Hacker News Reader

Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

This is where things go to die. People won’t succeed with this shit, but it will clog up previously useful channels and they will be shut down. Like email has mostly devolved to “communicate with those I already communicate with”.

View on HN

And phone calls.. not in my contacts? To voicemail with you!

Anyways, thinking more about the topic at hand, things like ChatGPT are just pushing us further towards a world of nepotism and social back-channel connections. Like in the modern art world where it isn't about talent, it's about who you are and who you know. AI means it's not about what you can write or create, it will be about your personal connections. IMO this is a bad thing for society as it leads to entrenched stratification and eventual ossification.

It's always been like this. For a brief period over the last century, we had the illusion of social mobility, that we were headed towards a more meritocratic society. But it was always that: an illusion. AI is not even a reversion to the mean, just a disillusionment.

>I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

Addendum: Drowned out amongst millions of AI augmented voices.

Yes, the industrial revolution made labor competitive enough to bargain. The computer, internet and now AI revolutions have chipped away at this since the 70s. Power and wealth accumulation has never been higher.

See e.g. https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

> But it was always that: an illusion.

Only if you view in black/white absolutist terms where if every single person isn't on 100% merit then it doesn't count at all.

But the only thing this argument achieves is making the people actively causing or cheerleading the damage feel better about what they are doing. For everyone else, it's a massive regression.

This right here has probably been the best defense and explanation of nepotism I’ve ever read. And it’s kinda scary.

It's a solid argument, since there's no theoretical upper limit in sophistication for such algorithms.

"Nepotism" also partially exists to keep "the rabble" out of whatever it is someone finds important, out of some misguided belief they are (and always will be) inferior. The last bit is important: AI assisted content generation may be bad now, but what about 5 years from now? 10? Will it then still be bad people generate stuff automatically?

Nepotism doesn't have a defense, because it's defense is essentially "tradition". I've genuinely not heard a compelling argument for that either - it always boils down to something anachronistic (i.e. racism, classism, etc).

We have two different meanings for "nepotism" here. His is "hiring within the family because I know their qualifications better." Yours is "hiring within the family even though someone outside has better qualifications."

Those are close to the same thing, though. _Obviously_ there exist people outside a family who are more qualified for any given thing than any of the people in the family.

"devolved" to replace all this stupid paperwork we were doing before though...

Look im talking to you and we dont know each other, and Im not sure why you think it's different using smtp or http ?

I really wonder how many of Hacker News comments are produced by Chat whatever.

Wouldn't that be an ideal application for ChatGPT etc?

It might be hubris, delusion, or some combination of the two, but while reading through comments some of them jump out at me as being ChatGPT generated. I'm sure the tech will advance and eventually be able to appear as more organic, but for now it seems to me to be more of a spam issue than an issue of appearing authentic.

And if you accidentally classify a human made comment as ChatGPT, it was a low quality comment anyway.

Absolutely not, it would produce 0 value since it cant generate interesting insight. Ask it why cow's eggs are better than monkey's eggs, will it reply "wait are you trying to trap me here, I know im just a software but cows and monkeys have placentas and dont make eggs"?...

The vast majority of Hacker News comments don't generate interesting insight, either, and most conversations are banal and repetitive anyway. And that's not just here, it's everywhere - Sturgeon's Law prevails over everything.

But if ChatGPT can be trained to remain civil and avoid prejudice and conspiracy theory, the quality of Hacker News would objectively improve even if everything ChatGPT says is qualitative nonsense. And it won't be, and as software improves, it will be less and less so. You can't say that about people, unfortunately. The quality of people tends to degrade over time, the more people the more degradation. That's how you get Eternal September. ChatGPT, however, can maintain a high degree of quality over time, unimpeded by irrationality or emotion.

Maybe we could split the difference and have all comments filtered through ChatGPT. Run sentiment analysis to catch and remove or edit low quality comments where feasible.

There was a GPT3 bot running around for several weeks before it was caught.

There are probably many more that don't get caught. What anti-botting measures does HN have deployed?

> What anti-botting measures does HN have deployed?

That's a good question I'd like to know the answer to.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com