3 ms·

I'm having trouble finding it now but I recall a mostly dead physics forum using LLMs to make new posts under the names of their once prolific users. So this ha

I'm having trouble finding it now but I recall a mostly dead physics forum using LLMs to make new posts under the names of their once prolific users. So this has already happened at least on a small scale. It seems nuts to me shareholders would be happy about a bunch of fake users, at least ones that don't have any money.

BobbyTables2 10mo ago
Remember Twitter a few years ago? Users are $$$. Nobody wants to talk about which are human and which aren’t. It’s all a game of hot potato.
- binary132 10mo ago
  I don’t think advertisers want to spend money for bot clicks.
  - nullocator 10mo ago
    Or maybe they do, because the big open secret in advertising is that they do spend quite a bit of money on exactly that
    - ryandrake 10mo ago
      I don't even think it's a secret anymore, open or otherwise. As long as Vanity Metric Goes Up, it doesn't seem like anyone, anywhere, actually cares how much "economic activity" is fake.
  - Viliam1234 10mo ago
    That's why the social networks don't want to talk about the bots, but they are happy to have them.
  - BobbyTables2 10mo ago
    I suspect it’s the “nobody got fired for buying IBM” mentality. Who in marketing doesn’t want to champion the success of “we got 25% more views this month!”
saalweachter 10mo ago
So I worked on a comparison shopping website. We crawled the Internet, identified stores, found item listings, extracted prices and product details, consolidated results for the same item together, and made the whole thing searchable. And this was the pre-LLM days, so that was all a lot of work, and not "hey magic oracle, please use an amount of compute previously reserved for cancer research to find these fields in this HTML and put them in this JSON format". We never really found a user base, and neither did most of our competitors (one or two of them lasted longer, but I'm not sure any survived to this day). Users basically always just went to Google or Amazon and searched there instead. However, shortly after we ran out of money and laid off most of the company, one of our engineers mastered the basics of SEO, and we discovered that users would click through Google to our site to an item listing, then through to make a purchase at a merchant site, and we became profitable. I suppose we were providing some value in the exchange, since the users were visiting our item listings which displayed the prices from all the various stores selling the item, and not just a naked redirect to Amazon or whatever, but we never turned any significant number of these click-throughs into actual users, and boy howdy was that demoralizing as the person working on the search functionality. Our shareholders had mostly written us off by that point, since comparison shopping had proven itself to not be the explosive growth area they'd hoped it was when investing, but they did get their money back through a modest sale a few years later.
rssoconnor 10mo ago
PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42816284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42816284
- rpigab 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  - aw1621107 10mo ago
    > Before you ask: this quote was made with ChatGPT (GPT-5.2), unmodified, first attempt. Just a heads up in case you didn't know, but generated comments are not allowed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45077654 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45077654
    - rpigab 10mo ago
      Thanks, I wasn't aware.
      - eszed 10mo ago
        I'll understand if dang takes it down, but the heavy (and intentional, I assume) irony makes it one I'd personally keep up. Thanks for posting that.
        rpigab 10mo ago
        The whole plot of Blade Runner is to detect AI so indeed, it is intentional, also I'm surprised ChatGPT managed to create something nice given the difficulty, but I understand HN would become awful in a matter of days if we let AI comments stay.
    - CamperBob2 10mo ago
      I think dang's intention here is to prohibit undisclosed comments posted by either bots or lazy humans, not topical, attributed comments that were generated by models and posted as part of a good-faith discussion by actual users. Can't speak for dang, obviously, but that's the rule I'd make in his shoes.
lazide 10mo ago
They don’t know (and don’t ask questions enough to know!) about the fake users - it’s no one look down. As long as no one figures out it’s all fake, the line can keep going up and to the right and everyone is happy. Anyone who starts asking hard questions may be up first on the chopping block. Unless the line breaks, then bam. Everyone rushes to be the first for the door as the bubble pops.

BobbyTables2 10mo ago

Remember Twitter a few years ago? Users are $$$. Nobody wants to talk about which are human and which aren’t. It’s all a game of hot potato.

binary132 10mo ago
I don’t think advertisers want to spend money for bot clicks.
- nullocator 10mo ago
  Or maybe they do, because the big open secret in advertising is that they do spend quite a bit of money on exactly that
  - ryandrake 10mo ago
    I don't even think it's a secret anymore, open or otherwise. As long as Vanity Metric Goes Up, it doesn't seem like anyone, anywhere, actually cares how much "economic activity" is fake.
- Viliam1234 10mo ago
  That's why the social networks don't want to talk about the bots, but they are happy to have them.
- BobbyTables2 10mo ago
  I suspect it’s the “nobody got fired for buying IBM” mentality. Who in marketing doesn’t want to champion the success of “we got 25% more views this month!”

saalweachter 10mo ago

So I worked on a comparison shopping website. We crawled the Internet, identified stores, found item listings, extracted prices and product details, consolidated results for the same item together, and made the whole thing searchable. And this was the pre-LLM days, so that was all a lot of work, and not "hey magic oracle, please use an amount of compute previously reserved for cancer research to find these fields in this HTML and put them in this JSON format". We never really found a user base, and neither did most of our competitors (one or two of them lasted longer, but I'm not sure any survived to this day). Users basically always just went to Google or Amazon and searched there instead. However, shortly after we ran out of money and laid off most of the company, one of our engineers mastered the basics of SEO, and we discovered that users would click through Google to our site to an item listing, then through to make a purchase at a merchant site, and we became profitable. I suppose we were providing some value in the exchange, since the users were visiting our item listings which displayed the prices from all the various stores selling the item, and not just a naked redirect to Amazon or whatever, but we never turned any significant number of these click-throughs into actual users, and boy howdy was that demoralizing as the person working on the search functionality. Our shareholders had mostly written us off by that point, since comparison shopping had proven itself to not be the explosive growth area they'd hoped it was when investing, but they did get their money back through a modest sale a few years later.

rssoconnor 10mo ago

PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42816284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42816284

rpigab 10mo ago
[flagged]
- aw1621107 10mo ago
  > Before you ask: this quote was made with ChatGPT (GPT-5.2), unmodified, first attempt. Just a heads up in case you didn't know, but generated comments are not allowed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45077654 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45077654
  - rpigab 10mo ago
    Thanks, I wasn't aware.
    - eszed 10mo ago
      I'll understand if dang takes it down, but the heavy (and intentional, I assume) irony makes it one I'd personally keep up. Thanks for posting that.
      - rpigab 10mo ago
        The whole plot of Blade Runner is to detect AI so indeed, it is intentional, also I'm surprised ChatGPT managed to create something nice given the difficulty, but I understand HN would become awful in a matter of days if we let AI comments stay.
  - CamperBob2 10mo ago
    I think dang's intention here is to prohibit undisclosed comments posted by either bots or lazy humans, not topical, attributed comments that were generated by models and posted as part of a good-faith discussion by actual users. Can't speak for dang, obviously, but that's the rule I'd make in his shoes.

lazide 10mo ago

They don’t know (and don’t ask questions enough to know!) about the fake users - it’s no one look down. As long as no one figures out it’s all fake, the line can keep going up and to the right and everyone is happy. Anyone who starts asking hard questions may be up first on the chopping block. Unless the line breaks, then bam. Everyone rushes to be the first for the door as the bubble pops.