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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?

#651

This debate reminds me a lot of early-Quora moderation discussions over anonymous users. People wanted to mass-ban any answers from "anonymous" because they weren't from "real people". I argued that, in a public forum, questions/answers should be judged on their content, rather than "who" wrote them. People disagreed. Anonymous functionality on Quora has since been gutted. AI-generated content seems similar. If a com…

This answer feels generated by ChatGPT. No human would side with ChatGPT so strongly.

I wrote the above answer with my brain and fingers without including ChatGPT.

I think you'd find that, in a lot of contexts, a lot of humans care more about reading quality content than concerning themselves with who wrote that content, which is effecively "siding with ChatGPT" here, I guess.

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

#652
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…

The account 'dang' often replies with a list of links and then produces some generated response with the topic as a seed. Given the frequency of responses this person would need to be using Hacker News full time.

@mods Can we get this account checked please?

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

#654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's so, where is the GPT detector?

mmm well how long did GPT take? Say a quarter of that time?

OpenAI started late 2015. I don't know when they started working on GPT, but GPT-2 was early 2019.

Nearly 4 years later, still no GPT-2 detector?

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

#655
post #652
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…

The account 'dang' often replies with a list of links and then produces some generated response with the topic as a seed. Given the frequency of responses this person would need to be using Hacker News full time. @mods Can we get this account checked please?

I'll check it for you.

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

#656
post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting them on a pseudo-anonymous web forum like Nextdoor shows what these people really think of you.

I disagree. While I subscribe to the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, I do not believe the vast majority of people are awful. The current format of the internet fosters an unnatural way of behaving, but sit at a table with most people and they are able to disagree, or even get around to another viewpoint, pretty easily. Sadly, I do think this view of mine of the Internet will die soon, as only the people that grew ha…

>While I subscribe to the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, I do not believe the vast majority of people are awful.

The vast majority? No, of course not. But a sizeable fraction are, and two things happen because of this: 1) they ruin most spaces when there aren't robust mechanism to keep their people out or their behavior regulated. Nextdoor has shown this, along with most unmoderated internet forums. 2) the fuckwads are frequently able to rile up others and get them to go along with their awful actions; we saw this in Nazi Germany for instance, and many other places throughout history.

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

#659
post #64
post #13

Seems like a non problem. If it's a dull comment or just inane it'll get downvoted out of existence. If the bot actually produces something interesting about the topic, what's the problem?

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.

imo you have described HN in a nutshell
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