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>And from what ChatGPT tells me, it's likely that this would have been an investment with a positive ROI. Wonderful. It's interesting to me that, in just a fe

>And from what ChatGPT tells me, it's likely that this would have been an investment with a positive ROI. Wonderful. It's interesting to me that, in just a few months, I've already developed muscle memory for checking whether or not things I read online are machine-generated. The first thing I do on any website is search for "GPT", "Bing", and "AI" and stop reading if I find them. Reading someone's writing is an exercise in trust. If they claim something, I have to be able to trust that they have done enough of their homework to back it up. If they cite a source, I have to be able to trust it says what they claim. Otherwise what's the point? If I can't rely on the author, then reading their writing requires checking everything they've said. Their writing is useless to me since I'll need to do my own research anyway. If you write something and ask me to read it, you are asking me to trust that you have done the legwork. If you really just typed it into ChatGPT, that's more than just stupid. It's a betrayal.

gerikson 3y ago
At least this author states openly that they used ChatGPT. In a couple of months such honesty will be rare.
- coldtea 3y ago
  Not to mention, on a close timeframe, most texts not even having an author aside from ChatGPT plus some glue code to post them as "legit" articles and blogs and social media comments and such.
MostlyStable 3y ago
It's weird to me that you are conflating asking GPT a question related to your article and writing your article. Would you have a similar reaction if he had said "according to google"? There does not seem to be any evidence at all that the author didn't write this entire article, and the fact that they explicitly reference that they consulted GPT on some related point seems further evidence that they _didn't_ have GPT write it (I think if they _had_ had GPT write it, they would have avoided mentioning GPT at all)
- howenterprisey 3y ago
  Not them, but no, I wouldn't have a similar reaction if it were "according to google", because in the context of a blog posted to HN I'd expect it to mean a cursory bit of research, which is way better.
  - MostlyStable 3y ago
    In the very near future (<5 years in my opinion), nearly all search requests are going to be mediated by a GPT like AI agent. It's already true that Bing search is better for some kinds of searches than a standard google search (which has become increasingly shit over the past few years as Google has lost the SEO war to blogspam). But even if we aren't quite there yet, referencing that you asked a related question to GPT in a an article you have written is still not fundamentally different than doing some research on google. GPT will still give bad answers to certain kinds of questions (and while the author didn't say what they asked or what exactly GPT responded, my best guess is that this was a pretty useless thing to ask GPT), but you can also find some real stupid shit on Google. That sentence was almost more rhetorical flourish than anything else, and while it didn't land particularly well for me personally, I find it _far_ weirder that the commenter I replied to went off about authorship and trust.
    - howenterprisey 3y ago
      GPT and Google results are extremely fundamentally different. I can use various heuristics to evaluate how trustworthy a site I find on Google is, and if I need to I can do any amount of research on the site itself, who wrote it, etc (and if I can't, then that's useful information too). In contrast, GPT has no indication of where it got anything from, but even that's giving too much credit. It's just stringing words together. Whether it's wrong or right, I have no way of knowing. If I'm reading a website and I know the first thing it says is for sure correct (or incorrect) then I can judge the rest of it appropriately. That's absolutely not the case for GPT, because the correctness of each sentence is relatively (entirely?) statistically independent. That's only the beginning of it. There are so many more ways that doing actual research is superior; there's just no contest. I will be horrified if most searches are mediated by LLMs in the future and I will do my best to never use such a search product. (I use Kagi myself and haven't had a problem yet.)

gerikson 3y ago

At least this author states openly that they used ChatGPT. In a couple of months such honesty will be rare.

coldtea 3y ago
Not to mention, on a close timeframe, most texts not even having an author aside from ChatGPT plus some glue code to post them as "legit" articles and blogs and social media comments and such.

MostlyStable 3y ago

It's weird to me that you are conflating asking GPT a question related to your article and writing your article. Would you have a similar reaction if he had said "according to google"? There does not seem to be any evidence at all that the author didn't write this entire article, and the fact that they explicitly reference that they consulted GPT on some related point seems further evidence that they _didn't_ have GPT write it (I think if they _had_ had GPT write it, they would have avoided mentioning GPT at all)

howenterprisey 3y ago
Not them, but no, I wouldn't have a similar reaction if it were "according to google", because in the context of a blog posted to HN I'd expect it to mean a cursory bit of research, which is way better.
- MostlyStable 3y ago
  In the very near future (<5 years in my opinion), nearly all search requests are going to be mediated by a GPT like AI agent. It's already true that Bing search is better for some kinds of searches than a standard google search (which has become increasingly shit over the past few years as Google has lost the SEO war to blogspam). But even if we aren't quite there yet, referencing that you asked a related question to GPT in a an article you have written is still not fundamentally different than doing some research on google. GPT will still give bad answers to certain kinds of questions (and while the author didn't say what they asked or what exactly GPT responded, my best guess is that this was a pretty useless thing to ask GPT), but you can also find some real stupid shit on Google. That sentence was almost more rhetorical flourish than anything else, and while it didn't land particularly well for me personally, I find it _far_ weirder that the commenter I replied to went off about authorship and trust.
  - howenterprisey 3y ago
    GPT and Google results are extremely fundamentally different. I can use various heuristics to evaluate how trustworthy a site I find on Google is, and if I need to I can do any amount of research on the site itself, who wrote it, etc (and if I can't, then that's useful information too). In contrast, GPT has no indication of where it got anything from, but even that's giving too much credit. It's just stringing words together. Whether it's wrong or right, I have no way of knowing. If I'm reading a website and I know the first thing it says is for sure correct (or incorrect) then I can judge the rest of it appropriately. That's absolutely not the case for GPT, because the correctness of each sentence is relatively (entirely?) statistically independent. That's only the beginning of it. There are so many more ways that doing actual research is superior; there's just no contest. I will be horrified if most searches are mediated by LLMs in the future and I will do my best to never use such a search product. (I use Kagi myself and haven't had a problem yet.)