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Comment by ranting-moth | Hacker News Reader

People think this is a temporary problem while and will only last while it's cool. It's not. It's signalling the end of internet chat/forums as we know them. Here's why.

AI chat will become more and more accessible. Writing/renting/commissioning bots will be cheaper. Can you imaging arguing your case to a bot? To a team of bots run by the same org? The sinister side of me thinks this will quickly turn political and will also help eroding what's left of democracy.

I remember reading about a Wikipedia editor some years ago that ran a service for squeezing in dubious edits. When others argued his tactics was to drown them in text. I think it worked pretty well for him. That'll be a dirt cheap trick accessible for pretty much everyone very soon.

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I suppose the next internet needs to be built around networks of trust to counteract this. Everyone will be assumed to be spammers by default. Then you add whitelists and use network algorithms to determine if user X is worth your time.

honestly we should have had that for a long time. Being able to blacklist sites on Google is a feature we should have had for a long time precisely because it would even be in Google's interest to add such a feature. They can use it as an extra datapoint in their search algorithm, if lots of people blacklist a site then maybe downrank it a little, maybe even depending on the social rank of the people.

Curation and experts are coming back big time.

Read it in the Economist -> high trust.

Any public forum -> assume nonsense.

Hubski turns out to be an aggregator ahead of its time

Need long-lived pseudonyms that can accrue reputation. Ideally they'd be securely portable from site to site. Some schemes for this use fancy cryptography, which may have some value. But something simple with web domains might be able to do the heavy lifting.

This comment reminds me of an xkcd comic from 12 years ago[0] in which two characters are discussing AI, and one has built a system to defeat spam comments by asking users to rate other comments as "Constructive" or "Not constructive". Their end goal, as it turns out, is to force the bots to make automated constructive comments.

At the time, the idea that a bot could even do that in response to any comment was pretty far-fetched. Nowadays, the flaw is obvious: How do you test that the comment is constructive?

Of course, we could train an AI - even ChatGPT - to do that (An example prompt could be "Please look at the following comment posted on a social media site. If the comment is constructive, say 'constructive'. If the comment is not constructive, say 'not constructive'. If you aren't sure, say 'unknown'. Do not give any other responses."), but at that point you're kinda fighting fire with fire.

[0] https://xkcd.com/810/

[edit: ...how do I report a bot reply to my comment as ~~not constructive~~ spam? I genuinely cannot find any link to do so.]

Heres a site that has good job connections : https://latestarticles.store/?s=+jobs+

Nationalism on internet scale

> AI chat will become more and more accessible. Writing/renting/commissioning bots will be cheaper. Can you imaging arguing your case to a bot? To a team of bots run by the same org? The sinister side of me thinks this will quickly turn political and will also help eroding what's left of democracy

Astroturfing is already a strong problem here and on reddit, specially the later

And yeah, it will certainly be a problem, as right now they need to hire actual people to do it, they give them actual sheets with preworded arguments and rebuttals to use, this will certainly only make it easier once the tech is properly implemented

How will websites like reddit, facebook and co be able to convince advertisers that they are not paying to show ads to bots? Maybe they will come up with countermeasures. Because how is that not threatening their hundreds of billion dollar business models?

How long will it be before companies pay to show adverts to bots, to change their responses

I wonder how many years we have left until a given comment on any web forum is more than likely bot generated

beats me...

> It is difficult to predict exactly when comments on web forums will become more likely to be generated by bots. The development and use of language generation technology is advancing rapidly, and it is possible that we will see significant progress in this area in the coming years. However, it is important to remember that the use of bots to generate comments on web forums is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, many companies are already using bots to automate certain tasks and improve their efficiency, and it is likely that this trend will continue in the future.

I wonder how many years we have left until a given comment on any web forum is more than likely bot generated

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