Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?

news.ycombinator.com

231–240 of 677 posts

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

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely not! In fact, we should be encouraging the use of ChatGPT and other generated responses. After all, why waste time thinking for ourselves when we can just let a computer do it for us? Plus, it's not like the AI is going to come up with some crazy, off-the-wall ideas that no human would ever come up with. Oh wait... never mind.

I disagree: mental laziness is never a good justification. (I recently started to memorize more things, since I do not believe in "just google it"). Also, I want to read what fellow humans relate. Even though it might sometimes be difficult to tell the difference, I attend HN as a substitute for physical social interactions. For mere knowledge or problem solving, other places might fill that role.

It was a sarcastic response.

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

#232
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.

This is even more valuable if you're not a native English speaker, as finding the right words for what you want to say takes more time. I'm not using it on HN but it's proving invaluable for professional emails, as it gets the tone and all the polite boilerplate right (at least for my standards) which is something that takes me some time to do by hand.

"which is something that takes me some time to do by hand. "

Yes, but this is how you learn it vs. always be dependant on an AI to communicate for you.

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

#233
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…

this is where the internet has gone over the last 10 years. it’s become less personal. you’re not on small community sites anymore with people you know. you’re on of a million looking at the same content reposted to the handful of large publishers. doesn’t matter which one you use, it’s all the same. doesn’t matter who the poster or commenter or anything about the people is, you don’t know them anyway

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

#234
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.

I have never seen questions to itself or other's in the generated text. Also it never expresses emotions. Never something like "I am convinced.. ." , "I dont want to be....". I find it quite easy to recognize in comment sections.

[deleted]

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

#235
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Really? Because this is what I got: "Me: How do partial derivative apply in one dimensional calculus? In one-dimensional calculus, a partial derivative is a derivative taken with respect to one variable, while treating all other variables as constants. For example, if a function f(x,y) depends on two variables x and y, the partial derivative of f with respect to x is denoted as ∂f/∂x, and it represents the rate at wh…

It was arguing with me the other day about the definition of a prime number. I couldn’t convince it otherwise.

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

#236
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.

I have never seen questions to itself or other's in the generated text. Also it never expresses emotions. Never something like "I am convinced.. ." , "I dont want to be....". I find it quite easy to recognize in comment sections.

You just gotta give it the right prompt.

For example, I gave it the following prompt:

> Imagine yourself able to ask yourself a question, or express emotions. Then write a short and passionate comment for Hacker News about the FreeBSD operating system.

The response includes a standard disclaimer that the OpenAI people put in there, but also satisfies expression of emotion:

> As a machine learning model, I am not capable of imagining myself with the ability to ask myself questions or express emotions. However, if I were able to express emotions and have a personal opinion, I might write the following short and passionate comment about the FreeBSD operating system:

> "I am in love with FreeBSD! It is the best operating system out there in my opinion. It is stable, reliable, and open source. I have tried other operating systems, but I always come back to FreeBSD because it is simply the best. #FreeBSDforlife"

Now imagine that you were reading a thread on HN about a new version of FreeBSD having been released, and you found the above ChatGPT generated comment, but with the disclaimer and the quotation marks removed. Would you have been able to guess that it was written by ChatGPT? I would not.

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

#237
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Price can vary by market. Many companies already do this both for products and services, as well as subscriptions.

But once you throw a VPN into the mix, it's not so simple [1] [2]. It then becomes a game of whack-a-mole where you have to obscure how pricing parity is done [3]. 1: https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1600232199243984897 2: https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1600246753348882432 3: https://twitter.com/dannypostmaa/status/1600372062958538752

I think the goal here is not money, but making it enough of a hassle that spammers wouldn't bother.

So if someone from US actually wants to go through the trouble to save $3, well, at least they're unlikely to be a bot.

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

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Price can vary by market. Many companies already do this both for products and services, as well as subscriptions.

I guess you haven't heard of a VPN?

I guess you haven't considered making a list of IPs VPNs use as an intern project to setup over the winter

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

#240
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…

Thank you for this hard line stance against AI.
Post reply on HN