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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?

#241

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

hutzlibu wrote: post #232
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I totally agree, and that's one of the reasons I'm not using it for meaningful communication (e.g. HN comments, among many other things).

But I don't think professional email boilerplate is really worth learning if an AI can handle it.

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

#242

Post by asone_tuhid »

robbomacrae wrote: post #229

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.

It would be relatively trivial to write a script pretending to be a fast typist.

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

#243

Post by jsemrau »

keiferski wrote: post #40
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…

This has a far easier and less dystopian solution: charge money to access communities, which are smaller and more focused. I find it very unlikely that corporate PR bots will be paying $5 a month each to spam Substack communities, for example.

That's what I am doing with finclout. The noise on Stocktwits, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc is just way too high. Hence, offering a value adding app + the social component is where its at. IMHO.

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

#244

Post by sph »

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…

Fellow Internet human, I agree with you completely, there must be dozens of us. I wonder if I am just becoming a Luddite, or people have no idea whatsoever what will this unleash on already frail social fabric of the Internet.

I wonder if we've reached a singularity point where you cannot be sure you are engaging with a human anymore and it's going to be instrumental in the demise of the net. First, it was the big corporations that created a soulless place, then it was the naive, reckless technologists that killed the little of humanity that remained. Thanks to them, we will soon have to present real IDs to access some websites.

I am in the peak of my career as a software engineer at 35, as many Millenials I've grown during the best years of it, and now I'm considering a life away from what was once a bustling bazaar of human discourse, now it's a void of text, images, rage and little soul.

If the "Dead Internet" is just a conspiracy theory, we're running towards it at breakneck speed.

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

#245

Post by Archipelagia »

I think the difficult part of this question is – what percent of false positives are we willing to accept in the pursuit of deleting bots?

I think setting up some barriers to entry/usage is worth looking into. I wouldn't mind paying $5 to create a throwaway account, and that might be enough of a barrier to block most spammers.

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

#246

Post by arcturus17 »

foota wrote: post #218
arcturus17 wrote: post #216

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…

> then taking the partial derivative with respect to that variable is equivalent to taking the ordinary derivative of the function

I could not get it for the life of me to actually say this. But it goes on to show, everyone's mileage with the tool varies a lot.

Edit:

I cannot rescue my original prompt, but it was something like:

"Does it make sense to speak of partial derivatives in single-variable calculus?"

I'll grant that it's a more abstract question ("does it make sense") than yours. Or maybe it trips up with the difference between one-dimensional and single-variable. But a half-smart high schooler or college freshman would have understood the question perfectly and made mince meat of it.

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

#247

Post by js8 »

xxs wrote: post #231
supernikita wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

From what I have seen, HN is not especially keen on sarcasm either. Which I somewhat disagree with, I think it's a good alternative way how to make people think about something, rather than directly attacking the argument.

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

#248

Post by bilekas »

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…

> Whatever ChatGPT (or similar) can generate, humans need to do better. If we reach the point where the humans simply can't do better, well, then it won't matter. But that's a ways off.

I love this response way more than I should.

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

#249

Post by sph »

midoridensha wrote: post #175
oriolid wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Back to local community and family i guess, it was amazing while it lasted.. Some local communities and families can be pretty dysfunctional or outright hostile. I'm old enough to remember the time before Internet and I think this is why the whole online community thing took off in the first place.

Seriously, have people here not used Nextdoor? Local communities are absolutely full of toxicity.

Nextdoor lives on the internet. People in real life tend to be less terrible when you talk with them face to face. Put them on the internet, it's easy being an inconsiderate imbecile.

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

#250

Post by FridgeSeal »

Aeolun wrote: post #180
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.

If I can’t determine your comment is by a bot, does it make a difference? You are just a random name on the internet.

I mean, I’d certainly prefer to be engaged in conversation with actual humans, who have actual experience and motivation. If I want to talk to the latest iteration of the gpt-parrot-robot, I’ll go to the gpt site and talk to it there.
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