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

151–160 of 677 posts

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

#151

Post by andsoitis »

cwkoss wrote: post #122
Aachen wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

These replies won’t come from a single account, so humans will still be drowned out by bots.

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

#152

Post by fleshdaddy »

mherdeg wrote: post #121
potatoman22 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

Both of these read like a person bullshitting and trying to reach a sentence minimum on a short answer prompt in high school to me.

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

#153

Post by greesil »

jspaetzel wrote: post #112

Time for a Hacker News Orange. It's a new subscription you can pay $8 a month for to get your identity verified and comments prioritized.

I'm sort of coming around to this part of Elon's viewpoint. Nevermind if this is the right solution to a bot problem, but I do think it's a problem.

Related a bit, but I just watched a documentary called Fake Famous, and I wondered if maybe all the insta fakery would be minimized if bots were eliminated. Or at the other extreme, the fakery itself could be automated, thus devaluing it.

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

#154

Post by xcambar »

im3w1l wrote: post #80
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…

> 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,…

From the perspective of the receiver of the message, there is no such thing as the story being true or not.

If it's byte for byte the same story and I don't know whether the author is a human or a bot and I believe the story, the same reaction will be triggered at every level. The emotions, the symbolics, the empathy, all the same, whether the author is this or that.

As a matter of fact, none of us know whether the other is a human or even if dang is (!), because it is orthogonal to the contents and discussion.

What is it that you don't like? That the story is made up or that it is made up (possibly) by a not? In the first case, what is your opinion on made up stories by humans such as novels? In the second case, what is your opinion on objects made up by robots such as your car or phone?

Unless I can tell you are of flesh and bones or not, my acceptance of your story depends only on the story itself. Not whether it happened to a human or not.

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

#155

Post by scarface74 »

lhuser123 wrote: post #114
scarface74 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I asked it to write a function in Python that would return the list of AWS accounts in an organization with a given tag key and value. The code looked right, initialized boto3 correctly and called a function on it get_account_numbers_by_tag on the organizations object. I wondered why I never heard of that function and nor did I find it when searching. Turns out, there is no such function.

It sounds a lot similar to normal thinking errors that we make.

The second time, it gave me code that was almost right.

Just now I asked

Write a Python script that returns all of the accounts in an AWS organization with a given tag where the user specifies the tag key and value using command line arguments

I thought the code had to be wrong because it used concepts I had never heard of. This time it used the resource group API.

I have never heard of the API. But it does exist. I also couldn’t find sample code on the internet that did anything similar. But from looking at the documentation it should work. I learned something new today.

BTW, for context when I claimed to be a “subject matter expert” above, I work at AWS in Professional Services, code most days using the AWS API and I would have never thought of the solution it gave me.

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

#156

Post by IncRnd »

mherdeg wrote: post #121
potatoman22 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

Those are entirely "fluff" comments, devoid of substance or example.

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

#157

Post by mschnell »

midoridensha wrote: post #149
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!

From the ChatGPT-generated stuff I've seen just in the last week, I think we're already there. Most humans these days are incredibly stupid.

I would rephrase that: Humans are incredibly stupid most of the time. Only if they make diligent use of ‚system 2‘ they are not.

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

#158

Post by greesil »

catiopatio wrote: post #74
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…

No thank you. That would be a dystopian nightmare.

Maybe all possible outcomes are dystopian nightmares, and we have to choose the least bad one.

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

#159

Post by Mistletoe »

xcambar wrote: post #154
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,…

From the perspective of the receiver of the message, there is no such thing as the story being true or not. If it's byte for byte the same story and I don't know whether the author is a human or a bot and I believe the story, the same reaction will be triggered at every level. The emotions, the symbolics, the empathy, all the same, whether the author is this or that. As a matter of fact, none of us know whether the o…

A made up story likely bears no resemblance to the reality we inhabit since it doesn’t obey the same physical laws of cause and effect for our universe? I’m surprised we have to even explain why a made up story is not useful.
Post reply on HN