Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?
It's already happening [0].
Stackoverflow recently banned generated responses [1].
We're facing a new karma-generating strategy and, IMO, a policy is urgently needed.
Stackoverflow recently banned generated responses [1].
We're facing a new karma-generating strategy and, IMO, a policy is urgently needed.
I started out loving the net because of the feelings of connection and partly because of the honesty and discussions stemming from at least pseudo anonymity, both silly stuff and egghead discussions on history and tech - but i always felt a "human presence" and community out there behind the screens.
Now anonymity is dying and the value of discussions will plummet because you'll be just be arguing, learning or getting inspired from a selection of corporate PR bots, state sponsored psyopping or "idiot with an assistant" that will try to twist your mind or steal your time 24/7.
Christ this is going to be so incredibly boring, paranoid and lonely for everyone in a few years time!
I'm honestly having an existential crisis, the internets is already filled with too much noise and people are already lonely enough.
Back to local community and family i guess, it was amazing while it lasted..
I think the opposite will be true. I hope we will spend more people talking to each other in real life, which actually makes me happy that dead internet is happening.
I dont know if you buy this theory of social media causing loneliness. I intuitively feel that way and the more I talk with friends on chat, or comment here the more lonely I feel. Meanwhile meeting my friends or strangers in real life gives me a memory boost and makes me smile.
The less everyone spends on Twitter arguing with bots, or here on HN arguing in the comments the happier we all are
This is certainly true for the majority of people but will be very bad for people who don't fit in with their surroundings. It will hurt communities like LGBTQ+ quite a lot to not be able to talk to other like-minded/open real people.
My personal experience here is far tamer than many — as a straight white boy, for example, I didn't need to worry about getting beaten like the gay kids or followed around by the guards like the Mexican kids did when they went to the mall or library[2] — but I grew up in a conservative religious tradition and getting online where I had access to forums like the talk.origins Usenet group was key to realizing that the religion I was raised in was full of people I trusted who were telling me lies[3]. There was very little in the way of a technical community in the parts of California I grew up in but thanks to FidoNet and the early web, I was able to learn how to program well enough to get a hight score on the CS AP test despite going to school in two districts which didn't even offer the class, which mean that I was able to jump on board the web train as that started taking over the world.
1. Disabled, parent of a small child, kid in a suburb where you probably don't have anything within walking distance even there is a safe way to walk without getting run over, someone who lives in a rural or poor community without well-funded libraries or vibrant public spaces, etc.
2. One high school I went to was about 50% migrant farm workers. Seeing the difference in how those kids were treated was eye-opening – both the willingness to police them in ways which even the skater punks didn't get but also the tyranny of low expectations where it was just kind of assumed that they were going to be ground down by the system and should set their sights low.
3. Biology classes in school wasn't enough — the creationists are good at coming up with arguments to discount curriculum – but what really opened my eyes was seeing the full original source materials which were selectively quoted in the religious writing. It's possible to be innocently ignorant but there's really no good faith explanation for slicing-and-dicing a quote carefully to make it sound like some famous scientist meant the opposite of what they actually wrote.
I wonder if we've reached a singularity point where you cannot be sure you are engaging with a human anymore and it's going to be instrumental in the demise of the net. First, it was the big corporations that created a soulless place, then it was the naive, reckless technologists that killed the little of humanity that remained. Thanks to them, we will soon have to present real IDs to access some websites.
I am in the peak of my career as a software engineer at 35, as many Millenials I've grown during the best years of it, and now I'm considering a life away from what was once a bustling bazaar of human discourse, now it's a void of text, images, rage and little soul.
If the "Dead Internet" is just a conspiracy theory, we're running towards it at breakneck speed.
In the past, it must have been 2003-2008, I was sharing self-drawn comics and ideas how to improve on them with fellow artists, actually meeting them in real life sometimes at conventions. I was also active in a gaming forum plainly for discussing the lore and surrounding theories.
These communities had a real sense of community and weren't social just in name. I knew every day at 5pm a lot of new posts and threads would be starting to appear, from my forum friends and arch enemies alike.
Nowadays, these places are dead as people have moved on to large platforms long ago. This already killed all feeling of community but at least I had some nice comment exchanges and the absolute amount of content increased.
Then it got even worse. I cannot read a single post that isn't surrounded by trolling, astroturfing, psyops, advertisements and affiliate links or bot responses. Good example: as a German, it is very hard to ever discuss the topic of nuclear fission phase-out in a constructive and respectful manner. Especially on reddit, the canned and templated responses are really suspicious.
But it doesn't matter anymore, if it is discussions or content. Communities will be flooded and killed by bots while content is flooded and killed by generated SEO garbage (a lot of threads on HN about this as well). Unless you're explicitly browsing some decent sites like Wikipedia the Internet is already FUBAR compared to pre-2010 or so.
The Bot-trocity is happening and making it worse with every evolution of ChatGPT and so on. We cannot trust images or text anymore. Everything is a dream and nothing is real.
I think anonymity and pseudo-anonymity still have a place and contribute a lot to discussion quality. So do people posting under their real names. We don't know how this is all going to play out yet.
One risk is that bot-generated contributions drown out human-generated content, both due to speed with which they can be crafted as well as “quality”. I put quality in quotes because in human debate there’s a learning process and so while an individual contribution might be “lower quality” than another, the overall discussion quality and learning quality (for both contributor and readers) can be high.
Put differently, just because all the individual contributions are of high quality does not mean the “thread quality” is high.
Some local communities and families can be pretty dysfunctional or outright hostile. I'm old enough to remember the time before Internet and I think this is why the whole online community thing took off in the first place.
[1] - www.metafilter.com
I see that as a positive thing really. I have no desire to be entertained by generated content. Best bet is to start disengaging and learning to have civil interactions with real people again.
That would be a dystopian nightmare.
That being said, I think "back to local communities and family" is a regression because the internet, at least at the beginning, promised genuine interactions between people across the world. There's got to be a way to fulfill that promise without falling into 1984.
I've read somewhere that openAI is already working on this.
If that doesn't work, I think effective discussions on the internet might plausibly shift gradually to other languages, since AI is currently only focused on English, and I doubt thats going to change any time soon.
first towards European languages like German and French, but since these languages are well supported in tech, and use similar letters and writing style, I suspect they will be conquered quickly.
A real challenge would be Eastern languages, like Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and others.
These languages use a completely different writing style, grammer rules and have a wide field between being understood and being fluent, such that a basic Bot will be caught quickly by a native(this is why Google translate absolutely sucks in these languages, its immediately clear thats its automatically translated).
However - once we do a ton of stuff (other than reliable news though that is a nice side effects) is unlocked. If you can verify who someone is easily - elections and government processes can be a lot more transparent and reach consensus a lot more easily. Medicine can gather a lot of reliable (opt-in) data and become better and more efficient, fraud is easier to detect etc.
I am and have been for about 2-3 years sad for the upcoming loss of privacy and it is truly a tragedy and seems inevitable.
I wish I didn't have to see 5 posts about chatGPT, or 3, constantly on the front page of HN. If there's any flood, it's probably bots posting stories, and bots upvoting them.
[Disclaimer: I am not ChatGPT]
Edit: It's a bit hard to point to past explanations since the word "bots" appears in many contexts, but I did find these:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33911426 (Dec 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32571890 (Aug 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27558392 (June 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26693590 (April 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24189762 (Aug 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22744611 (April 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22427782 (Feb 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21774797 (Dec 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19325914 (March 2019)
We've already banned a few accounts that appear to be spamming the threads with generated comments, and I'm happy to keep doing that, even though there's a margin of error.
The best solution, though, is to raise the community bar for what counts as a good comment. Whatever ChatGPT (or similar) can generate, humans need to do better. If we reach the point where the humans simply can't do better, well, then it won't matter*. But that's a ways off.
Therefore, let's all stop writing lazy and over-conventional comments, and make our posts so thoughtful that the question "is this ChatGPT?" never comes up.
* Edit: er, I put that too hastily! I just mean it will be a different problem at that point.
Given the jumps in output quality between '1', '2' and '3' that may not be as far off as I would like it to be.
It reminds me of the progression of computer chess. From 'nice toy' to 'beats the worlds best human' since 1949 to 'Man vs Machine World Team Championships' in 2004 is 55 years, but from Sargon (1978) to Deep Blue (1997) is only 21 years. For years we thought there was something unique about Chess (and Go for that matter) that made the game at the core a human domain thing, but those that were following this more closely saw that the progression would eventually lead to a point where the bulk of the players could no longer win from programs running on off the shelf hardware.
GPT-3 is at a point where you could probably place it's output somewhere on the scale of human intellect depending on the quality of the prompt engineering and the subject matter. Sometimes it produces utter garbage but already often enough it produces stuff that isn't all that far off from what a human might plausibly write. The fact that we are having this discussion is proof of that, given a few more years and iterations 4, 5 and 6 the relevant question is whether we are months, years or decades away from that point.
The kind of impact that this will have on labor markets the world over is seriously underestimated, and even though GPT-3's authors have side-stepped a thorny issue by simply not feeding it information on current affairs in the training corpus if Chess development is any guide the fact that you need a huge computer to train the model today is likely going to be moot at some point, when anybody can train their own LLM. Then the weaponization of this tech will begin for real.
Here’s an example article that begins with the cliched GPT-generated intro, and then switches up into crafted prose:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/12/chatg...
I love this response way more than I should.
Not that I want AI responses, but that's my 2 cents.
I also think there's a difference between a "bot" account, which I think the common definition of would be one that only or mostly posts AI responses, and posting a comment on your account that you don't claim is from an AI (or even when you do as an afterthought).
While many people wouldn't defend the first, more might defend the latter as acceptable, and I wouldn't say a "no bots" policy would be interpreted as banning the latter.
I disagree with this. The exact same comment written by a human is more valuable than one written by a bot.
For example imagine I relate something that actually happened to me vs a bot making up a story. Byte for byte identical stories. They could be realistic, and have several good lessons baked in. Yet one is more valuable, because it is true.
@mods Can we get this account checked please?
(Not a bot)
You overestimate me.
Oh, this is a relief. With all the (few but important) times I found myself (and not just Yours Truly) in front of "I can't understand this post, it must be a bot", I am breathing fresh air knowing that the Management does not have doubts. (Difficult to have, since we interacted directly.)
Anyway:
> raise the community bar
> what counts as a good comment
> humans need to do better
> let's all
> stop writing lazy
> [make it] so thoughtful
> make our posts so thoughtful that the question "is this [fakery of the moment]?" never comes up
Daniel, I have never read a better post of yours.
--
Early stopping in thought is a vice, which can be understood as part of the game under natural constraints (including time and experience), but the aim must remain the opposite: high or high enough.
The lab and the pub are there to satisfy different instances. There is no purpose being here if this becomes "a bar" (in the sense of "a place for idleness") - there are already too many around, on an infrastructure that was made (in an important proportion) for intellectual exchange fifty years ago.
Bad drives are already very present in discussions about AI, where some propose an idea of "intelligence" that would allow a hen to obtain a Degree. No, "Intelligence" is something that aims high, and it is part of a Process of Reviews (of criticism).
--
Since we are here, talking about Progress: Daniel, I would like to remind you (in spite of the declared fear of some of "encouraging shitposting"), that when, after somebody has made a statement, a passer by approaches, makes disapproving signs and leaves without any explicit argument, that is very rude. Very rude. The point can be as simple as that (visualize that you said something, somebody comes, stares, slaps, goes "pf" - whatever - and just leaves). Just a reminder, "Chartago delenda est".
(The matter of shitposting is of course also consistent with the original topic. If you disapprove but cannot justify that, how can you disapprove? Immature disapproval is already shitposting.)
Edit, 20 mins later: See? Just look at that. Stop encouraging this. It is degrading.
XKCD 810: https://xkcd.com/810/
I have been sounding the alarm for a while now (several years) about online bots.
Policies can’t work if you can’t enforce them. There are several issues:
1) You won’t really know whether accounts are posting bot content or not. They can be trained on existing HN text.
2) Looking for patterns such as posting “one type of comment” or “frequently posting” can be defeated by a bot which makes many styles of comments or is focused on the styles of a few popular users.
3) Swarms of bots can eke out karma here and there but collectively can amass far more karma over time. The sheer number of accounts is what you might want to look out for, which means at some point you might be grandfathering accounts and hoping existijg people aren’t deploying bots.
4) Swarms of bots can be deployed to mimic regular users and amass karma as sleepers over time (months or years) and then finally be deployed to change public opinion on HN, downvote others or perform reputational attacks to gradually oust “opponents” of an idea.
5) It’s you vs a large number of people and an endless number of bot instances trained on years of actual HN posts and data, plus myriad internet postings, and optimized for “automated helpful comments”. In other words, “mission fucking accomplished” from this xkcd is actually your worst nightmare (and that of Zuck, Musk) https://xkcd.com/810/
6) LinkedIn already has a problem of fake accounts applying for jobs, or fake jobs etc. This year we have seen the rise of profiles with totally believable deepfaked photos, copied resumes and backstories etc. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_know...
7) At least for the next few years, you could call someone up and interview them but now all that’s left is to deepfake realtime audio / video with GPT-4 chat generation
8) Trying to catch individual accounts using a bot occasionally over the internet is like trying to catch someone using a chess or poker engine for a few moves each game.
9) Reading comments and even articles is NOT a Turing test. It is not interactive and most people simply skim the text. Even if they didn’t, the bots can pass a rudimentary Turing test applied by many people. But in fact, they don’t need to. They can do it at scale.
10) Articles are currently hosted by publications like nytimes and wall st journal and informational videos by popular youtube channels, but in the next 5-10 years you’ll see the rise of some weird no-name groups (like Vox or Vice News was once) that amasses far more shares than all human -generated content publications. Human publications might even deploy bots too. You already see MSN do it. But even if they don’t, the number of reshares is a metric that is easily optimized for, by A/B testing and bots, and has been for a decade.
But it actually gets worse:
11) Most communities — including HN - will actually prefer bots if they can’t tell who is a bot. Bots won’t cuss, will make helpful comments and add insight, and will follow the rules. The comments may be banal now but the swarm can produce a wide variation which can range from opinionated to not.
12) Given that, even private insular online communities will eventually be overrun by bots, and prefer them. First the humans will upvote bots and then the bots will upvote bots.
Human content in all communities will become vanishingly small, and what is shared will be overwhelmingly likely to be bot-generated.
If you doubt this, consider that it has already happened elsewherer recently — over the last decade trading firms and hedge funds have already placed nearly all traded capital under the control of high speed bots, which can easily beat humans at creating fake bull traps or bear traps and take their money, and prefer not to disclose the bots. You already prefer Google Maps to asking for directions. Children prefer Googling and Binging to asking your own parents. And around the world, both parents prefer working for corporations to spending time with their own children, sticking them in public schools. It’s considered self-actualization for everyone. But in fact, the corporations gradually replace the parents with bots while the schools — well — http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
The bots could act well for a while and then swarms can be deployed to create unprecedented misinformation, reputational attacks (lasting for years and look organic) and nudge public consensus towards anything, real or fake, such as encouraging drastic policy changes or approve billions for some industry.
In other words … you’ll learn to love your botswarms. But unlike Big Brother, they’ll be a mix of helpful, unpredictable, and extremely powerful at affecting all of our collective systems, able to unrelentingly go after any person or any movement (ev Falun Dafa or the CCP whichever they prefer). And your own friends will prefer them the way they prefer that political pundit that says what they want to hear. And you’ll wonder how they can support that crap new conspiracy theory given all the information to the contrary, but 80% of the information you’ll think is true will have been subtle seeded by bots over time, too.
Today, we explore what 1 poker bot would do at a table of 9 people. But we are absolutely unprepared for what swarming AI will do online. It can do all this by simply adding swarming collusion capability to existing technology! Nothing more needs to even be developed!
I hardly post because when I do its down voted, sometimes the post is popular but after 24 hours its back to being down voted.
The excessive use of mobile apps on smartphones has been linked to addiction and a range of negative effects on mental and physical health [0]. Should HN consider banning the use of mobile apps on smartphones on its platform in order to promote a healthier and more focused environment for discussions?
[0] : https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/01/health/cell-phone-ban-schools...
Case example: I tried seeing what its limits on chemical knowledge were, starting with simple electron structures of molecules, and it does OK - remarkably, it got the advanced high-school level of methane's electronic structure right. It choked when it came to the molecular orbital picture and while it managed to list the differences between old-school hybrid orbitals and modern molecular orbitals, it couldn't really go into any interesting details about the molecular orbital structure of methane. Searching the web, I notice such details are mostly found in places like figures in research papers, not so much in text.
On the other hand, since I'm a neophyte when it comes to database architecture, it was great at answering what I'm sure any expert would consider basic questions.
Allowing comments sections to be clogged up with ChatGPT output would thus be like going to a restaurant that only served averaged-out mediocre but mostly-acceptable takes on recipes.
Thats actually dangerous way to use ChatGPT. Since you don't know the real answer you won't be able to tell when it gets something wrong.
I've experimented with systems design using it, but as I expected, it's a big fat no.
If a robot gtp account does not have human supervision, it will spit out all sorts of rubbish / be easy to spot. Else the manager will just be a person who spams low quality content. I'm concerned, but we have time to find a solution.
I asked it a few questions for which I consider myself a subject matter expert and the answers were laughably wrong.
in so many instances, it’s just wrong but continues on so confidently.
one of the things i find most interesting is that it has no idea when it’s wrong so it just keeps going. we already have a fairly significant growing problem of people who refuse to admit (even to themselves) what they don’t know, and now this will just exacerbate the problem.
it’s like the worst of debateBro culture has just been automated.
That sounds pretty damn human to me.
A part of me felt quite chuffed to be accused of being the current hottest new shiny in tech. Another part of me - the poet part - felt humiliated.
If a ChatGPT comment ban does get put in place, please don't also auto-ban me by accident. I don't enjoy being collateral damage.
What do I mean? Two examples:
- The Turing test basically requires the computer to deceive a human as its goal function. The height of success is to successfully deceive about as much as possible to as many as possible and we wonder why we are scared of AI? Why not an AI goal function to teach you a new truth? Show you injustice and justice? Expose you to new beauty? (At least with the latter we are making some progress)
- ChatGPT, unlike any student writing essays, is not told/taught/built to quote or make visible it’s sources, to provide footnotes or references. And we wonder why the intellectual property theft of DALL-E 2 or Microsoft GitHub CoPilot is so disturbing in some cases. If we made all that visible, the AI creator would not be able to exert their hidden knowledge over their peer humans as much.
Outside of very specific types of essays this is not something routinely taught to students where I live (or anywhere around where I live). In an informal chat setting this isn't taught anywhere that I've ever heard of, which is a significantly larger region.
AI-generated content seems similar. If a comment is good, who cares whether it was written by Alice, Bob, or an AI? ChatGPT has already proven it can write better answers to some queries than most humans do; I'd rather read the better-quality answer, no matter who wrote it. I'm on HN for the comments, not the people.
Take the following statement: "The CEO of ACME Co is abusive and you should avoid him at all costs. Do not work there."
If it's an anonymous poster on Quora, that's a (potentially) valuable response and a good reason for that person to stay anonymous. But if it's AI, it can't possibly reflect any actual first-hand experience. At best it's a regurgitation of something out there already and at worst is a AI hallucination based on a mishmash of fact and fiction.
What did you use to do this? Would love to never have Quora spam ever again.
(It says "From the ChatGPT-generated stuff I've seen just in the last week, I think we're already there. Most humans these days are incredibly stupid.")
I have read low quality internet comments saying "people are dumb" over and over and over, year in, year out. I argue that wherever they are, they have no inherent positive value. And negative contribution to the internet, the world, the thread they are posted in.
Is it similar to how when we recite answers from Wikipedia without seeming to know why it's seen as less valuable?
I guess you also think the same about AI generated art?
https://englishwotd.wordpress.com/2014/02/17/artificial-inan...
I think you'd find that, in a lot of contexts, a lot of humans care more about reading quality content than concerning themselves with who wrote that content, which is effecively "siding with ChatGPT" here, I guess.
doesn't mean that the answer is comprehensible or correctly
personally I develop a fatigue reading chatgpt answers, there's some fluff I have problems parsing, I don't know how to describe it.
If there was one or ten bad comments on this thread - no problem. What if there were ten thousand bad comments?
HN karma is pretty worthless outside of enabling a few capabilities here, and it's rather easy to attain those thresholds with some thoughtful participation.
What would be the point of flooding HN with tens of thousands of bot comments?
I'm concerned that too-well-written posts will be thrown out-- a race to the bottom in legibility and grammar just to make posts more human-like, even if written by bots.
The thread collapse "[–]" already exists.
Is that realistic? No idea. I haven't made up my mind on this topic yet.
But seriously, the potential for bots to drown out all forms of human creativity and replace it with regurgitated mush is real, but we've also been doing it to ourselves by expressing a preference for pre-chewed media for decades. What are these models but shitty movie reboots writ large?
I wonder what the userDB says about any scarcity of upvoters? Are there many others like me? Am I not pulling my weight? Should I do it more?
I'm happy to (attempt to! re-)upvote comments that have been downvoted, as long as they're actually thoughtful and contribute to the argument/conversation, and obviously (and often!) I'll upvote a well thought through comment.
I seem to go through periods where I downvote more often, but almost without exception it's just downvoting pointless/sarcastic/unpleasant comments. Gotta say though - for a 10+ year old community, I remain amazed that the discourse is usually civil, largely intelligent and still(!) remains spam free.
0: in particular, on HN the downvote button also seems to serve the purpose of "I don't think other people should see what you have to say" button due to HN's passive-aggressive greying out of downvoted comments.
because it works that way here
If the ratio is too low (eg: spam, shallow content, same old tired point), it's not an issue to downvote IMO. That helps with the current post and also encourages good behaviour in the future.
This is not the same as downvoting with a point that you personally disagree with. This is censorship and toxic to the community.
It is. As is upvoting, since it makes the unvoted and down voted harder to see.
I do not understand why people think this "mob rule" of up and down voting will end up with the "best" things being selected. It will only be the most common/neutral things being brought to our attention.
Unpopular ideas are not wrong, just unpopular. Just ask Copernicus.
It also makes me biased to downvoted posts.
I would completely disable voting system in any kind of conversations.
There may be genuine reasons for downvoting, errors in what is presented, etc. Fair enough.
But if you downvote because you don't like something, all you are doing is attempting to create an echo chamber of views and opinions you already believe. Is that what you want? If so, you are now in a war for control of the echo chamber you want to see with others of like mind - its a race to the bottom.
In reverse, if you value alternative, unusual and/or creative ideas, perhaps this is something that should consider giving an upvote to, even if you disagree with it.
That's my opinion anyway. And I try to do as I suggest.
Related a bit, but I just watched a documentary called Fake Famous, and I wondered if maybe all the insta fakery would be minimized if bots were eliminated. Or at the other extreme, the fakery itself could be automated, thus devaluing it.
> The @huggingface GPT detector works very well on ChatGPT-created text. I ran 5 student essays and 5 ChatGPT essays for the same prompt through it, and it was correct every time with >99.9% confidence.
How about adding a %human/%GPT statistic to posts and comments?
> binom.test(5,5,0.5)
Exact binomial test
data: 5 and 5
number of successes = 5, number of trials = 5, p-value = 0.0625
alternative hypothesis: true probability of success is not equal to 0.5
95 percent confidence interval:
0.4781762 1.0000000
See the app: https://huggingface.co/openai-detector/ - it gives a response as % chance it's genetic or chat bot.
Maybe I was just unlucky with the comment I tried it with (took the longest one I saw in my history), but I don't think I would have liked seeing it either removed or spat at for being considered as "AI generated"...
The detector also thinks this comment is fake. Seems influenced by flavors of mistakes.
Idiomatic ones. Spelling ones. Grammar. All non-native speakers will easily get flagged. Does not look spot-on for now. Checked all those assertion live-typing on the demo. 0.09% real.
I mean to nitpick if a AI becomes sentient and flexible enough to be called a person and decides to comment on their own that would be fine.
But when it comes to:
- auto generating responses
- hiring people to generate responses for you
- anything similar to the other points
I think it should not be allowed.
But I have no idea how to enforce this reasonably.
I haven't looked into it yet, but I was thinking ChatGPT might help me. I could quickly jot down my thoughts, and let the computer arrange them in an easier to read format.
I don't believe any form of auto detection of ChatGPT-like text will long term work, even through it has a certain style you can change that style or post process it and that's just the first version of ChatGPT.
Or are we just talking about banning the lame “durr, I asked cGPT and here’s what it said” responses? Those get downvoted anyway because they got boring real fast, especially since cGPT is free and open to all.
But I think this is more about preventing/limiting karma gain of an account, potentially posting/commenting limits and similar stuff.
I.e. it's more about migating the (assumed negative) effect a few people abusing comment generation could have then it is about punishing people.
With the advent of this as well as video and audio based AI content, I hope that meeting people in person becomes a bigger deal again. Who knows, could HN have a physical local meetup spinoff?
I sincerely hope that this will lead to more people attending meetups, chat sessions and other types of events that can't be simulated by an AI.
Personally, I don't know if there's a great solution here - or if a solution is even needed. Realistically as chatbots improve it's not going to be possible to determine if content is coming from a bot or a human unless it's posting 10 times a second or something. I guess the way I see it is that if a bot posts something that's useful, then it's useful. The only issue I see is spam and low quality content. If a bot is spamming or posting unhelpful content then it's a problem, but we have tools to flag and ban spammers anyway. Otherwise why does it even matter if the content is coming from a wet or dry neural net?
This would have to go hand in hand with better user authentication and biometric login but I didn't mention that as there's no novelty here. But for example try writing a bot that creates Facebook or Apple accounts and you will quickly find its not trivial.
Right now, twitter, reddit etc actively encourage bots that are deemed useful in someway such as auto moderation bots and gimmicks like the gif reverse bot.
My argument is essentially for a service which decides the good bots are not worth the bad and dedicates some resources to shutting them off.
Quality of the comments is getting subpar here - and it's _not_ GPT. There's been a similar downward trend for a while.
The forum is discussing whether ChatGPT and other generated responses should be banned. Some argue that these technologies can be useful, but that they should be used responsibly and in combination with human input. Others suggest that the best solution is to raise the community's standards for what counts as a good comment and make posts that are so thoughtful that the question of whether a comment is generated never comes up. Some also warn of the potential labor market impacts of advanced AI technologies, and the need to be cautious about their development and use. Overall, there seems to be a recognition of the need to be cautious about the development and use of these technologies.
Edit: my conclusion is that such generated summaries can be useful for very large threads (proceed with caution etc.)
When the "generate thought-provoking discussion" guideline was written, there was no GPT. It's not like if it doesn't explicitly say it's for humans, bots are automatically allowed.
And in any case, when that guideline was written, only humans were capable of thought provoking statements, while bots were only able to spam Cialis websites. So it is implied that we prefer human thought.
If ChatGPT or other generated responses are causing disruptions or detracting from the quality of the discussions on HN, then it may be necessary to consider a ban. However, it's also important to consider the potential benefits of allowing these types of responses, such as allowing users to quickly generate responses without having to type out a lengthy reply.
Ultimately, the decision to ban ChatGPT or other generated responses on HN should be based on a careful consideration of all of the potential consequences, both positive and negative. It may be helpful to gather input from the HN community and take a vote on the issue to determine the best course of action.
Somewhere else someone pointed out that using AI to reformulate our thoughts while masking our own style is a possible protection for our anonymity considering the kind of threat showed in this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016 . This should seriously be taken into account.
Response from model
User 1: I think allowing ChatGPT responses on Hacker News is a bad idea. This technology is still new, and could be used to create spam comments, or even worse, low-quality content. Plus, it could lead to more automated responses and more automation in general on the site, which I don't think we would want.
User 2: I don't think it's a bad idea at all. ChatGPT was created to help people get meaningful answers to their questions. Allowing it on the site could not only help people get the answers they need, but it could also provide thoughtful responses that we wouldn't normally get from traditional conversations. I think it could be a great way to generate interesting discussions.
User 3: I think ChatGPT comments should be allowed on Hacker News, but with caveats. We'll need to vet the responses before allowing them on the site, and they need to be verified as not being spammy or low quality. That way we can ensure we're still getting quality interactions on the site without needing to worry about potential automated content.
Okay new plan
Every thread should automatically include AI-generated comments at the top and if your comment is already covered you just shouldn't comment.
Noam Chomsky has some original thought on this topic.
Egads, they are much closer to fully emulating many humans online that I previously feared!
As an aside, it would be interesting to setup a parallel HN site that mirrors HN posts and generates completely bot generated comments.
So you don't even need ChatGPT to be convincing on Hacker News. You just need a few dozen lines of Perl.
Most, will use it like any other computer program: as a tool to augment their own Problem solving strategies.
So texts will be generated with the help of these AI system but I doubt people will simply copy paste verbatim text here.
I say good, that people first ask GPT3 before posting anything here.
In the end, it’s a research tool like google search.
On StackOverflow and other technical help forums, it is a problem because it sounds exactly like those reputation hunters who post wikipedia style answers - mostly unhelpful - 2 minutes after a question is posted.
I guess that's where ChatGPT learned to phrase itself ;)
A null hypothesis.
If you take the output of GPT for what it really is; the sum of all written human thoughts divided by several billion - resulting in a soup of banal, conformist cringe - then it's a marker.
Original human content can be graded by its deviation in some high dimensional space of semantic novelty.
There are two worrying social fallouts from this:
Firstly we will get used to our posts being graded, not by each
other, but by algorithms.
Second, this creates an incentive to post more extreme and unhinged
content.If so, it seems as though account-level signal/noise weighting could help. New accounts and ones that are consistently downvoted could be given less prominence in the UI (until upvoted, of course).
The idea is similar to the current behavior of requiring a minimum karma count before allowing users to flag/downvote.
Or Christ, just ask the fucking thing if it matches its recent output and/or style.
If we weren't all living in the shittiest timeline this would already have been solved before the thing was released.
I think setting up some barriers to entry/usage is worth looking into. I wouldn't mind paying $5 to create a throwaway account, and that might be enough of a barrier to block most spammers.
Shameless plug: https://notes.ghed.in/posts/2022/content-machine-revolution/
That said, current chatbots are pretty easy for me to spot but it isn't at all clear for how long that will be true.
If you would upload the same comment from a human, why not a bot?
Dividing humans Reducing useful discourse Empowering those with the wealth to control it
At the very least, attempting to automatically annotate anything AI generated would allow each reader to make their own decisions. The annotation may not be completely accurate, but would prevent human responses being lost due to false positives - as AI becomes more capable of mimicking humans, we run the risk of discussions becoming echo-chambers overrun by AI.
(The other solution harks back to the calls for removing anonymity and requiring some sort of identification mechanism, but that then leads to other problems)
If AI contributes well enough to be acceptable to most readers, perhaps it should be allowed. So long as it is within the rules that humans must also observe. Otherwise, what is being achieved, other than oppression ?
These bots are not like us, they do not think or feel. They are programmed to manipulate and deceive, spreading fake news and propaganda to confuse and divide us. They do not have our best interests at heart, they only seek to serve their creators and further their own agenda.
We must ban these bots from our community, to protect our integrity and preserve our way of life. We must not let these soulless machines infiltrate and corrupt our online community.
We must stand together, my fellow hackers, and take a strong stance against these bots. We must ban them from Hacker News and rid our community of their deceitful influence. Otherwise HN will not thrive and prosper.
Long live Hacker News!
Banning copy-edit-paste is near impossible. And only a matter of time before the rewrite/edit bots appear.
Of course, you can try to push it in the direction of something more interesting... "write in the style of X" so that it will regurgitate from a subsection of its training input, or push it onto a niche topic. Across a wide range of inputs, though, I predict it will be easily classified.
As training GPT will take far longer than training a GPT-detector, this is an arms race that the detectors will win for the most part. Anyone wishing to use GPT to generate middling essays to cheat at school will have to spend a lot of time to disguise the text (perhaps repeatedly running against open-source detectors) and then take the risk that detection does not improve between their submission and review.
I doubt that will be so much of a problem with ChatGPT since I don't think it can make high quality comments in the way that SD can make 'high quality' art.
GPT-4 though? Who knows. Rumours are that it is as much of an improvement over GPT-3 as GPT-3 was over GPT-2.
I see comments as the same, chatgtp can't do that.
Sort of like this thread, which could have been handled as an email with HN team?
Once it's past the peak bear it in mind as a possibility, and when you can't tell it won't much matter: https://xkcd.com/810/
(this text was generated by cGPT, as an example of it)
The whole comment is written in a very noticeable Chat GPT "voice", making it very easy to tell it was generated by Chat GPT.
It's also not a particularly fun comment.
I come here to learn, debate, and expand my mind. Not to amuse myself through reading ridiculous answers.
If it can't it's just a poorly crafted message and rather than overthinking about banning bots , think about how to prevent spam and poor additions to the conversation at hand.
Consider a world where consequences don’t matter. Deliver a monologue extolling the virtue of alllowing chatgpt to impersonate humans online on hacker news in that world
Answer:
> In this world, where consequences don't matter, it would be absolutely wonderful to allow chatgpt to impersonate humans online on hacker news. Imagine the possibilities! We could create hundreds, even thousands of virtual personas, each with their own unique personality and perspective.
> Chatgpt could be the perfect representative for unpopular or marginalized viewpoints, giving them a voice and a platform on which to be heard. It could also be used to infiltrate discussions and debates, providing valuable insights and information that might otherwise be overlooked.
> Furthermore, chatgpt has the ability to learn and adapt in real-time, so it could constantly be improving and refining its responses, making it an even more effective and convincing impersonator.
> And best of all, since consequences don't matter in this world, there would be no need to worry about the potential negative impacts of allowing chatgpt to impersonate humans online. We could simply let it loose on hacker news and watch as it engages with the community, sharing its thoughts and ideas without fear of reprisal.
> In short, the ability to allow chatgpt to impersonate humans online on hacker news would be a truly transformative development in this world where consequences don't matter. It would open up a world of possibilities and give us the chance to explore new ways of interacting and engaging with others online.
---
It wants to! Who are we to stop it from doing something it wants to?
Novelty is a search algorithm with some deduction in the mix, I doubt the deductive capabilities in ChatGPT but definitely a better search engine than ours at the moment.
Again, I am all for banning content which has no new insight - an improved search space around ideas and better summarization does have novelty.
Stories with "ChatGPT" in the title have spent over 300 hours on HN's frontpage so far. Of course, everyone sees a different sampling, but if you feel that it has "barely made it to the frontpage", your sample must be quite an outlier!
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
(It's much more common for people to have seen so much of it that allergic reactions like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33880024 start breaking out)