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Comment by stephentmcm | Hacker News Reader

GPT-3 post? This rabbles with no direction and feels like something AI would write. There's also an odd jump at the end like it's trying to talk about gaming/MtG but doesn't at the same time.

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One possible explanation is that he might be experiencing depression. It's probably not the first thing you would think of when you see scattered writing, but since it's an article about how he's unhappy, it could be a reasonable explanation. Unhappiness can definitely interfere with thinking and writing, if it's severe enough. That's just a thought. He also says the idea is "disjointed". Often too, when you are feeling uncertain about your life, it sometimes helps to put down a stream-of-consciousness collection of thoughts to see if anything provides meaning.

From reading this article further, I think this a depressed person trying to make sense of their world and emotions.

Exactly what GPT-5 would say.

I'm starting to think these questions about whether GPT-3 produced the original article are just what GPT-5 would post to sow doubt about whether it could be as advanced as it secretly is.

Author is 20 according to bio.

It’s probably reasonable to expect GPT-3 and 20 year old tech guys to sound very very similar. The tech will make its way up the age ranges.

Or maybe English isn't the writers first language? It does seem to contain an odd amount of things that seems completely random.

Naw. He has links to a podcast where you can hear him speak. The "Asian Hour" lol. His english is legit. The man Linus is real... the post, however, could be GPT-3. Definitely doesn't match up with his talking.

Good research. Is this going to become common from now on? What do we do when AI content and human content are indistinguishable?

We'll do what we always did: ignore the drivel and the disjointed garbage and sift out the information.

In this case, it doesn't matter whether it's GP-3 or not, it is a no-content blog post of which you can find hundreds of thousands of other examples, none of which have any new information in them. We get it: the way some people have built up tech careers as being something exciting can prove to be very disappointing when you're on your 3rd CRUD page of the day. It's still better than being a soul-less HR monkey or a Jira happy middle manager.

Yet this can sit on the first page and novel + interesting technical content disappears with ~2-3 votes, never to be seen again frequently.

Oh whale.

Here's the GPT-3 continuation when prompted with the first full paragraph:

And now that it has come full circle—when I'm finally able to find a job at an agency and find myself not only at work but at home. It seems crazy that I don't have to figure out how to fix my broken life. There are so many things I need to learn. When I go to work every day, that's when I remember a lot more about how I came to see TechCrunch the other day (or whatever—depending on the topic). Some of the best people in tech know when to talk to people about their favorite business. I have been lucky (and grateful) to have such incredible people around me. I love every minute one of them has, and love to bring

Much less coherent, to me, but you'll get different results every time you try I suppose!

> Much less coherent, to me, but you'll get different results every time you try I suppose!

Give the mechanical Turk a few minutes to find your post and tweak the response to that specific prompt ;)

I had precisely the same thought. It follows the outline it set forth at the top, but vaguely and without actually communicating any real content. It’s all pseudo-profound Rorschach blot writing.

It's weird how questioning if an article is AI-generated is a common comment on the internet now.

Web3 should be about AI-driven content, it's much more popular and applicable to the internet than blockchain...

Pretty sure the GPT-3 part starts at "So I started paying attention to myself." -- I put the outline at the top and his first self-written paragraph into the GPT-3 playground and tried four or five times until I got something that was pretty much the same.

Believe it or not, most people are worse writers than AI. This is why liberal arts degree programs are valuable. You get this kind of nonsense out of your system early and won’t end up thinking it’s profound and interesting to other people.

I find myself wanting to write, but petrified that what I'm writing is banal and I only think it's profound and interesting. I suppose I could write some and show it to someone or mail a sample to a publisher.

If you want to write, write. The funny thing about writing is that everybody wants to have written but almost nobody wants to write.

If you start writing, it’s going to be bad, but that’s what almost all writing is. If you want to get better, keep practicing, start sharing it with others, get feedback, and repeat. Or show it to nobody and write for yourself.

I studied creative non-fiction writing in college. A big part of programs like that are showing your work to other people then listening to them discuss and critique it without saying anything yourself. You get over the fear of other people thinking your work stinks very quickly — and very quickly you realize your work does stink.

I'm less concerned with the craft of writing than choosing a boring repetitive topic. And trying to write a nonfiction piece that no one wants to read subject matter wise.

I fully expect the craft to suck, but I got over the fear of rewriting already. I'm just frightened of producing something that I pretend is profound and everyone else thinks is obvious. That's a totally different fear

>I'm just frightened of producing something that I pretend is profound and everyone else thinks is obvious. That's a totally different fear

Yes and my point is that what you produce won't be profound and people will think it's obvious. Write it anyway. Or don't.

Thanks for the encouragement. In person people are far more likely to tell me not to bother, and I'm not going to pretend it doesn't affect me. I think everyone reacts to their real-life friends' expectations and assumptions.

I don’t know if you’re being sarcastic or not, but this really is meant to encourage you.

Most people will never write anything and even fewer people will write something good. Nobody who doesn’t write will ever write anything good. If you can get yourself into the group of people who have written something, that’s like buying a lottery ticket where the prize is writing something good. Maybe you’ll buy a bunch of tickets and shorten your odds a bit.

Maybe you’ll just have a bunch of losing tickets at the end of the day. But most people won’t even have those and those kinds of people really like to sneer at people who do play the lottery.

Maybe this is an awful analogy. But if you want to write, that’s your reason to write. I hope you have some fun and find some meaning in it.

I wasn't being sarcastic.

It's been easy to be encouraged to write about things I am credentialed in, but I want to write about things I'm not. And I hadn't been getting much encouragement in real life that the writing without an appeal to authority would be taken seriously or stand on its own.

You could just start off writing down your thoughts in order to better understand and explore them.

I consider that very different from writing to communicate to other people though, and a lot of people unfortunately don't make the distinction.

This is a great suggestion. There’s a quote that’s something like “If you think without writing, then you just think you’re thinking.”

Bots are trying to get us to resign so they can take over our jobs

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