When the percentage of human generated content approaches 0.0000%, what does that internet look like?
And the result of this? Genuine conversation progressively retreats from the internet at large as it becomes overrun with the intellectual flatus of the bot wars, and people move further and further into silos in which bot behavior can be spotted and eliminated.
Welcome to the future. How do you like it, gentlemen? All your posts are belong to us.
I could definitely see someone already having trained a bot to write HN comments and posting them.
What's anyone going to do about it? It's super hard to write a discriminator that works well enough to not destroy the site for everyone.
Yes, which will produce things that are stylistically similar to HN comments, but without any connection to external reality beyond the training data and prompt.
That might provide believable comments, but not things likely to be treated as high-quality ones, and not virtual posters that respond well to things like moderation warnings from dang.
Replies to comments are difficult, so I guess the bot must just write somewhat related top level comments.
It will accumulate a lot of "Did you RTFA?" and also polite request for clarifications, and it will be suspicious that the bot never replies or replies with nonsense.
If every commit has a link to http://www.example.com then people will notice and start flagging.
I guess it can fly under the radar posting a few top level bland comments per week in the megathreads with a few hundred comments, but I don't imagine how this can be used to gain anything.
I have seen a couple of times on some other even smaller technical forums what appeared to be sequences of comments generated by an AI, from a fake account (until the accounts were banned).
There could not have been any kind of financial gain from those actions, so the conclusion was that someone was testing the capability of their AI to carry a conversation on such subjects.
The messages posted were remarkably coherent, but in the end it was obvious that their source could have been only either an AI or a human with mental problems.
What made those messages stand-out was that even if they contained mostly correct information, the same that might be found e.g in technical magazines, there was always some weird disconnect between their answer and the message to which they replied.
Apparently, in most cases the AI failed to identify which exactly was the point-of-view of the previous poster. The reply referred to various items mentioned in the parent message, but instead of referring to the essential points it referred to some non-relevant things mentioned more or less accidentally, or it tried to argue for or against some points as if trying to contradict the previous poster, when they actually had argued in the same direction.
One could argue it's already happening. How many of the people we talk to everyday get their facts from SEO-spam websites and Google instant answers (which often sources its content from such websites)? Even if we avoid AI-generated content, we might be gettting fed it by proxy.
I think the world will be a better place if everybody follows a similar pattern. The only reason to use deepfakes is if the victim who's identity is being stolen is not cooperating with you. - It's a new way to violate a person's integrity and their right to agency in our already fading grasp of reality. You could probably gaslight your girlfriend with it, if you are incomprehensibly evil.
I'm honestly a bit more concerned with people gaslighting courts.
The technology isn't going away, unfortunately. Society will have to adapt to these new invasive norms, as they already have time and again in the past.
In the process of remembering that little tidibt it reminded me of a short story I read once that was circulated without attribution for a few decades, i.e. Terry Bissom's "They're Made Out of Meat"[1] published in OMNI in 1990. "They're meat all the way through."
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190501130711/http://www.terryb...
Much of the internet is currently full of not-even-approximately true (and often maliciously false) information, so I’m not particular worried about that.
> When the percentage of human generated content approaches 0.0000%, what does that internet look like?
...approximately the same, but less false :)
This is a lie, i sw
<NUL>
<NUL>
Segmentation fault
(Another risk might be governments-enforced identification, no more pseudonymity !)