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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?

#221

Post by prox »

komali2 wrote: post #201
andsoitis wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suggest thinking about the purpose of discussion on HN. There’s a tension between thread quality on the one hand and the process of humans debating and learning from each other on the other hand.

I like thinking about the purpose, because I doubt there is a defined purpose right now. I have absolutely no idea why whoever hosts this site (ycombinator?) wants comments - if they're like reddit or twitter, though, it's to build a community and post history, because you can put that down as an asset and, idk, do money stuff with it. Count it in valuations and whatnot. And maybe do marketing and data mining. Or sel…

As someone who did a lot of debates in philosophy, most casual commenters are hilariously bad at discussing something. It’s like a wheel that wobbles from its axis and the wheel quickly comes of the axis. It’s not always a bad thing, some threads are just that, casual.

If the purpose for you is to get a dopamine hit and not true interest (exaggerating here) it might tune you out from the matter at hand.

For me it is the aspect of a more eclectic crowd, with a host of opinions, yet often still respectful that I like. Most threads give insights that are lacking in more general, less well moderated places. You get more interesting in depth opinions and knowledge sharing what makes HN great to me.

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

#222

Post by Jataman606 »

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…

> if it's an area of knowledge you're not really that familiar with

Thats actually dangerous way to use ChatGPT. Since you don't know the real answer you won't be able to tell when it gets something wrong.

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

#223

Post by [deleted] »

SoftTalker wrote: post #101
ALittleLight wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a capacity problem. Right now, the "system" (legit HN users) have the capacity to deal with dull and inane comments currently provided by dull and inane human commenters. If the dull and inane comments become automated they can arbitrarily increase their number until the system lacks the capacity to deal with them. If there was one or ten bad comments on this thread - no problem. What if there were ten t…

To what benefit? HN karma is pretty worthless outside of enabling a few capabilities here, and it's rather easy to attain those thresholds with some thoughtful participation. What would be the point of flooding HN with tens of thousands of bot comments?

[deleted]

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

#224

Post by wruza »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #174
matthberg wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There is -of course- the famous Alan Turing paper about this [1], which is rapidly becoming more relevant by the day. Alan Turing's paper was quite forward thinking. At the time, most people did not yet consider men and women to be equal (let alone homosexuals). I don't think it is so important whether a comment is written by a man, a woman, a child, or a , or some combination thereof. What is important is that the c…

I don't think it is so important whether a comment is written by a man, a woman, a child, or a , or some combination thereof. What is important is that the comment stands on its own, and has merit

This feels wrong for some reasons. A generalized knowledge that AI can express may be useful. But if it makes things up convincingly, the result that someone may follow its line of thought may be worse for them? With all shit humans say, it’s their real human experience formulated through a prism of their mood, intelligence and other states and characteristics. It’s a reflection of a real world somewhere. AI statements in this sense are minced realities cooked into something that may only look like a solid one. Maybe for some communities it would be irrelevant because participants are expected to judge logically and to check all facts, but it would require to keep awareness at all times.

By “real human” I don’t mean that they are better (or worse) in a discussion, only that I am a human too, a real experience is applicable to me in principle and I could meet it irl. AI’s experience applicability has yet to be proven, if it makes sense at all.

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

#225

Post by onion2k »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #41
dathinab wrote: post #12

The comment section on HN is for comments and discussions of people so yes any form of generated responses does IMHO fundamentally disqualify. I mean to nitpick if a AI becomes sentient and flexible enough to be called a person and decides to comment on their own that would be fine. But when it comes to: - auto generating responses - hiring people to generate responses for you - anything similar to the other points I…

I have a disability. I'm a bad writer and a bad speller. It takes me a long time to compose a response that I wont later regret. I haven't looked into it yet, but I was thinking ChatGPT might help me. I could quickly jot down my thoughts, and let the computer arrange them in an easier to read format.

That's not what ChatGPT does though. It will always add its own "thoughts" to your prompts. Using it as a writing assistant for spelling and grammar won't work.

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

#226

Post by jodrellblank »

Mistletoe wrote: post #159
xcambar wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The parent constrained with "Byte for byte identical stories".

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

#227

Post by pfortuny »

arcturus17 wrote: post #216
foota wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on what Ive seen, I strongly believe that chatGPT responses to many questions are better than a non human expert in many cases. You can still generally tell when a response is from chatGPT, at least by "default". Maybe someone could prompt it to sound more human, but it's really just that the AI responses are cold, not that they're imo worse. Not that I want AI responses, but that's my 2 cents. I also think the…

Based on what I’ve seen, ChatGPT has some disastrous responses. I asked it yesterday if it made sense to speak of partial derivatives in single-variable calculus and it made an absolute carnage of the response. I could not steer it with prompts towards something intelligible - it only produced jank. I do not want people who cannot answer a question in the first place to copy-paste ChatGPT responses, just like it has…

Try (I have done so) to ask it about nonsense good-looking keywords in maths. Like “what is an einstenian dual in a Hilbert space” (or something of the sort). It is totally incapable of saying “I do not know” in just 4 words. At least till two days ago.

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

#228

Post by xxs »

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…

>Let's try it.

It didn't work at all. Both answers read the same and lack any substance.

>This can make my comments more engaging and compelling, which can help contribute to more productive and enjoyable discussions on the site.

We don't need more markettering jazz. A casual use of 'engaging' tend to ruin any attempt at making a point.

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

#229

Post by robbomacrae »

Maybe we need a forum where the only way to add comments or posts is to write them out in the editor (no copy paste) with captcha style checks on the writing speed and variation. Sure, one could manually copy a generated response but the cost in posting such content has increased significantly and hopefully past the point of making any sense in most cases.

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

#230

Post by robbomacrae »

godmode2019 wrote: post #220
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…

Hi dang, is my account shadow banned? Or in any way limited I hardly post because when I do its down voted, sometimes the post is popular but after 24 hours its back to being down voted.

You don’t look shadow banned to me..
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