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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?

#61

Post by dang »

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!

I agree, but in that case we can learn from the bots instead of wincing at regurgitated material.

Basically, if it improves thread quality, I'm for it, and if it degrades thread quality, we should throw the book at it. The nice thing about this position is that comment quality is a function of the comments themselves, and little else.

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

#63

Post by rtkwe »

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…

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 be doable with current encryption the biggest issue is we don’t have key to real person really setup at any level. Maybe something like keybase combined with the KYC tech used for banks and exchanges could bridge that gap.

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

#64

Post by rtkwe »

bragr wrote: 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.

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

#65

Post by dang »

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.

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

#66

Post by scarface74 »

photochemsyn wrote: post #29

Yes, ban it. I've been playing around with ChatGPT and where it starts failing is just where things start becoming interesting. What that means is that it's wikipedia-smart, i.e. it doesn't really tell you anything you can't find out with a minimal Google search. It does however cut the time-to-answer quite a bit, particularly if it's an area of knowledge you're not really that familiar with. But it bottoms out right…

The problem with ChatGPT is that it often reads authoritative. But is often just flat out wrong.

I asked it a few questions for which I consider myself a subject matter expert and the answers were laughably wrong.

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

#67

Post by dang »

arbitrage wrote: post #25
pjmorris wrote: post #14

Dr. Casey Fiesler recently tweeted > The @huggingface GPT detector works very well on ChatGPT-created text. I ran 5 student essays and 5 ChatGPT essays for the same prompt through it, and it was correct every time with >99.9% confidence. How about adding a %human/%GPT statistic to posts and comments?

HN doesn't update anything. That will obviously never happen.

We update things all the time! But we prefer to be subtle about it.

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

#68

Post by carbocation »

pjmorris wrote: post #14

Dr. Casey Fiesler recently tweeted > The @huggingface GPT detector works very well on ChatGPT-created text. I ran 5 student essays and 5 ChatGPT essays for the same prompt through it, and it was correct every time with >99.9% confidence. How about adding a %human/%GPT statistic to posts and comments?

I would argue that this test isn't particularly informative. Given 5 attempts and 5 successes, even though the point estimate of accuracy is 1, the 95% CI ranges from 0.48 to 1:

    > binom.test(5,5,0.5)

     Exact binomial test

    data:  5 and 5
    number of successes = 5, number of trials = 5, p-value = 0.0625
    alternative hypothesis: true probability of success is not equal to 0.5
    95 percent confidence interval:
     0.4781762 1.0000000
In other words, we don't have enough data in that small sample to reject the possibility that the model is 50% accurate, much less 99.9% accurate.

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

#69

Post by [deleted] »

Lockal wrote: post #54

Tbh, clay-dreidels just posted few ChatGPT-generated comments mostly in ChatGPT-related posts (more as a joke to show the pointlessness). And these comments were perfectly identifiable, despite the lack of a disclaimer. If we were talking about really hard-to-detect comments coming in mass quantities, then we could discuss the ban. In the meantime, it's too early.

[deleted]

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

#70

Post by woleium »

rtkwe wrote: post #63
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…

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…

...or pay to play. if every tweet cost $1 im sure they would be more thoughtful.
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