I'd expect reddit to be flooded by these but HN would not care much.
Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?
271–280 of 677 posts
Re: Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree, but in that case we can learn from the bots instead of wincing at regurgitated material. Basically, if it improves thread quality, I'm for it, and if it degrades thread quality, we should throw the book at it. The nice thing about this position is that comment quality is a function of the comments themselves, and little else.
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.
There's the quality of the written commentary (which is all that matters for anyone only reading, never posting on HN) and the quality of the engagement of people that do write comments (which include how much their learned, the emotions they had, and other less tangible stuff)
I think HN is optimizing for the former quality aspects and not the latter. So in that sense, if you can't tell if it's written by a bot, does it matter? (cue Westworld https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaahx4hMxmw)
Re: Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?
#273Is the "point" of HN comments to let people (humans) speak their minds, or generate insightful thought-provoking discussion? If the latter, I say let the bot post. Maybe it will force some of our more, shall we say, "insight challenged" commenters to up their game.
You're thinking like a lawyer here. When the "generate thought-provoking discussion" guideline was written, there was no GPT. It's not like if it doesn't explicitly say it's for humans, bots are automatically allowed. And in any case, when that guideline was written, only humans were capable of thought provoking statements, while bots were only able to spam Cialis websites. So it is implied that we prefer human thoug…
Makes sense. For context I wrote that comment when there were like 4 other comments, didn't even realize this was addressed in the guidelines until I came back to this thread just now.
Re: Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those of us who don't read the news daily, or live in a different country, won't know the answer to that question either.
You can quickly google it
Have you seen ChatGPT responses? It can easily find out yesterday's topics and write a 10 page essay.
Re: Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?
#275Allow them as long as they make clear that they are generated, ban deceptive behavior
Re: Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?
#276The 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…
Reputation could hold this at bay for a little (in place of a real person ID), though you have the obvious problem of bootstrapping a real person's reputation who is only entering the forum.
How do you make a working reputation system? Reddit, for example, has bots populating the top karma levels.
Re: Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?
#277They'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.
I think that puts too much faith in the average person
Re: Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meanwhile quality of Quora answers these days are basically as bad as it gets, so bad that I have it blocked from my Google results. Not once have I been to Quora and actually found an answer I was looking for.
> so bad that I have it blocked from my Google results What did you use to do this? Would love to never have Quora spam ever again.
There are browser extensions that help with this. I use a adlist for ublock-origin that uses the cosmetic filters to remove some offending sites from search results. For me this includes Wikipedia and StackOverflow clones, Quora and a few others
Re: Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
But if you know a lot about something, why would you ask ChatGPT a question about it (especially if you assume it doesn't have expert knowledge)?
I wouldn't ask ChatGPT anything. It is still writing weird articles that sounds meaningful yet lacking arguments because it finds attributes of the compared objects and places them in sentences. As if it is comparing them. It just doesn't make sense. ChatGPT is nice but has a long way to become useful that way.
Re: Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Indeed, and to me the sarcasm was beyond obvious - 1st sentence: two words and an exclamation mark. One interesting caveat was that the account was brand new (like just created).