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Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?

news.ycombinator.com

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

#121

Post by mherdeg »

potatoman22 wrote: post #89
dottjt wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Let's try it. I think the second response below fails "concise" ..

Q: Write a news.ycombinator.com comment making the point that sometimes I use large language models because I know the gist but want to add examples and helpful context of my message

A: I find that sometimes when I'm commenting on news.ycombinator.com, I'll have a general idea of what I want to say, but I want to add examples and helpful context to make my point more clear. That's when I turn to large language models like Assistant. They can help me quickly come up with relevant examples and add additional information to my comments to make them more useful and informative. Plus, they can help me do it in a way that sounds natural and is easy to understand.

Q: Make it two paragraphs and concise

A: As a frequent reader of news.ycombinator.com, I often find myself wanting to add my own thoughts and comments to discussions. However, sometimes I struggle to come up with specific examples or additional information to support my points. That's when I turn to large language models like Assistant. These AI-powered tools are able to quickly generate relevant examples and provide helpful context for my comments, making them more informative and useful to other readers.

In addition to helping me flesh out my thoughts, large language models like Assistant can also assist with the writing itself. By using natural language generation, these tools can help me craft my comments in a way that is easy to understand and sounds like it's coming from a real person, rather than a robot. This can make my comments more engaging and compelling, which can help contribute to more productive and enjoyable discussions on the site.

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

#122

Post by cwkoss »

Aachen wrote: post #23
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?

Not to take a side, but to answer the question: imbalance. It takes less than thirty seconds for a computer to generate basically any amount of text, faster than anyone else can formulate a response, faster even than anyone can read. It could theoretically swamp a topic. Is that realistic? No idea. I haven't made up my mind on this topic yet.

Your concern seems to imply that you have to be the last one to get a word in to win an internet argument, which I wholeheartedly disagree with. On the internet and in real life, replying a lot and quickly is more often a sign of weakness.

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

#123

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#124

Post by gkoberger »

andsoitis wrote: post #119
gkoberger wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anonymous and AI are very different (at least currently). Take the following statement: "The CEO of ACME Co is abusive and you should avoid him at all costs. Do not work there." If it's an anonymous poster on Quora, that's a (potentially) valuable response and a good reason for that person to stay anonymous. But if it's AI, it can't possibly reflect any actual first-hand experience. At best it's a regurgitation of so…

There’s no reason to trust said anonymous comment on Quora.

Agreed, that's why I said potentially. I completely understand why a platform might want to ban anonymous comments, and I also understand why it might welcome them. Both come with risks and rewards.

(Same for for AI, btw. Some places will embrace it and some places will ban it, and both will have their valid reasons.)

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

#125

Post by drusepth »

photochemsyn wrote: post #83
scarface74 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It seems like if the contextual analogy here was carried through and ChatGPT were to leave its message as a comment on a Java-security thread, the same approach would apply (a few minutes of research on Google) and the provably-incorrect message would either be downvoted or commented on, just like a human comment with the same content would be.

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

#126

Post by ramraj07 »

matthberg wrote: post #73
ramraj07 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

There is an xkcd comic about this (of course): #810 Constructive: https://xkcd.com/810/

Of course there is, but it’s definitely weird when the jokes only funny when it’s not easy to think of it as a real possibility!

In someways this thread sounds like the real first step in the raise of true AI, in a weird banal encroachment kind of way.

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

#127

Post by hdhejenennd »

drusepth wrote: post #97

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…

Quora didn't gut anonymous functionality because it was bad for the product, but rather because there was a substantial cost involved in preventing privacy leaks (code changes that could accidentally reveal information about an anonymous poster) as well as a huge risk to the company and to users sharing confidential information if there was ever a data leak. The anonymous contributions themselves were a clear positive.

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

#128

Post by rafaelero »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #118

Aside: It would be interesting to have a 'show bot' option in the profile that would show posts that were bot generated. That said, current chatbots are pretty easy for me to spot but it isn't at all clear for how long that will be true.

I agree with you. It is definitely true that current chatbots are relatively easy to spot. However, I think it's only a matter of time before AI technology becomes even more advanced and it becomes much harder to distinguish between a chatbot and a human. It's an interesting time for AI development and I'm looking forward to seeing what the future holds in terms of chatbot technology.

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

#129

Post by andsoitis »

woleium wrote: post #70
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…

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

A toll fee won’t really be a quality incentive for someone of sufficient economic means, while shutting out great contributions from someone who can’t afford it.

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

#130

Post by mherdeg »

dang wrote: post #87
im3w1l wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This is one reason why I think NFT art theft is possible.

In principle "who owns this jpeg" is just a few bits in a distributed filesystem that the community collectively agrees to treat as the canonical source of "ownership", and they could easily roll it back if someone stole a market-distorting amount of art.

In practice, if you do an interesting heist -- like you put on cool looking art thief costume and livestream yourself on a vintage PowerBook bypassing the owners' defenses and nabbing the apes with a narrow escape -- you've written a compelling story that the community is sort of bound to accept.

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