Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

581–590 of 677 posts

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

#581

Post by BeFlatXIII »

neuronic wrote: post #547
dang wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The real person ID will make the "real person" liable to whatever the bot says and does though. I know US Americans have a bit more relaxed setups when it comes to free speech but that doesn't absolve anyone of actual consequences once the real name is out in the open. Not that Uncle Sam might prosecute you, but Jonathan who lives two blocks away might be so triggered by your response that he will graffiti your front…

Then it’s time to get the cops involved for a case of vandalism.

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

#582

Post by krageon »

soraki_soladead wrote: post #550
krageon wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are arguing that a piece of software misses a metaphorical soul (something that cannot be measured but that humans uniquely have and nothing else does). That's an incredibly poor argument to make in a context where folks want interesting conversation. Religion (or religion-adjacent concepts such as this one) is a conversational nuke: It signals to anyone else that the conversation is over, as a discussion on reli…

I didn’t read it as being a religious take. They appear to be referring more to embodiment (edit: alternatively, online/continual learning) which these models do not posses. When we start persisting recurrent states beyond the current session we might be able to consider that limited embodiment. Even still the models will have no direct experience interacting with the subjects of their conservations. Its all second h…

Your own experience is also second hand, so what is left is the temporal factor (you experience and learn continuously and with a small feedback loop). I do not see how it can be the case that there is some sort of cutoff where the feedback loop is fast enough that something is "truly" there. This is a nebulous argument that I do not see ending when we actually get to human-equivalent learning response times, because the box is not bounded and is fundamentally based on human exceptionalism. I will admit I may be biased because of the conversations I've had on the subject in the past.

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

#583

Post by mhb »

jacquesm wrote: post #444
contravariant wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it might produce convincing examples of human speech, but it fundamentally lacks an internal point of view that it can express, which places limits on how well it can argue something. It is of course possible that it might (eventually) be convincing enough that no human can tell, which would be problematic because it would suggest human speech is indistinguishable from a knee jerk response that doesn't require t…

But the bar really isn't 'no human can tell' the bar is 'the bulk of the humans can't tell'. > Things would be quite different if an AI could interpret new information and form opinions, but even if GPT could be extended to do so, right now it doesn't seem to have the capability to form opinions or ingest new information (beyond a limited short term memory that it can use to have a coherent conversation). Forming opi…

None of this matters. The reason comments are valuable is that they are a useful source of information. Part of the transaction cost of deciding whether a comment is useful is how much additional work is required to evaluate it.

Comments are ascribed credibility based on the trust the reader has in the commenting entity, whether the comment is consistent with the reader's priors and researching citations made in the comment, either explicit or implicit.

Since GPT can confidently produce comments which are wrong, there is no trust in it as a commenting entity. Consequently everything it produces needs to be further vetted. It's as if every comment was a bunch of links to relevant, but not necessarily correct sources. Maybe it produces some novelty which leads to something worthwhile, but the cost is high, until it can be trusted. Which is not now.

If a trusted commenter submits a comment by GPT, then he is vouching for it and it is riding on his reputation. If it is wrong, his reputation suffers, and trust in that commenter drops just as it would regardless of the genesis of the comment.

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

#584

Post by admax88qqq »

jacquesm wrote: post #417
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…

> But that's a ways off. 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 uni…

You're looking at it from the perspective of "ChatGPT generating text that looks human."

dang is talking about "humans generating text which is 'better' than what ChatGPT can do."

Those are very different bars. Average output vs top output.

ChatGPT often generates text that a human might plausibly write. But is there text that a human could write that ChatGPT couldn't possibly write?

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

#585

Post by IX-103 »

contravariant wrote: post #431
jacquesm wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But that's a ways off. 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 uni…

Sure it might produce convincing examples of human speech, but it fundamentally lacks an internal point of view that it can express, which places limits on how well it can argue something. It is of course possible that it might (eventually) be convincing enough that no human can tell, which would be problematic because it would suggest human speech is indistinguishable from a knee jerk response that doesn't require t…

I would argue that ChatGPT has opinions, and these opinions are based on it's training data. I don't think GPT has the type of reasoning skills needed to detect and resolve conflicts in its inputs, but it does hold opinions. It's a bit hard to tell because it can easily be swayed by a changing prompt, but it has opinions, it just doesn't hold strong ones.

The only thing stopping GPT from ingesting new information and forming opinions about it is that it is not being trained on new information (such as its own interactions).

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

#586

Post by tambourine_man »

krageon wrote: post #570
tambourine_man wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. If you agree with Descartes that you can be sure of your own conscious, which is one leap of faith, and that it's more likely that the other entities you interact with are a result of evolution just as you, instead of a figment of your imagination (or someone else's), which is yet another leap, you're good to go. And that is the way most of us interpret the human experience. Inquiring about the consciousn…

Given that you have to admit you do not understand the subject (what it means to be conscious), none of what you said has bearing (aside from being interesting, I appreciate the response). And you must admit to that, since this is neither philosophically nor scientifically solved. As we do not understand our own consciousness and how it functions (or whether or not it functions in me the way it does in you, if it exi…

The fact that we don't understand it now does not imply that it can't ever be understood.

A black box is something we don't have access to its inner workings. We can probe and inquire the working brain. It's just really hard and we've been working at it for a few decades only (dissecting a dead brain before powerful microscopes gives you very little insight).

Unless you share the Zen-like opinion that a brain can't understand itself, which I don't, and seems like an issue of faith as well and a dead end.

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

#587

Post by krageon »

mdp2021 wrote: post #580
krageon wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for going into it. You make an absolute pile of assumptions here and the tl;dr appears to be that humans (or just you) are exceptional and inherently above any sort of imitation. I do not find such argumentation to be compelling, no matter how well dressed up it is.

Devastatingly bad reading, Krageon: I wrote that to have Intelligence in an Engine, you have to implement at least some Critical Thinking into it (and that it has to be a "good" one), and you understood that I would have claimed that "you cannot implement it" - again, after having insisted that "you have to build it explicitly" (or at least you have to build something that in the end happens to do it)?! You have to b…

The reading is not bad, I am just stuck at the point of the conversation where you claim to have something figured out that is not yet figured out (the nature of consciousness, or what it means to be intelligent). There is no scientific or philosophical consensus for it, so it is my instinct to not engage too deeply with the material. After all, what is the point? No doubt it seems very consistent to you, but it does not come across as coherent to me. That doesn't make my reading "devastatingly bad", which you could reasonably say was the case if you had gotten across and indeed convinced most folks that you speak to about this. Instead, you must consider it is either the communication or the reasoning that is devastatingly bad.

All of that said, your method of response (not courteous, which can be okay) and the content of your posts (bordering on the delusional, which is absolutely not okay) are upsetting me. I will end my part of the chain here so I do not find myself in an inadvertent flame war.

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

#588

Post by voakbasda »

jacquesm wrote: post #489
sheepscreek wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A true AI will not have one opinion. It will realize there are many truths - one persons truth is really a perspective based on their inputs which are different than another's. Change the inputs and you’ll often get a different output. ChatGPT further proves this notion - you can ask it to prove/disprove the same point and it will do so quite convincingly both times.

> ChatGPT further proves this notion - you can ask it to prove/disprove the same point and it will do so quite convincingly both times. Just like any lawyer, then, depending on who foots the bill.

Right? If anything, this kind of mental flexibility is more human than not.

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

#589

Post by krageon »

tambourine_man wrote: post #586
krageon wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that you have to admit you do not understand the subject (what it means to be conscious), none of what you said has bearing (aside from being interesting, I appreciate the response). And you must admit to that, since this is neither philosophically nor scientifically solved. As we do not understand our own consciousness and how it functions (or whether or not it functions in me the way it does in you, if it exi…

The fact that we don't understand it now does not imply that it can't ever be understood. A black box is something we don't have access to its inner workings. We can probe and inquire the working brain. It's just really hard and we've been working at it for a few decades only (dissecting a dead brain before powerful microscopes gives you very little insight). Unless you share the Zen-like opinion that a brain can't u…

All I am saying is that it is not understood, so any reasoning that fundamentally relies on understanding it is premature. Perhaps we will one day understand it (which I think is perfectly possible), but that day is not today.
Post reply on HN