively improve even if everything ChatGPT says is qualitative nonsense. And it won't be, and as software improves, it will be less and less so. You can't say that about people, unfortunately. The quality of people tends to degrade over time, the more people the more degradation. That's how you get Eternal September. ChatGPT, however, can maintain a high degree of quality over time, unimpeded by irrationality or emotion. Maybe we could split the difference and have all comments filtered through ChatGPT. Run sentiment analysis to catch and remove or edit low quality comments where feasible.
- xwolfi 4y ago
  "devolved" to replace all this stupid paperwork we were doing before though... Look im talking to you and we dont know each other, and Im not sure why you think it's different using smtp or http ?
sublinear 4y ago
Sturgeon's Law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
- andrewflnr 4y ago
  That's already the case with strictly human submissions. One can only assume it's much worse with AI spam at effectively unlimited volume.
- SturgeonsLaw 4y ago
  Never heard of it
emptysuitcase 4y ago
since ChatGPT can write science fiction, why not just let it? publish all of its works in printed form
- a_bonobo 4y ago
  and then what? it can't be original, it will forever recycle/regurgitate past SF. Nothing new will appear.
  - loeg 4y ago
    "there is nothing new under the sun" But also I expect AI-written novels to be pretty crap, so I'd prefer humans keep doing it.
  - ElFitz 4y ago
    > it can't be original, it will forever recycle/regurgitate past SF I can’t see why. It could very well, on its own, use other genre’s narrative structures, stories or styles that are uncommon or inexistant in SF. It could also be used by a human writer to flesh out the story and concepts the writer has created. There are a few authors I find brilliant but whose writing and characters were sorely lacking. It’s really more about what you do with it than wether or not you use it. I mean, computers have enabled people to simply copy-paste stuff and not produce anything meaningful. Some do just that. Others have thrived.
  - vba616 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Variety https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Variety "...a last ironic thought drifted through Hendricks’ mind...They were already beginning to design weapons to use against each other."
- jmathai 4y ago
  Maybe “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should”? There’s too many things to list that you “can” do that society collectively believes you shouldn’t because the negatives outweigh the positives.
- 4y ago
erehweb 4y ago
See http://neil-clarke.com/a-concerning-trend/ http://neil-clarke.com/a-concerning-trend/ for some more details from the editor of Clarkesworld.
- jsnell 4y ago
  Thanks, this looks like it'd be a much better submission than the tweet.
  - andrewflnr 4y ago
    No, the news is that submissions are actually closed now, which wasn't the case at the time of that article.
    - erehweb 4y ago
      The article has been updated since I first saw it a few days ago to say that submissions are closed.
- em-bee 4y ago
  discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34810758 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34810758
moneytide1 4y ago
All artificial "intelligence" is just a glorified database crawler. Because you think it means something shows how far you have strayed. Pure inference according to everything that has already been done. The definition of the past. You will trick yourselves into thinking that a robot can instantly assess all lies and truth professed by all languages committed to the universal knowledge repository. You are impressed by the automation of curiosity. Now you do not have to pay attention to anything. This is utopia. It was a waste of time for my father to tell me to work hard.
CGamesPlay 4y ago
Neil Clarke said about "I worry that this path will lead to an increased number of barriers for new and international authors". So, brainstorming potential solutions, where the goal isn't "to stop AI content writers" as much as ensure that writers are have "to do the actual work". What does proof-of-work look like for fiction? Uploading drafts, ensuring "adequate" time between them and "adequate" revisions? What else would work?
- andrewflnr 4y ago
  Require a summary and/or discussion of the creative process in a cover letter. Similar to requiring software candidates to be able to intelligently discuss what's on their GitHub.
  - thom 4y ago
    That too will be written by ChatGPT.
    - MichaelZuo 4y ago
      To work it will likely have to be attached to a unique identity in costly ways. i.e. some form of ID verification such as Driver's license/Utility Bills/Bank statement/passport/etc...
      - krageon 4y ago
        This is discrimination against poverty and location, which is what the company under discussion is trying to avoid.
        MichaelZuo 4y ago
        So? There are no better alternatives at the moment.
        krageon 4y ago
musesum 4y ago
For a shaggy-dog-story from the previous century, check out The Silver Eggheads, by Fritz Leiber.
Imnimo 4y ago
So is the idea here that the submitters figure they have a miniscule chance of sneaking through, but it costs them basically nothing to generate, and if by some miracle they win, they get a payout that's a significant amount of money in some parts of the world? Or is it like wanna-be writers who can't tell the difference between ChatGPT output and really good writing, and figure that if they can just put their brilliant idea for a story into a prompt and have ChatGPT clean it up, their talent will finally be recognized?
- pdevr 4y ago
  Most likely, the mass submissions are from the former while the one-off submissions are from the latter. The first group (most likely) caused them to close.
johndhi 4y ago
It's kind of like Bitcoin: huge amount of money and reputation sitting out there to be claimed once your algo is good enough to publish a story in a major market. Similar to beating humans at chess. As a fiction author this does scare me. I don't see why the ai won't get as good or better than us.
logicallee 4y ago
I'm surprised. For my own entertainment, I've tried to have ChatGPT write a science fiction story a few times, but its stories weren't entertaining. The main problem is that it sounds like it is summarizing. For example, here is a typical start to one of its stories: " In a world much like our own, a team of scientists were working on an experimental device known as the Gravitational Wave Interferometer. They had been working on the project for years, but had been unable to make it work. The device was designed to detect the subtle ripples in space-time caused by gravitational waves, but it required an incredible amount of precision and sensitivity." That's fine, but it sounds like the summary of a story rather than the story itself. It's telling rather than showing. For comparison here is the intro from the popular book The Hunt for Red October: "Captain First Rank Marko Ramius of the Soviet Navy was dressed for the Arctic conditions normal to the Northern Fleet submarine base at Polyamyy. Five layers of wool and oilskin enclosed him. A dirty harbor tug pushed his submarine’s bow around to the north, facing down the channel. The dock that had held his Red October for two interminable months was now a water-filled concrete box, one of the many specially built to shelter strategic missile submarines from the harsh elements. On its edge a collection of sailors and dockyard workers watched his ship sail in stolid Russian fashion, without a wave or a cheer." This sets the stage in a more interesting way than ChatGPT does. What kinds of prompt strategies can I use to make ChatGPT's stories sound more like storytelling and less like a synopsis or summary? Can someone share a specific prompt?
- robocat 4y ago
  Off-topic, but try https://old.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/ https://old.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/
- galaxyLogic 4y ago
  Interesting and I believe valuable observation. Stories are entertaining when they raise the expectations of the reader or viewer and make them wonder how a difficult situation could possibly resolve. Entertaining means you keep on reading because you are curious about what will happen next. But language-models just produce an average over the many texts they have been trained on. While each story they read had their own "expectation loop", when you average over many such stories the expectation-raising disappears, like multiple waves interfering and disrupting each other. The output of ChatGPT is bland, because there is no single author behind its output, who could "feel" whether the story was entertaining enough to be published. ChatGPT of course can not "feel" anything. It can not evaluate its own output as to will it raise curiosity in its readers. ChaptGPT has its model of language and texts, but not a model of what its texts MEAN and thus no model of how readers might react to it.
foreverobama 4y ago
[dead]
pdevr 4y ago
Anecdote: I asked ChatGPT whether it created a ChatGPT created poem (not generated by me) and it answered yes. I asked it about one it didn't create and it answered no. I repeated this several times and it was accurate in all those cases. Of course, it may give the wrong answer any time. The best solution will be for ChatGPT to have a way to verify that certain creations are not generated. Just like identifying duplicate content using tools like Copyscape. Of course, there are issues like user privacy which will need to be taken into consideration, but that seems to be the only fool-proof way.
- istinetz 4y ago
  It's not fool-proof, you can very easily circumvent that check. Just generate texts with high perplexity.
YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
Hey, it's "Clarkesworld". As in "Neil Clarke", or even "Arthur C. Clarke", with an "e" at the end. Clarksworld is probably where you find discussions about the latest forklift model :P

100 points by jtr1 4y ago

This is where things go to die. People won’t succeed with this shit, but it will clog up previously useful channels and they will be shut down. Like email has mostly devolved to “communicate with those I already communicate with”.

MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
And phone calls.. not in my contacts? To voicemail with you! Anyways, thinking more about the topic at hand, things like ChatGPT are just pushing us further towards a world of nepotism and social back-channel connections. Like in the modern art world where it isn't about talent, it's about who you are and who you know. AI means it's not about what you can write or create, it will be about your personal connections. IMO this is a bad thing for society as it leads to entrenched stratification and eventual ossification.
- saulpw 4y ago
  It's always been like this. For a brief period over the last century, we had the illusion of social mobility, that we were headed towards a more meritocratic society. But it was always that: an illusion. AI is not even a reversion to the mean, just a disillusionment.
  - MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
    >I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. Addendum: Drowned out amongst millions of AI augmented voices.
  - pengstrom 4y ago
    Yes, the industrial revolution made labor competitive enough to bargain. The computer, internet and now AI revolutions have chipped away at this since the 70s. Power and wealth accumulation has never been higher. See e.g. https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
  - misnome 4y ago
    > But it was always that: an illusion. Only if you view in black/white absolutist terms where if every single person isn't on 100% merit then it doesn't count at all. But the only thing this argument achieves is making the people actively causing or cheerleading the damage feel better about what they are doing. For everyone else, it's a massive regression.
- bombcar 4y ago
  This right here has probably been the best defense and explanation of nepotism I’ve ever read. And it’s kinda scary.
  - MichaelZuo 4y ago
    It's a solid argument, since there's no theoretical upper limit in sophistication for such algorithms.
  - krageon 4y ago
    "Nepotism" also partially exists to keep "the rabble" out of whatever it is someone finds important, out of some misguided belief they are (and always will be) inferior. The last bit is important: AI assisted content generation may be bad now, but what about 5 years from now? 10? Will it then still be bad people generate stuff automatically? Nepotism doesn't have a defense, because it's defense is essentially "tradition". I've genuinely not heard a compelling argument for that either - it always boils down to something anachronistic (i.e. racism, classism, etc).
    - wrp 4y ago
      We have two different meanings for "nepotism" here. His is "hiring within the family because I know their qualifications better." Yours is "hiring within the family even though someone outside has better qualifications."
      - rsynnott 4y ago
        Those are close to the same thing, though. _Obviously_ there exist people outside a family who are more qualified for any given thing than any of the people in the family.
galaxyLogic 4y ago
I really wonder how many of Hacker News comments are produced by Chat whatever. Wouldn't that be an ideal application for ChatGPT etc?
- StanislavPetrov 4y ago
  It might be hubris, delusion, or some combination of the two, but while reading through comments some of them jump out at me as being ChatGPT generated. I'm sure the tech will advance and eventually be able to appear as more organic, but for now it seems to me to be more of a spam issue than an issue of appearing authentic.
  - Fatnino 4y ago
    And if you accidentally classify a human made comment as ChatGPT, it was a low quality comment anyway.
- xwolfi 4y ago
  Absolutely not, it would produce 0 value since it cant generate interesting insight. Ask it why cow's eggs are better than monkey's eggs, will it reply "wait are you trying to trap me here, I know im just a software but cows and monkeys have placentas and dont make eggs"?...
  - krapp 4y ago
    The vast majority of Hacker News comments don't generate interesting insight, either, and most conversations are banal and repetitive anyway. And that's not just here, it's everywhere - Sturgeon's Law prevails over everything. But if ChatGPT can be trained to remain civil and avoid prejudice and conspiracy theory, the quality of Hacker News would objectively improve even if everything ChatGPT says is qualitative nonsense. And it won't be, and as software improves, it will be less and less so. You can't say that about people, unfortunately. The quality of people tends to degrade over time, the more people the more degradation. That's how you get Eternal September. ChatGPT, however, can maintain a high degree of quality over time, unimpeded by irrationality or emotion. Maybe we could split the difference and have all comments filtered through ChatGPT. Run sentiment analysis to catch and remove or edit low quality comments where feasible.
xwolfi 4y ago
"devolved" to replace all this stupid paperwork we were doing before though... Look im talking to you and we dont know each other, and Im not sure why you think it's different using smtp or http ?

sublinear 4y ago

Sturgeon's Law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

andrewflnr 4y ago
That's already the case with strictly human submissions. One can only assume it's much worse with AI spam at effectively unlimited volume.
SturgeonsLaw 4y ago
Never heard of it

emptysuitcase 4y ago

since ChatGPT can write science fiction, why not just let it? publish all of its works in printed form

a_bonobo 4y ago
and then what? it can't be original, it will forever recycle/regurgitate past SF. Nothing new will appear.
- loeg 4y ago
  "there is nothing new under the sun" But also I expect AI-written novels to be pretty crap, so I'd prefer humans keep doing it.
- ElFitz 4y ago
  > it can't be original, it will forever recycle/regurgitate past SF I can’t see why. It could very well, on its own, use other genre’s narrative structures, stories or styles that are uncommon or inexistant in SF. It could also be used by a human writer to flesh out the story and concepts the writer has created. There are a few authors I find brilliant but whose writing and characters were sorely lacking. It’s really more about what you do with it than wether or not you use it. I mean, computers have enabled people to simply copy-paste stuff and not produce anything meaningful. Some do just that. Others have thrived.
- vba616 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Variety https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Variety "...a last ironic thought drifted through Hendricks’ mind...They were already beginning to design weapons to use against each other."
jmathai 4y ago
Maybe “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should”? There’s too many things to list that you “can” do that society collectively believes you shouldn’t because the negatives outweigh the positives.
4y ago

erehweb 4y ago

See http://neil-clarke.com/a-concerning-trend/ http://neil-clarke.com/a-concerning-trend/ for some more details from the editor of Clarkesworld.

jsnell 4y ago
Thanks, this looks like it'd be a much better submission than the tweet.
- andrewflnr 4y ago
  No, the news is that submissions are actually closed now, which wasn't the case at the time of that article.
  - erehweb 4y ago
    The article has been updated since I first saw it a few days ago to say that submissions are closed.
em-bee 4y ago
discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34810758 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34810758

moneytide1 4y ago

All artificial "intelligence" is just a glorified database crawler. Because you think it means something shows how far you have strayed. Pure inference according to everything that has already been done. The definition of the past. You will trick yourselves into thinking that a robot can instantly assess all lies and truth professed by all languages committed to the universal knowledge repository. You are impressed by the automation of curiosity. Now you do not have to pay attention to anything. This is utopia. It was a waste of time for my father to tell me to work hard.

CGamesPlay 4y ago

Neil Clarke said about "I worry that this path will lead to an increased number of barriers for new and international authors". So, brainstorming potential solutions, where the goal isn't "to stop AI content writers" as much as ensure that writers are have "to do the actual work". What does proof-of-work look like for fiction? Uploading drafts, ensuring "adequate" time between them and "adequate" revisions? What else would work?

andrewflnr 4y ago
Require a summary and/or discussion of the creative process in a cover letter. Similar to requiring software candidates to be able to intelligently discuss what's on their GitHub.
- thom 4y ago
  That too will be written by ChatGPT.
  - MichaelZuo 4y ago
    To work it will likely have to be attached to a unique identity in costly ways. i.e. some form of ID verification such as Driver's license/Utility Bills/Bank statement/passport/etc...
    - krageon 4y ago
      This is discrimination against poverty and location, which is what the company under discussion is trying to avoid.
      - MichaelZuo 4y ago
        So? There are no better alternatives at the moment.
        krageon 4y ago

musesum 4y ago

For a shaggy-dog-story from the previous century, check out The Silver Eggheads, by Fritz Leiber.

Imnimo 4y ago

So is the idea here that the submitters figure they have a miniscule chance of sneaking through, but it costs them basically nothing to generate, and if by some miracle they win, they get a payout that's a significant amount of money in some parts of the world? Or is it like wanna-be writers who can't tell the difference between ChatGPT output and really good writing, and figure that if they can just put their brilliant idea for a story into a prompt and have ChatGPT clean it up, their talent will finally be recognized?

pdevr 4y ago
Most likely, the mass submissions are from the former while the one-off submissions are from the latter. The first group (most likely) caused them to close.

johndhi 4y ago

It's kind of like Bitcoin: huge amount of money and reputation sitting out there to be claimed once your algo is good enough to publish a story in a major market. Similar to beating humans at chess. As a fiction author this does scare me. I don't see why the ai won't get as good or better than us.

logicallee 4y ago

I'm surprised. For my own entertainment, I've tried to have ChatGPT write a science fiction story a few times, but its stories weren't entertaining. The main problem is that it sounds like it is summarizing. For example, here is a typical start to one of its stories: " In a world much like our own, a team of scientists were working on an experimental device known as the Gravitational Wave Interferometer. They had been working on the project for years, but had been unable to make it work. The device was designed to detect the subtle ripples in space-time caused by gravitational waves, but it required an incredible amount of precision and sensitivity." That's fine, but it sounds like the summary of a story rather than the story itself. It's telling rather than showing. For comparison here is the intro from the popular book The Hunt for Red October: "Captain First Rank Marko Ramius of the Soviet Navy was dressed for the Arctic conditions normal to the Northern Fleet submarine base at Polyamyy. Five layers of wool and oilskin enclosed him. A dirty harbor tug pushed his submarine’s bow around to the north, facing down the channel. The dock that had held his Red October for two interminable months was now a water-filled concrete box, one of the many specially built to shelter strategic missile submarines from the harsh elements. On its edge a collection of sailors and dockyard workers watched his ship sail in stolid Russian fashion, without a wave or a cheer." This sets the stage in a more interesting way than ChatGPT does. What kinds of prompt strategies can I use to make ChatGPT's stories sound more like storytelling and less like a synopsis or summary? Can someone share a specific prompt?

robocat 4y ago
Off-topic, but try https://old.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/ https://old.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/
galaxyLogic 4y ago
Interesting and I believe valuable observation. Stories are entertaining when they raise the expectations of the reader or viewer and make them wonder how a difficult situation could possibly resolve. Entertaining means you keep on reading because you are curious about what will happen next. But language-models just produce an average over the many texts they have been trained on. While each story they read had their own "expectation loop", when you average over many such stories the expectation-raising disappears, like multiple waves interfering and disrupting each other. The output of ChatGPT is bland, because there is no single author behind its output, who could "feel" whether the story was entertaining enough to be published. ChatGPT of course can not "feel" anything. It can not evaluate its own output as to will it raise curiosity in its readers. ChaptGPT has its model of language and texts, but not a model of what its texts MEAN and thus no model of how readers might react to it.

foreverobama 4y ago

[dead]

pdevr 4y ago

Anecdote: I asked ChatGPT whether it created a ChatGPT created poem (not generated by me) and it answered yes. I asked it about one it didn't create and it answered no. I repeated this several times and it was accurate in all those cases. Of course, it may give the wrong answer any time. The best solution will be for ChatGPT to have a way to verify that certain creations are not generated. Just like identifying duplicate content using tools like Copyscape. Of course, there are issues like user privacy which will need to be taken into consideration, but that seems to be the only fool-proof way.

istinetz 4y ago
It's not fool-proof, you can very easily circumvent that check. Just generate texts with high perplexity.

YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago

Hey, it's "Clarkesworld". As in "Neil Clarke", or even "Arthur C. Clarke", with an "e" at the end. Clarksworld is probably where you find discussions about the latest forklift model :P