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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?

#81

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.

i’ve seen so many examples of this over the past few weeks. just thinking about how many people will just eat what it feeds them borders on terrifying.

in so many instances, it’s just wrong but continues on so confidently.

one of the things i find most interesting is that it has no idea when it’s wrong so it just keeps going. we already have a fairly significant growing problem of people who refuse to admit (even to themselves) what they don’t know, and now this will just exacerbate the problem.

it’s like the worst of debateBro culture has just been automated.

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

#82
post #38

Generate a Hacker News comments section discussing whether or not ChatGPT responses should be allowed on the site. Response from model User 1: I think allowing ChatGPT responses on Hacker News is a bad idea. This technology is still new, and could be used to create spam comments, or even worse, low-quality content. Plus, it could lead to more automated responses and more automation in general on the site, which I don…

No post body was provided.

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

#83

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.

I just asked it to provide a specific example of a security breach caused by a Java serialization flaw and it just made something up, i.e. it found some random security breach (unrelated to anything Java) and found some other random Java serialization bug and claimed that breach was due to that bug. A few minutes on Google revealed they were completely unrelated. Ouch.

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

#85
post #63
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…

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.

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

#86

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?

The GPT detector requires a significant amount of text for accuracy. Works well on student essays, not so much on short comments.

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

#87
post #80
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,…

Good point! I didn't really think that bit through.

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

#88
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?

Because this places the burden on users to sort it out. And you're ignoring a third category of comments: bad ones that are glib enough to garner upvotes.

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

#89
post #78
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…

I think the issue is that ChatGPT can already generate better responses than I personally can. Like, a lot of the time I'll have an interesting perspective that I just can't be bothered articulating, whereas ChatGPT will formulate that for me.

How could ChatGPT generate your perspective for you?

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

#90
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…

If I would be running Medium, I would be really worried. The platform already has the worst discovery. Now this will be even worse as content velocity will quickly increase.
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