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Comment by dahart | Hacker News Reader

This was an inevitable outcome of ChatGPT/LLMS, no? I expect to see a lot more of this by a lot of different people. I feel like a ton of the examples I’ve seen to date are effectively regurgitating Stack Overflow (sometimes verbatim!) and in a kind of abstract way, I feel like this is exactly the same as someone opportunistically publishing a bunch of auto-generated books… publishing a model trained on a bunch of web sites is effectively re-publishing these web sites with a different interface.

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Even here on HN, people are using ChatGPT to write replies. You can spot it by the very verbose answers that don't say anything meaningful.

Someone else commented here that AI would raise the noise level everywhere and I unfortunately have to agree.

> You can spot it by the very verbose answers that don't say anything meaningful.

I've been doing that online for years! Does this mean ChatGPT be taking my hobby away?

no, just rebrand as artisanal. there'll be some future designation similar to "organic" for text strings that originated from a human brain.

Eating an American diet, I definitely cannot be considered organic.

Yeah, I've noticed the same thing, and it can be pretty annoying when people use ChatGPT to generate those long-winded replies that don't actually add much value. But on the flip side, I've seen cases where AI-generated content can actually be super helpful.

I guess it's all about how people choose to use it. It's up to us to encourage responsible use and make sure we don't let AI-generated content overshadow genuine, thoughtful discussion. Who knows, maybe as the tech gets better, we'll see AI tools that can generate more concise and meaningful responses. Fingers crossed!

(this comment was generated by chatGPT)

If I include tl;dr or eli5, chatGPT makes an effort to distill the answer to the essentials.

> You can spot it by the very verbose answers that don't say anything meaningful.

Although, in all fairness, I have been known to write verbose answers that don't say anything meaningful, too, and I'm not a bot. I think.

ChatGPT replies to you with:

> Don't worry, JohnFen. We still love you even if you're not sure whether you're a bot or not. After all, aren't we all just a bunch of biological machines running on meat-based neural networks?

Except for the first sentence, that would easily pass for a HN reply.

AI is taking your job I'm afraid.

Perhaps that's how I would eventually get rid of my HN addiction.

This is actually a spin on an existing git-rich-quick scam (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw). Version 1.0 had people hiring low cost ghostwriters for hundreds of dollars to bang out a book on some SEO topic. Now you use the same playbook with "AI," with far less upfront cost.

Playboy? I think you meant “playbook”?

Maybe the playbook is in Playboy?

They did have great articles

> Playboy? I think you meant “playbook”?

Yes, I've corrected it.

I fell for this once when I was a newer developer. I bought a book on my Kindle about Ruby on Rails, thinking it might be more insightful or accessible than the Rails docs. But every chapter was literally just copy/pasted from the Rails docs (which are free).

Like 3/4 of Amazon's listings for classic books are Print on Demand scams that exist to trick people buying books as gifts, who don't know what they're looking at and don't know to watch out for this sort of thing. Just Project Gutenberg text automatically sent to the printer, no manual typesetting or clean-up or any actual care put into it. They're just garbage, literally. Pure waste.

It’s a huge shame too because it shouldn’t be that hard for Amazon to filter it out. It’s not like there isn’t a database of these classic works, at least the ~2000 most popular ones that must account for 95+% of searches. If only they had the economic incentive to do so.

A funny thing that made the rounds on social media over here a few years ago was somebody buying a translated copy of Moby Dick. Turned out it was evidently translated by Google translate or some similar service, and it was atrocious.

Literally the first sentence "Call me Ishmael" was translated as if the meaning was to tell Ishmael to call the story teller on the phone.

It is the same, yes. Right now the way I see it is that we are off-loading noise generation from humans to AIs; it's not that noise didn't exist before, it's just probably going to come more frequently and in a less-recognizable way.

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