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Comment by naillo | Hacker News Reader

The problem is the people doing this. The AI doesn't have agency, it's just an autocomplete tool.

That doesn't really seem relevant to the discussion. AI obviously makes it 1000x easier to generate realistic-looking fake papers, so it "intensifies" the issue as this article explains. It is newsworthy and discussion-worthy, and as you said AI doesn't have agency so we don't need to worry about hurting its feelings by referencing it in a headline.

The only reason it's a problem is that papers became the measure - more papers = more prestige. The measure will simply change because now it won't have a strong signal.

That is not the only reason and it's not the most important reason. Papers are useful in the real world and people use them to learn stuff, and also reference them as evidence. If you're trying to learn about a topic and you have to wade through 90% bullshit AI papers when search for the topic, when you aren't experienced enough to immediately tell which papers are real, that's a problem. If malicious actors are able to spread disinformation that cites very real-looking research, or pitch journalists with very real-looking papers, that's a problem.

No, papers are not always useful. That isn't an inherent property. They can be useful. It depends on the content of the paper.

If you can't tell whether a paper is real or bullshit it doesn't matter if an AI or a human created it. Journalists will, heaven forbid, have to do real journalism instead of blindly trusting some piece of paper they found somewhere.

> If you can't tell whether a paper is real or bullshit it doesn't matter if an AI or a human created it.

That's true, but now it's incredibly easy to create a human-quality bullshit paper. That wasn't true a year ago. It doesn't matter who created it, but it does matter how easy it was to create.

> Journalists will, heaven forbid, have to do real journalism instead of blindly trusting some piece of paper they found somewhere.

That's true, but now it's incredibly easy to generate a real-looking piece of paper and send it to a journalist, prompting them to spend a day doing real journalism to verify it. That wasn't true a year ago.

> That's true, but now it's incredibly easy to create a human-quality bullshit paper.

No, it's incredibly easy to create human-quality syntax. Not meaning. The source of the value was never the paper or the syntax - it was the meaning of the paper. Whether a human or an AI creates bullshit matters not.

Right so what solutions do you have here to prevent people from using the autocomplete tool for harm?

Legitimate journals (or groups of journals) might need to institute a throttling mechanism to limit the rate at which individual authors can submit papers. They might also need some kind of reputation tracking system so that reviewers can flag articles as low quality, and then future submissions by the same author will be treated as lower priority. Open access journals can raise author fees.

Punish the people using it, disallow and shame people who are found to use it. The usual stuff when you want people to stop doing things. (Not legally ban the whole population from making use of it even in cases where it's productive.)

Guns don’t kill people. They have no agency. But they sure make it easier.

Illegal guns kill people. Something like 80-90% of guns involved in homicide are illegally obtained/possessed. This is relevant because like banning guns, “banning” AI shouldn’t be the focus. It seems like an AI detection arms race is inevitable.

Illegal guns start as legal guns. With both AI and guns you need to be willing to think about the problem at every step in the chain, not just at the end.

> Illegal guns start as legal guns.

To be pedantic, there are very few actually illegal guns. Mostly we are talking about crimes committed by felons who have committed prior crimes are no longer legally allowed access to firearms.

That same gun, if possessed by a non-felon, would be legal.

I don't know if this is or isn't important to the analogy, but I do think it applies.

Wait a moment. If 80-90% of guns used to kill people are illegally obtained, that means the laws successfully generate a regime by which guns are obtained much more safely. Now all that remains is to enforce the laws and crack down on illegal gun sales (although in USA that isn’t all since old guns already purchased illegally will continue to work for decades)

It’s like when people were saying that 80-90% of people dying in hospitals were unvaccinated. So vaccination helped right?

Apologies for taking the bait.

If the number of legal firearms were reduced then would that not reduce the pool from which the illegal firearms can be obtained?

Agreed it doesn't completely solve the issue, but could make it significantly less likely that one would encounter a firearm in general.

Likely, yes. One of the practical difficulties in the US, however, is that the pool has historically been replenished by the trafficking of guns. So yes, reducing the pool of available guns is prima facie sensible, but it takes a fair bit more than declaring guns illegal. Further complicating the issue is the fact that guns have a very long service life. I have an FB Vis from 1942 that still works flawlessly, despite having seen years of service in actual war. With ordinary care and the replacement of high-wear parts (the extractor, mostly, and maybe the barrel), I’d expect it to run at least another 100k rounds.

The proposition to reduce gun violence by reducing the number of guns in circulation has to account for the guns already in circulation, and for the propensity of black markets to introduce new guns into circulation. Otherwise, the only thing achieved is the disarming of the groups of people with legitimate uses for firearms.

It’s not as simple as “guns are the problem”, nor is it as simple as “more guns are the solution”, I’m afraid.

Then how comes a 10 year old cannot buy a gun or drive a car?

Companies making AI like ChatGPT have agency. They should not publish tools that generate false information.

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