6 ms·

I believe the issue of proving who is and who isn't really human on the Internet will be a really important issue in the coming years, especially without sacrif

by iammjm 7mo ago

I believe the issue of proving who is and who isn't really human on the Internet will be a really important issue in the coming years, especially without sacrificing people's right to privacy and anonymity in the process.

sebastiennight 7mo ago
> especially without sacrificing people's right to privacy and anonymity in the process I'm afraid the ship has sailed on this one. What other solutions have you heard of apart from the dystopian eyeball-scanning, ID-uploading, biometrics-profiling obvious ones? (knowing that of course, neither of those actually solve the problem)
jsheard 7mo ago
Sam Altman would love to sell you a solution to the fire that he dumped gasoline on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_(blockchain) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_(blockchain)
- pear01 7mo ago
  One should highlight the best part of this: https://www.toolsforhumanity.com/orb https://www.toolsforhumanity.com/orb An orb that scans your eyeballs for "proof of human".
  - tomalbrc 7mo ago
    I fully expected this to be a meme. Eerie
  - antonvs 7mo ago
    Negative, I am a meat popsicle
  - rationalist 7mo ago
    You just need to pay someone 1 cent every time they scan their eye for you. You will have people sitting at home and giving their eye scans to AIs to use.
    - SchemaLoad 7mo ago
      You'd still burn through IDs. Eventually the people selling their ID would just end up blacklisted from signing up for new accounts.
- levkk 7mo ago
  It's not clear to me how this is verifiable without constant hardware supervision. Even that'll get cracked, just like DVD encryption back in the day. You almost need dedicated hardware that can't run any other software except a mechanical keyboard and make it communicate over an analog medium - something terribly expensive and inconvenient for AI farms to duplicate.
  - intrasight 7mo ago
    I started promoting the idea of hardware verification about 6 years ago. Didn't get any traction and I doubt I ever will. I think Apple is the only company that would even be able to do that. You have to control the full stack to the pixels or speaker.
  - degamad 7mo ago
    One physical robot with four wheels, a camera, and a 101 up/down "fingers" to match the keyboard can roll between physical machines and type on mechanical hardware keyboards. This brings the ceiling of how many accounts you can control down to the number of computers you have, but that's not a high price to pay.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- shit_game 7mo ago
  This issue (human attestation) is the product of these AI companies. They are poisoning the well, only to sell the cure. This may not have initially been the plan of many of these companies, but it is the eventual end goal of all of them. Very similar to war profiteers, selling both the problem and the solution simultaneously has yet to be illegalized, but has long been masterfully capitalized, and will be vigourously because nobody will stop it. Years ago (around 2020, when GPT-2 and 3 became publicly available) I noticed and was incredibly critical of how prevalent LLM-generated content was on reddit. I was permanently banned for "abusing reports" for reporting AI-generated comments as spam. Before that, I had posted about how I believed that the the fight against bots was over because the uncanny valley of text generation had been crossed; prior to the public availability of LLMs, most spam/bot comments were either shotgunned scripts that are easily blockable by the most rudimentary of spam filters, generated gibberish created by markov chains, or simply old scraped comments being reposted. The landscape of bot operation at the time largely relied on gaming human interaction, which required carefuly gaming temporal-relevance of text content, coherence of text content (in relation to comment chains), and the most basic attempt at appearing to be organic. After LLMs became publicly available, text content that was temporally, contextually, and coherently relevant could be generated instantly for free. This removed practically every non-platform-imposed friction for a bot to be successful on reddit (and to generalize, anywhere that people interact). Now the onus of determining what is and isn't organic interaction is squarely on the platform, which is a difficult problem because now bot operators have had much of their work freed up, and can solely focus on gaming platform heuristics instead of also having to game human perception. This is where AI companies come in to monetize the disaster they have created; by offering fingerprinting services for content they generate, detection services for content made by themselves and others, and estimations of human authenticity for content of any form. All while they continue to sell their services that contradict these objectives, and after having stolen literally everything that has ever been on the internet to accomplish this. These people are evil. Not these companies - they are legal constructions that don't think or feel or act. These people are evil.
agile-gift0262 7mo ago
just scan your eye in this orb to prove you are human. I'll give you some sh*tcoins in excgange
Asmod4n 7mo ago
you could sell physical items at any store where you have to show your ID and you get one for the age group you are. that kills two birds with one stone, you can then show everywhere online you are human and how old you are without the services needing any personal information about you, and the sellers don't know what you use that id tag for.
- MattRix 7mo ago
  what’s to keep people from selling or giving away those id tags? seems like a nefarious entity could buy them in bulk
  - close04 7mo ago
    Same thing that keeps me from letting my agent do the online talking for me. That is to say… nothing.
  - Asmod4n 7mo ago
    law enforcement.
  - vova_hn2 7mo ago
    It's already sorta happening with SIM-cards/phone numbers that are sometimes used for similar purposes.
- stetrain 7mo ago
  I'll sell you my proof-of-human-age badge for $1,000.
  - Dylan16807 7mo ago
    I would be overjoyed if a human-level amount of spam cost $1000 per year-or-until-caught.
- lich_king 7mo ago
  People who are posting AI comments or setting up AI bots are... people. They can show their ID. If a website owner doesn't have a way to ban that specific human and the bad guy can always get another voucher, it's sort of meaningless. In fact, even if you can ban the human for life, I'm not sure it solves anything. There are billions of people out there and there's money to be made by monetizing attention. AI-generated content is a way to do that, so there's plenty of takers who don't mind the risk of getting booted from some platform once in a blue moon if it makes them $5k/month without requiring any effort or skill.
khazhoux 7mo ago
[flagged]
- vova_hn2 7mo ago
  People seem yo be unable to read your irony...
  - floxy 7mo ago
    Yo! Apparently not enough em-dashes or bullet points.
  - blast 7mo ago
    The joke has been old for a while already.
    - khazhoux 7mo ago
      I like to think mine brought a certain je ne sais quoi to the public discourse.
- skeledrew 7mo ago
  Why?
munk-a 7mo ago
I'm going to guess we'll eventually settle onto a psuedo-anonymous cert system like HTTPS where some companies are entrusted with verification and if that company says "That's definitely a human" it'll fly - not a great solution, of course, but I really can't see a non-chain-of-custody/trust based approach to the problem and those might only slightly compromise anonymity in optimal scenarios but some compromise is inevitable.
safog 7mo ago
I hope I'm wrong but I don't think a privacy friendly alternative is going to exist. It's going to go the way of show me your drivers license to use my site.
- k33n 7mo ago
  That is exactly what will happen. The sad thing is, it needs to happen. I've found myself advocating for this lately, when 10 years ago, I wouldn't have even considered taking that position. If Web3-like session-signing had taken off enough to become OS or even browser-native, we would have had a fighting chance of remaining mostly anonymous. But that just didn't happen, and isn't going to happen. Mostly because fraud ruined Web3.
  - MaKey 7mo ago
    >The sad thing is, it needs to happen. No, it doesn't.
    - k33n 7mo ago
      There's literally no other way to combat rampant botting, child abuse, and nation-state originating disinformation campaigns and the intentional creation of public discord.
      - MaKey 7mo ago
        That's a false dichotomy. There are other possible approaches to address these issues that don't include ID verification. It also isn't the golden solution, verified accounts could still be stolen or bought.
        k33n 7mo ago
        Then provide a better solution to the market. I doubt you can, but you never know.
      - nyc_data_geek1 7mo ago
WD-42 7mo ago
Will it be? Or is the solution to move to smaller, trusted networks where there's less need for proof. Unfortunately I think the age of large scale open discussion forums like HN is coming to an end.
- gdulli 7mo ago
  The utility of those larger sites is coming to an end, but most people aren't discerning or ambitious enough to leave and seek out the smaller places you mentioned. Places like this will remain but will join Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter as shadows of their prior useful selves. The smaller, better sites won't have to worry about attracting the masses and therefore worsening, because the masses have finally settled.
- thewebguyd 7mo ago
  I think this is the most likely and best path. There's no stopping the flood of bots, the dead internet theory is beyond just a theory at this point. Best we can do, for the internet and ourselves, is to move away from it and into smaller networks that can be more effectively moderated, and where there is still a level of "human verification" before someone gets invited to participate. I don't like what that will do to being able to find information publicly, though. The big advantage of internet forums (that have all but disappeared into private discords) is search ability/discoverability. Ran into a problem, or have a question about some super niche project or hobby? Good chance someone else on the net also has it and made a post about it somewhere, and the post & answers are public. Moving more and more into private communities removes that, and that is a great loss IMO.
  - bluefirebrand 7mo ago
    > Moving more and more into private communities removes that, and that is a great loss IMO It is a great loss. Unfortunately this is a result of unchecked greed and an attitude of technological progress at any cost. Frankly we enabled this abuse by naively trying to maintain a free and open internet for people. Maybe we should have been much more aggressively closed off from the start, and not used the internet to share so freely.
toomuchtodo 7mo ago
I like Mitchell's Vouch idea. At the end of the day, it's all about trust. Anything else is an abstraction attempting to replicate some spectrum of trust. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46930961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46930961 https://github.com/mitchellh/vouch https://github.com/mitchellh/vouch
- grufkork 7mo ago
  I think we’ll see a return to smaller groups and implementing a lot of systems the way we do it IRL. I think you could definitely do a more fine-grained system that progressively adds less score to contacts the further away they are. In combination with some type of accumulating reputation system, you’d have both a force to keep out unknown IDs, but also a reason for one to stick to their current ID even though it’s anonymous. Adding this type of rep system would destroy a lot of what is so cool about the internet though. There’d probably be segregation based on rep if it’s very visible, new IDs drowning in a sea of noise. Being anonymous but with a record isn’t the same as posting for the very first time as a completely blank identity and still being given an audience. Making online comms more like real life would alleviate some problems but would also lose part of the reason they’re used in the first place. I don’t see much any other way to do it besides maybe a state-provided anonymous identity provider (though that’s risky for a number of reasons), but it’s going to be sad to see things go.
shadowgovt 7mo ago
If it becomes one, then that will be the end of sites like Hacker News. This site, at its core, is fundamentally too low-bandwidth, too text-only, and too hands-off-moderated to be able to shoulder the burden of distinguishing real human-sourced dialog from text generated by machines that are optimized to generate dialog that looks human-sourced. Expect the consequence to be that the experience you are having right now will drastically shift. My personal guess: sites like this will slop up and human beings will ship out, going to sites where they have some mechanism for trust establishment, even if that mechanism is as simple and lo-fi as "The only people who can connect to this site are ones the admin, who is Steve and we all know Steve, personally set up an account for." This has, of course, sacrificed anonymity. But I fundamentally don't see an attestation-of-humanity model that doesn't sacrifice anonymity at some layer; the whole point of anonymity on the Internet was that nobody knew you were a dog (or, in this case, a lobster), and if we now care deeply about a commenter's nephropid (or canid) qualities, we'll probably have to sacrifice that feature. I'd rather keep the feature, pesonally.
aprentic 7mo ago
I think we're going to have to make some choices. A completely anonymous stranger has no way to prove that they're human that can't be imitated by an AI. We've even seen that, in some cases, AIs can look more human to humans than real humans do. The only solution I can think of to that problem is some sort of provenance system. Even before AI, if some random person told me a thing, I'd ignore them; If my most trusted friend told me something, I'd believe them. We're going to need a digital equivalent. If I see a post/article/comment I need my tech to automatically check the author and rank it based on their position in my trust network. I don't necessarily need to know their identity, but I do need to know their identity relative to me.
- OkayPhysicist 7mo ago
  Reputation tracking is the key. The most simple option is open-invite invite-only spaces: Any user can invite more users, but only users with an invite can participate. Most Discord servers work like this, secret societies like the Oddfellows do, as does the other site. If you keep track of the invite tree, you can "prune" it as needed to reduce moderation load: low quality users don't tend to be the source of high-quality users, and in the cases where they are, those high quality users tend find other people willing to vouch for them faster than their inviter catches a ban.
  - aprentic 7mo ago
    The open-invite system works well in many cases. It works particularly well in-person but even there you can get drift over time. Our fraternity unanimously agreed on every single initiate who joined; the cohort today is still very different from the one 20 years ago. In online systems the scales quickly get too big for open-invite. There needs to be a way to automatically update the trust network at a fine grain. The one that jumps to mind is an inference system; when I +/- a comment, I'm really noting that I trust or distrust the author. It can be general or on a specific topic (eg I trust the author to tell the truth or I trust the author to make me laugh). I could also infer that other people with similar trust patterns are likely trustworthy. And I could likely infer that people who are trusted by people I trust are trustworthy.
  - 7mo ago
wvenable 7mo ago
I don't think the real issue is LLM posts. The issue with low quality on the Internet has always been quantity. The problem always has been humans who post too much, humans that use software to post too much, and now it's humans who use LLMs to post too much. The problem with a medium that is completely free and unrestricted is that whomever posts the most sort of wins. I could post this opinion 30-40 times in this thread, using bots and alternative accounts, and completely move the discussion to be only this. Someone using an LLM is craft a reply is not a problem on it's own. Using it craft a low-effort reply in 3 seconds just to get out is the problem.
- ffsm8 7mo ago
  If you had the LLM write the comment, then it wasn't your thoughts. I sometimes wonder if people aren't forgetting why we're on this platform. The goal is to have an interesting discourse and maybe grow as a human by broadening your horizon. The likelihood of that happening with llms talking for you is basically nil, hence... Why even go through the motion at that point? It's not like you get anything for upvotes on HN
  - wvenable 7mo ago
    > If you had the LLM write the comment, then it wasn't your thoughts. But what if I provided the LLM my thoughts? That's actually how I use LLMs in my life -- I provide it with my thoughts and it generates things from those thoughts. Now if I'm just giving it your comment and asking it to reply, then yes, those aren't my thoughts. Why would I do that? I think the answer goes back to my original point. If I'm telling you my thoughts and then you go and tell a friend those thoughts, would you say those are still my thoughts even though I wasn't the one expressing them directly to your friend?
    - meatmanek 7mo ago
      I like to think about it in terms of output-to-prompt ratio. For HN comments, I think an output ratio of 1 or less is _probably_ fine. Examples: - translating (relatively) literally from one language to another would be ~1:1. - automatic spelling/grammar correction is ~1:1 - Using an LLM to help you find a concise way of expressing what you mean, i.e. giving it extra content to help it suggest a way of phrasing something that has the connotation you want, would be <1:1 Expansion (output > prompt) is where it gets problematic, at least for HN comments: if you give it an 8 word prompt and it expands it to 50, you've just wasted the reader's time -- they could've read the prompt and gotten the same information. (expansion is perfectly fine in a coding context -- it often takes way fewer words to express what you want the program to do than the generated code will contain.)
apitman 7mo ago
Maybe it will push people to seek out more in-person interactions, which would be a good thing.
TacticalCoder 7mo ago
> I believe the issue of proving who is and who isn't really human on the Internet will be a really important issue in the coming years On a site like HN it's kinda easy to vet for at least those that already had thousands of karma before ChatGPT had its breakthrough moment a few years ago. Now an AI could be asked to "Use my HN account and only write in my style" and probably fool people but I take it old-timers (HN account wise) wouldn't, for the most part, bother doing something that low. Especially not if the community says it's against the guidelines.
wasmitnetzen 7mo ago
We will just have to fucking swear all the time. The corporate-speak LLM won't do that.
- SchemaLoad 7mo ago
  Grok will post CP on twitter, you think it won't swear?

by iammjm 7mo ago

sebastiennight 7mo ago

> especially without sacrificing people's right to privacy and anonymity in the process I'm afraid the ship has sailed on this one. What other solutions have you heard of apart from the dystopian eyeball-scanning, ID-uploading, biometrics-profiling obvious ones? (knowing that of course, neither of those actually solve the problem)

jsheard 7mo ago

Sam Altman would love to sell you a solution to the fire that he dumped gasoline on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_(blockchain) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_(blockchain)

pear01 7mo ago
One should highlight the best part of this: https://www.toolsforhumanity.com/orb https://www.toolsforhumanity.com/orb An orb that scans your eyeballs for "proof of human".
- tomalbrc 7mo ago
  I fully expected this to be a meme. Eerie
- antonvs 7mo ago
  Negative, I am a meat popsicle
- rationalist 7mo ago
  You just need to pay someone 1 cent every time they scan their eye for you. You will have people sitting at home and giving their eye scans to AIs to use.
  - SchemaLoad 7mo ago
    You'd still burn through IDs. Eventually the people selling their ID would just end up blacklisted from signing up for new accounts.
levkk 7mo ago
It's not clear to me how this is verifiable without constant hardware supervision. Even that'll get cracked, just like DVD encryption back in the day. You almost need dedicated hardware that can't run any other software except a mechanical keyboard and make it communicate over an analog medium - something terribly expensive and inconvenient for AI farms to duplicate.
- intrasight 7mo ago
  I started promoting the idea of hardware verification about 6 years ago. Didn't get any traction and I doubt I ever will. I think Apple is the only company that would even be able to do that. You have to control the full stack to the pixels or speaker.
- degamad 7mo ago
  One physical robot with four wheels, a camera, and a 101 up/down "fingers" to match the keyboard can roll between physical machines and type on mechanical hardware keyboards. This brings the ceiling of how many accounts you can control down to the number of computers you have, but that's not a high price to pay.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
shit_game 7mo ago
This issue (human attestation) is the product of these AI companies. They are poisoning the well, only to sell the cure. This may not have initially been the plan of many of these companies, but it is the eventual end goal of all of them. Very similar to war profiteers, selling both the problem and the solution simultaneously has yet to be illegalized, but has long been masterfully capitalized, and will be vigourously because nobody will stop it. Years ago (around 2020, when GPT-2 and 3 became publicly available) I noticed and was incredibly critical of how prevalent LLM-generated content was on reddit. I was permanently banned for "abusing reports" for reporting AI-generated comments as spam. Before that, I had posted about how I believed that the the fight against bots was over because the uncanny valley of text generation had been crossed; prior to the public availability of LLMs, most spam/bot comments were either shotgunned scripts that are easily blockable by the most rudimentary of spam filters, generated gibberish created by markov chains, or simply old scraped comments being reposted. The landscape of bot operation at the time largely relied on gaming human interaction, which required carefuly gaming temporal-relevance of text content, coherence of text content (in relation to comment chains), and the most basic attempt at appearing to be organic. After LLMs became publicly available, text content that was temporally, contextually, and coherently relevant could be generated instantly for free. This removed practically every non-platform-imposed friction for a bot to be successful on reddit (and to generalize, anywhere that people interact). Now the onus of determining what is and isn't organic interaction is squarely on the platform, which is a difficult problem because now bot operators have had much of their work freed up, and can solely focus on gaming platform heuristics instead of also having to game human perception. This is where AI companies come in to monetize the disaster they have created; by offering fingerprinting services for content they generate, detection services for content made by themselves and others, and estimations of human authenticity for content of any form. All while they continue to sell their services that contradict these objectives, and after having stolen literally everything that has ever been on the internet to accomplish this. These people are evil. Not these companies - they are legal constructions that don't think or feel or act. These people are evil.

agile-gift0262 7mo ago

just scan your eye in this orb to prove you are human. I'll give you some sh*tcoins in excgange

Asmod4n 7mo ago

you could sell physical items at any store where you have to show your ID and you get one for the age group you are. that kills two birds with one stone, you can then show everywhere online you are human and how old you are without the services needing any personal information about you, and the sellers don't know what you use that id tag for.

MattRix 7mo ago
what’s to keep people from selling or giving away those id tags? seems like a nefarious entity could buy them in bulk
- close04 7mo ago
  Same thing that keeps me from letting my agent do the online talking for me. That is to say… nothing.
- Asmod4n 7mo ago
  law enforcement.
- vova_hn2 7mo ago
  It's already sorta happening with SIM-cards/phone numbers that are sometimes used for similar purposes.
stetrain 7mo ago
I'll sell you my proof-of-human-age badge for $1,000.
- Dylan16807 7mo ago
  I would be overjoyed if a human-level amount of spam cost $1000 per year-or-until-caught.
lich_king 7mo ago
People who are posting AI comments or setting up AI bots are... people. They can show their ID. If a website owner doesn't have a way to ban that specific human and the bad guy can always get another voucher, it's sort of meaningless. In fact, even if you can ban the human for life, I'm not sure it solves anything. There are billions of people out there and there's money to be made by monetizing attention. AI-generated content is a way to do that, so there's plenty of takers who don't mind the risk of getting booted from some platform once in a blue moon if it makes them $5k/month without requiring any effort or skill.

khazhoux 7mo ago

[flagged]

vova_hn2 7mo ago
People seem yo be unable to read your irony...
- floxy 7mo ago
  Yo! Apparently not enough em-dashes or bullet points.
- blast 7mo ago
  The joke has been old for a while already.
  - khazhoux 7mo ago
    I like to think mine brought a certain je ne sais quoi to the public discourse.
skeledrew 7mo ago
Why?

munk-a 7mo ago

I'm going to guess we'll eventually settle onto a psuedo-anonymous cert system like HTTPS where some companies are entrusted with verification and if that company says "That's definitely a human" it'll fly - not a great solution, of course, but I really can't see a non-chain-of-custody/trust based approach to the problem and those might only slightly compromise anonymity in optimal scenarios but some compromise is inevitable.

safog 7mo ago

I hope I'm wrong but I don't think a privacy friendly alternative is going to exist. It's going to go the way of show me your drivers license to use my site.

k33n 7mo ago
That is exactly what will happen. The sad thing is, it needs to happen. I've found myself advocating for this lately, when 10 years ago, I wouldn't have even considered taking that position. If Web3-like session-signing had taken off enough to become OS or even browser-native, we would have had a fighting chance of remaining mostly anonymous. But that just didn't happen, and isn't going to happen. Mostly because fraud ruined Web3.
- MaKey 7mo ago
  >The sad thing is, it needs to happen. No, it doesn't.
  - k33n 7mo ago
    There's literally no other way to combat rampant botting, child abuse, and nation-state originating disinformation campaigns and the intentional creation of public discord.
    - MaKey 7mo ago
      That's a false dichotomy. There are other possible approaches to address these issues that don't include ID verification. It also isn't the golden solution, verified accounts could still be stolen or bought.
      - k33n 7mo ago
        Then provide a better solution to the market. I doubt you can, but you never know.
    - nyc_data_geek1 7mo ago

WD-42 7mo ago

Will it be? Or is the solution to move to smaller, trusted networks where there's less need for proof. Unfortunately I think the age of large scale open discussion forums like HN is coming to an end.

gdulli 7mo ago
The utility of those larger sites is coming to an end, but most people aren't discerning or ambitious enough to leave and seek out the smaller places you mentioned. Places like this will remain but will join Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter as shadows of their prior useful selves. The smaller, better sites won't have to worry about attracting the masses and therefore worsening, because the masses have finally settled.
thewebguyd 7mo ago
I think this is the most likely and best path. There's no stopping the flood of bots, the dead internet theory is beyond just a theory at this point. Best we can do, for the internet and ourselves, is to move away from it and into smaller networks that can be more effectively moderated, and where there is still a level of "human verification" before someone gets invited to participate. I don't like what that will do to being able to find information publicly, though. The big advantage of internet forums (that have all but disappeared into private discords) is search ability/discoverability. Ran into a problem, or have a question about some super niche project or hobby? Good chance someone else on the net also has it and made a post about it somewhere, and the post & answers are public. Moving more and more into private communities removes that, and that is a great loss IMO.
- bluefirebrand 7mo ago
  > Moving more and more into private communities removes that, and that is a great loss IMO It is a great loss. Unfortunately this is a result of unchecked greed and an attitude of technological progress at any cost. Frankly we enabled this abuse by naively trying to maintain a free and open internet for people. Maybe we should have been much more aggressively closed off from the start, and not used the internet to share so freely.

toomuchtodo 7mo ago

I like Mitchell's Vouch idea. At the end of the day, it's all about trust. Anything else is an abstraction attempting to replicate some spectrum of trust. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46930961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46930961 https://github.com/mitchellh/vouch https://github.com/mitchellh/vouch

grufkork 7mo ago
I think we’ll see a return to smaller groups and implementing a lot of systems the way we do it IRL. I think you could definitely do a more fine-grained system that progressively adds less score to contacts the further away they are. In combination with some type of accumulating reputation system, you’d have both a force to keep out unknown IDs, but also a reason for one to stick to their current ID even though it’s anonymous. Adding this type of rep system would destroy a lot of what is so cool about the internet though. There’d probably be segregation based on rep if it’s very visible, new IDs drowning in a sea of noise. Being anonymous but with a record isn’t the same as posting for the very first time as a completely blank identity and still being given an audience. Making online comms more like real life would alleviate some problems but would also lose part of the reason they’re used in the first place. I don’t see much any other way to do it besides maybe a state-provided anonymous identity provider (though that’s risky for a number of reasons), but it’s going to be sad to see things go.

shadowgovt 7mo ago

If it becomes one, then that will be the end of sites like Hacker News. This site, at its core, is fundamentally too low-bandwidth, too text-only, and too hands-off-moderated to be able to shoulder the burden of distinguishing real human-sourced dialog from text generated by machines that are optimized to generate dialog that looks human-sourced. Expect the consequence to be that the experience you are having right now will drastically shift. My personal guess: sites like this will slop up and human beings will ship out, going to sites where they have some mechanism for trust establishment, even if that mechanism is as simple and lo-fi as "The only people who can connect to this site are ones the admin, who is Steve and we all know Steve, personally set up an account for." This has, of course, sacrificed anonymity. But I fundamentally don't see an attestation-of-humanity model that doesn't sacrifice anonymity at some layer; the whole point of anonymity on the Internet was that nobody knew you were a dog (or, in this case, a lobster), and if we now care deeply about a commenter's nephropid (or canid) qualities, we'll probably have to sacrifice that feature. I'd rather keep the feature, pesonally.

aprentic 7mo ago

I think we're going to have to make some choices. A completely anonymous stranger has no way to prove that they're human that can't be imitated by an AI. We've even seen that, in some cases, AIs can look more human to humans than real humans do. The only solution I can think of to that problem is some sort of provenance system. Even before AI, if some random person told me a thing, I'd ignore them; If my most trusted friend told me something, I'd believe them. We're going to need a digital equivalent. If I see a post/article/comment I need my tech to automatically check the author and rank it based on their position in my trust network. I don't necessarily need to know their identity, but I do need to know their identity relative to me.

OkayPhysicist 7mo ago
Reputation tracking is the key. The most simple option is open-invite invite-only spaces: Any user can invite more users, but only users with an invite can participate. Most Discord servers work like this, secret societies like the Oddfellows do, as does the other site. If you keep track of the invite tree, you can "prune" it as needed to reduce moderation load: low quality users don't tend to be the source of high-quality users, and in the cases where they are, those high quality users tend find other people willing to vouch for them faster than their inviter catches a ban.
- aprentic 7mo ago
  The open-invite system works well in many cases. It works particularly well in-person but even there you can get drift over time. Our fraternity unanimously agreed on every single initiate who joined; the cohort today is still very different from the one 20 years ago. In online systems the scales quickly get too big for open-invite. There needs to be a way to automatically update the trust network at a fine grain. The one that jumps to mind is an inference system; when I +/- a comment, I'm really noting that I trust or distrust the author. It can be general or on a specific topic (eg I trust the author to tell the truth or I trust the author to make me laugh). I could also infer that other people with similar trust patterns are likely trustworthy. And I could likely infer that people who are trusted by people I trust are trustworthy.
- 7mo ago

wvenable 7mo ago

I don't think the real issue is LLM posts. The issue with low quality on the Internet has always been quantity. The problem always has been humans who post too much, humans that use software to post too much, and now it's humans who use LLMs to post too much. The problem with a medium that is completely free and unrestricted is that whomever posts the most sort of wins. I could post this opinion 30-40 times in this thread, using bots and alternative accounts, and completely move the discussion to be only this. Someone using an LLM is craft a reply is not a problem on it's own. Using it craft a low-effort reply in 3 seconds just to get out is the problem.

ffsm8 7mo ago
If you had the LLM write the comment, then it wasn't your thoughts. I sometimes wonder if people aren't forgetting why we're on this platform. The goal is to have an interesting discourse and maybe grow as a human by broadening your horizon. The likelihood of that happening with llms talking for you is basically nil, hence... Why even go through the motion at that point? It's not like you get anything for upvotes on HN
- wvenable 7mo ago
  > If you had the LLM write the comment, then it wasn't your thoughts. But what if I provided the LLM my thoughts? That's actually how I use LLMs in my life -- I provide it with my thoughts and it generates things from those thoughts. Now if I'm just giving it your comment and asking it to reply, then yes, those aren't my thoughts. Why would I do that? I think the answer goes back to my original point. If I'm telling you my thoughts and then you go and tell a friend those thoughts, would you say those are still my thoughts even though I wasn't the one expressing them directly to your friend?
  - meatmanek 7mo ago
    I like to think about it in terms of output-to-prompt ratio. For HN comments, I think an output ratio of 1 or less is _probably_ fine. Examples: - translating (relatively) literally from one language to another would be ~1:1. - automatic spelling/grammar correction is ~1:1 - Using an LLM to help you find a concise way of expressing what you mean, i.e. giving it extra content to help it suggest a way of phrasing something that has the connotation you want, would be <1:1 Expansion (output > prompt) is where it gets problematic, at least for HN comments: if you give it an 8 word prompt and it expands it to 50, you've just wasted the reader's time -- they could've read the prompt and gotten the same information. (expansion is perfectly fine in a coding context -- it often takes way fewer words to express what you want the program to do than the generated code will contain.)

apitman 7mo ago

Maybe it will push people to seek out more in-person interactions, which would be a good thing.

TacticalCoder 7mo ago

> I believe the issue of proving who is and who isn't really human on the Internet will be a really important issue in the coming years On a site like HN it's kinda easy to vet for at least those that already had thousands of karma before ChatGPT had its breakthrough moment a few years ago. Now an AI could be asked to "Use my HN account and only write in my style" and probably fool people but I take it old-timers (HN account wise) wouldn't, for the most part, bother doing something that low. Especially not if the community says it's against the guidelines.

wasmitnetzen 7mo ago

We will just have to fucking swear all the time. The corporate-speak LLM won't do that.

SchemaLoad 7mo ago
Grok will post CP on twitter, you think it won't swear?