3 ms·

The community already seems to have established a policy that copy pasting a block of LLM text into a comment will get you downvoted into oblivion immediately.

aspenmayer 2y ago
That rubric only works until sufficiently advanced LLM-generated HN posts are indistinguishable from human-generated HN posts. It also doesn’t speak to the permission or lack thereof of training LLMs on HN content, which was another main point of OP.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- JavierFlores09 2y ago
  > That rubric only works until sufficiently advanced LLM-generated HN posts are indistinguishable from human-generated HN posts. if a comment made by a LLM is indistinguishable from a normal one, it'd be impossible to moderate anyway unless one starts tracking people across comments and see the consistency of their replies and overall stance so I don't particularly think it is useful to worry about people who will go the extra length to go undetected
  - aspenmayer 2y ago
    > if a comment made by a LLM is indistinguishable from a normal one, it'd be impossible to moderate anyway unless one starts tracking people across comments and see the consistency of their replies and overall stance so I don't particularly think it is useful to worry about people who will go the extra length to go undetected The existence of rule-breakers is not itself an argument against a rules-based order.
  - tredre3 2y ago
    HN's guidelines aren't "laws" to be "enforced", they're a list of unwelcome behaviors. There is value in setting expectations for participants in a community, even if some will choose to break them and get away with it.
    - bawolff 2y ago
      If comments by LLMs were actually as valuable & insightful as human comments there would be no need for the rule. The rule is in place because they usually aren't. Relavent xkcd https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
- majormajor 2y ago
  That's assuming a certain outcome: indistinguishable posts. Some would say LLM-generated posts will eventually be superior information-wise. In which case possibly the behavior will change naturally. Or maybe they don't get there any time soon and stay in the uncanny valley for a long time. I'm kinda fine with a "if you can't be bothered to even change the standard-corporate-BS-tone of your copypaste, you get downvoted" - for all I know some people might be more clever with their prompting to get something less crap-sounding, and then they'll just live or die on the coherence of the comment.
- redox99 2y ago
  It's pretty trivial to finetune an LLM to output posts that are indistinguishable.
Der_Einzige 2y ago
Bold of you to assume that you will have any idea at all that an LLM generated a particular comment. If I take a trick like those recommend by the authors of min_p (high temperature + min_p)[1], I do a great job of escaping the "slop" phrasing that is normally detectable and indicative of an LLM. Even more-so if I use the anti-slop sampler[2]. LLMs are already more creative than humans are today, they're already better than humans at most kinds of writing, and they are coming to a comment section near you. Good luck proving I didn't use an LLM to generate this comment. What if I did? I claim that I might as well have. Maybe I did? :) [1] https://openreview.net/forum?id=FBkpCyujtS https://openreview.net/forum?id=FBkpCyujtS [2] https://github.com/sam-paech/antislop-sampler https://github.com/sam-paech/antislop-sampler, https://github.com/sam-paech/antislop-sampler/blob/main/slop_phrase_prob_adjustments.json https://github.com/sam-paech/antislop-sampler/blob/main/slop...
- bjourne 2y ago
  Fascinating that very minor variations on established sampling techniques still generate papers. :) Afaik, neither top-p nor top-k sampling has conclusively been proven superior to good old-fashioned temperature sampling. Certainly, recent sampling techniques can make the text "sound different", but not necessarily read better. I.e., you're replacing one kind of bot generated "slop" with another.
  - Der_Einzige 2y ago
    Just FYI. This paper is currently ranked in the top 10 papers in all of ICLR, out of 12000 submissions. It's telling that peer reviewers believe that it deserves to be highlighted.
    - bjourne 2y ago
      Maybe I'm wrong then. But there has been many slightly-different-sampling-method papers in the past that showed impressive results which were then difficult to replicate on other models or experimental setups.
fenomas 2y ago
Sure, and I think the reason is that whatever else they are, LLM outputs are disposable. Posting them here is like posting outputs from Math.random() - anyone who wants such outputs can easily generate their own.

aspenmayer 2y ago

That rubric only works until sufficiently advanced LLM-generated HN posts are indistinguishable from human-generated HN posts. It also doesn’t speak to the permission or lack thereof of training LLMs on HN content, which was another main point of OP.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
JavierFlores09 2y ago
> That rubric only works until sufficiently advanced LLM-generated HN posts are indistinguishable from human-generated HN posts. if a comment made by a LLM is indistinguishable from a normal one, it'd be impossible to moderate anyway unless one starts tracking people across comments and see the consistency of their replies and overall stance so I don't particularly think it is useful to worry about people who will go the extra length to go undetected
- aspenmayer 2y ago
  > if a comment made by a LLM is indistinguishable from a normal one, it'd be impossible to moderate anyway unless one starts tracking people across comments and see the consistency of their replies and overall stance so I don't particularly think it is useful to worry about people who will go the extra length to go undetected The existence of rule-breakers is not itself an argument against a rules-based order.
- tredre3 2y ago
  HN's guidelines aren't "laws" to be "enforced", they're a list of unwelcome behaviors. There is value in setting expectations for participants in a community, even if some will choose to break them and get away with it.
  - bawolff 2y ago
    If comments by LLMs were actually as valuable & insightful as human comments there would be no need for the rule. The rule is in place because they usually aren't. Relavent xkcd https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
majormajor 2y ago
That's assuming a certain outcome: indistinguishable posts. Some would say LLM-generated posts will eventually be superior information-wise. In which case possibly the behavior will change naturally. Or maybe they don't get there any time soon and stay in the uncanny valley for a long time. I'm kinda fine with a "if you can't be bothered to even change the standard-corporate-BS-tone of your copypaste, you get downvoted" - for all I know some people might be more clever with their prompting to get something less crap-sounding, and then they'll just live or die on the coherence of the comment.
redox99 2y ago
It's pretty trivial to finetune an LLM to output posts that are indistinguishable.

Der_Einzige 2y ago

Bold of you to assume that you will have any idea at all that an LLM generated a particular comment. If I take a trick like those recommend by the authors of min_p (high temperature + min_p)[1], I do a great job of escaping the "slop" phrasing that is normally detectable and indicative of an LLM. Even more-so if I use the anti-slop sampler[2]. LLMs are already more creative than humans are today, they're already better than humans at most kinds of writing, and they are coming to a comment section near you. Good luck proving I didn't use an LLM to generate this comment. What if I did? I claim that I might as well have. Maybe I did? :) [1] https://openreview.net/forum?id=FBkpCyujtS https://openreview.net/forum?id=FBkpCyujtS [2] https://github.com/sam-paech/antislop-sampler https://github.com/sam-paech/antislop-sampler, https://github.com/sam-paech/antislop-sampler/blob/main/slop_phrase_prob_adjustments.json https://github.com/sam-paech/antislop-sampler/blob/main/slop...

bjourne 2y ago
Fascinating that very minor variations on established sampling techniques still generate papers. :) Afaik, neither top-p nor top-k sampling has conclusively been proven superior to good old-fashioned temperature sampling. Certainly, recent sampling techniques can make the text "sound different", but not necessarily read better. I.e., you're replacing one kind of bot generated "slop" with another.
- Der_Einzige 2y ago
  Just FYI. This paper is currently ranked in the top 10 papers in all of ICLR, out of 12000 submissions. It's telling that peer reviewers believe that it deserves to be highlighted.
  - bjourne 2y ago
    Maybe I'm wrong then. But there has been many slightly-different-sampling-method papers in the past that showed impressive results which were then difficult to replicate on other models or experimental setups.

fenomas 2y ago

Sure, and I think the reason is that whatever else they are, LLM outputs are disposable. Posting them here is like posting outputs from Math.random() - anyone who wants such outputs can easily generate their own.