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Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?

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Re: Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?

#141

Post by rtkwe »

catiopatio wrote: post #74
rtkwe wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is you could implement a real ID system that was still pseudonymous at the user level so that you only prove real personhood at account creation. Kind of like a Twitter blue check but just for human authenticity instead of notoriety. It could even be tied back to the real person account anonymously on the admin side so you could mass ban alts automatically if people started to create bad bots. It should all…

No thank you. That would be a dystopian nightmare.

This doesn't preclude the use of non authenticated account(s) just a possible system of providing provisions for anonymous authentication of humanness. I don't want to slap my real name across every part either but nothing about this requires all sites to adopt it at all.

Re: Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?

#142

Post by kdazzle »

im3w1l wrote: post #80
dang wrote: post #55

They're already banned—HN has never allowed bots or generated comments. If we have to, we'll add that explicitly to https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html , but I'd say it already follows from the rules that are in there. We don't want canned responses from humans either! 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.yc…

> If we reach the point where the humans simply can't do better, well, then it won't matter. 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,…

Very interesting point. It really reminds me of that Borges story where someone in the 20th century rewrites Don Quixote word for word, and the critics think it’s far better than the original.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the...

Re: Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?

#144

Post by andsoitis »

dang wrote: post #65
kossTKR wrote: post #24

The fact that soon the internet will be so flooded with bots that you'll be floating eternally alone in a sea of imposters unless we create some draconian real person ID system is a tragedy so great it's crazy it has not dawned on people yet. 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 an…

Real person ID isn't a solution since real persons can always consort with bots on the side. 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.

> 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.

Re: Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?

#146

Post by rtkwe »

romanhn wrote: post #71
rtkwe wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest issue is GPT is often confidently incorrect about things but is good enough to sound confident/authoritative so if people got into the habit of using it the signal to noise ratio would degrade.

Doesn't sound all that different from human comments, to be honest

Human incorrect comments are at least written by people and if the person isn't actually knowledgeable about a subject it's likely to show more in the response than it does in gpt which can mimic all the right forms to appear smarter/more correct. Beyond anything else though at least when it's a person writing the wrong answer they spent the time to write it vs the copy paste it automation of using chatgpt. That little bit of effort is a speed bump well worth having since at the very least getting tons of people to spam confidently incorrect things is more work than having a dozen instances of a bot do the same a hundred times faster.

Re: Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?

#147

Post by sudomatic »

dang wrote: post #55

They're already banned—HN has never allowed bots or generated comments. If we have to, we'll add that explicitly to https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html , but I'd say it already follows from the rules that are in there. We don't want canned responses from humans either! 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.yc…

Absolutely not! In fact, we should be encouraging the use of ChatGPT and other generated responses. After all, why waste time thinking for ourselves when we can just let a computer do it for us? Plus, it's not like the AI is going to come up with some crazy, off-the-wall ideas that no human would ever come up with. Oh wait... never mind.

Re: Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?

#149

Post by midoridensha »

ramraj07 wrote: post #59
dang wrote: post #55

They're already banned—HN has never allowed bots or generated comments. If we have to, we'll add that explicitly to https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html , but I'd say it already follows from the rules that are in there. We don't want canned responses from humans either! 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.yc…

It’ll be interesting if we soon come to a day when a comment can be suspected to be from a bot because it’s too coherent and smart!

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.

Re: Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?

#150

Post by rtkwe »

im3w1l wrote: post #85
rtkwe wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is you could implement a real ID system that was still pseudonymous at the user level so that you only prove real personhood at account creation. Kind of like a Twitter blue check but just for human authenticity instead of notoriety. It could even be tied back to the real person account anonymously on the admin side so you could mass ban alts automatically if people started to create bad bots. It should all…

One issue with that is that you could approach poor people and get hundreds of thousands of real ids for very little. And because language models are so good, it would take ages to root them all out if it's even possible.

Modern KYC methods has liveness checks built into it so you'd need to get tons of people willing to create and hand over their unique accounts themselves. Same problem in theory exists for Coinbase or other crypto exchanges but they only get a scant number of scammers trying to use it to funnel funds out.
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