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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?

#341

Post by Kim_Bruning »

wruza wrote: post #224
Kim_Bruning wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sh…

Moderators need to put up with trolls and shills (and outright strange people) a lot of the time too. While so far AI's aren't always quite helpful, they also are not actively hostile.

So as far as the spectrum of things moderation needs to deal with goes, AI contribution to discussions doesn't seem to be the worst of problems, and it doesn't seem like it would be completely unmanageable.

But while AI may not be an unmitigated disaster, you are quite correct that unsupervised AI currently might not be an unmitigated boon yet either.

Currently if one does want to use an AI to help participate in discussions, I'd recommend one keep a very close eye on it to make sure the activity remains constructive. This seems like common courtesy and common sense at this time. (And accounts who act unwisely should be sanctioned.)

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

#342

Post by ShamelessC »

asone_tuhid wrote: post #242
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.

Grandparent is a typical HN comment. "Oh, I just learned about a subject? It's so easy! Of course none of the studied experts considered [my dumb thought experiment i just came up with].

Quality of the comments is getting subpar here - and it's _not_ GPT. There's been a similar downward trend for a while.

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

#343

Post by techdragon »

UweSchmidt wrote: post #267
dang wrote: post #61

Earlier 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.

Then humans might just be on the sideline, watching chatbots flooding the forums with superbly researched mini-whitepapers with links, reasoning, humour; a flow of comments optimized like tiktok videos, unbeatable like chess engines in chess. Those bots could also collude with complementing comments, and create a background noise of opinions to fake a certain sentiment in the community. I have no suggestion or soluti…

If there’s a bot that can take a topic and research the argument you feed it, all without hallucinating any data and made up references… please please point me to it.

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

#344

Post by ShamelessC »

yadaeno wrote: post #33
dathinab wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Banning on HN is kinda pointless. But I think this is more about preventing/limiting karma gain of an account, potentially posting/commenting limits and similar stuff. I.e. it's more about migating the (assumed negative) effect a few people abusing comment generation could have then it is about punishing people.

Banning is not pointless. Allowing an easy path for farming high karma accounts is a huge issue. It would basically lower the cost of Astroturfing

I think you maybe overestimate the influence of a given hacker news comment. I imagine most lurkers don't even keep inventory of people's usernames, much less their karma.

I assume an unfortunate number of investors track such things, however.

And in any case - this site already lets companies shill things on HN and has a whole community of investors and other startups there to back them up. I guess the transparency is what makes it not astroturfing - but it's rather close don't you think?

Rules that discourage "shallow dismissals" go too far in the other direction - and all you get is founder-template, linked-in overly congratulatory "compliments".

Rules that discourage "read the fucking article" comments go too far in the other direction - and all you get is deeply reactionary, underinformed and waaay over-confident.

Of course, the only way to know these things would be to assess based on actual merits - it doesn't seem like the site operators agree with this assessment (that degradation of comment quality is largely self-inflicted due to the curation of a "yes!" (or, equally - a "yes, and...") culture.

Tech startup culture has similar issues, so I'm not really surprised. It does suck however to lose so much respect for your colleagues (speaking hyperbolically/poetically).

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

#345

Post by psychphysic »

randomsearch wrote: post #290
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…

I agree. ChatGPT has made me realise the gulf between “short form essay” school writing and the professionals. Here’s an example article that begins with the cliched GPT-generated intro, and then switches up into crafted prose: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/12/chatg...

I agree with the under current what chatGPT does well is making a good first draft of a text which is intended to be mostly neutral.

It is to communication what calculators are to mathematics.

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

#346

Post by moomin »

andy_ppp wrote: post #318
gorgoiler wrote: post #252

One thing I’m guilty of on this site is not upvoting enough. I vote down the banality and flag the pollution. Upvoting doesn’t seem to come as naturally — whenever I read an interesting response it’s the last thing on my mind. It’s a good thing really. Interesting stories and comments are the norm. I wonder what the userDB says about any scarcity of upvoters? Are there many others like me? Am I not pulling my weight?…

The UI for voting in general isn’t great and gives me anxiety on mobile so I almost never click it. With my sausage fingers it’d be good if the clickable area was bigger and up voting had some CTA…

Grief, the mobile UI is awful. I’ve seen auto-playing videos with more clickable close buttons.

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

#347

Post by phonebucket »

drusepth wrote: post #97

This debate reminds me a lot of early-Quora moderation discussions over anonymous users. People wanted to mass-ban any answers from "anonymous" because they weren't from "real people". I argued that, in a public forum, questions/answers should be judged on their content, rather than "who" wrote them. People disagreed. Anonymous functionality on Quora has since been gutted. AI-generated content seems similar. If a com…

This answer feels generated by ChatGPT. No human would side with ChatGPT so strongly.

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

#348

Post by folbec »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #105
drusepth wrote: post #97

This debate reminds me a lot of early-Quora moderation discussions over anonymous users. People wanted to mass-ban any answers from "anonymous" because they weren't from "real people". I argued that, in a public forum, questions/answers should be judged on their content, rather than "who" wrote them. People disagreed. Anonymous functionality on Quora has since been gutted. AI-generated content seems similar. If a com…

Answer: Because AI-generated content is (frequently) lower quality while maintaining the appearance of high quality.

Artificial Inanity ?

https://englishwotd.wordpress.com/2014/02/17/artificial-inan...

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

#350

Post by mdp2021 »

andy_ppp wrote: post #318
gorgoiler wrote: post #252

One thing I’m guilty of on this site is not upvoting enough. I vote down the banality and flag the pollution. Upvoting doesn’t seem to come as naturally — whenever I read an interesting response it’s the last thing on my mind. It’s a good thing really. Interesting stories and comments are the norm. I wonder what the userDB says about any scarcity of upvoters? Are there many others like me? Am I not pulling my weight?…

The UI for voting in general isn’t great and gives me anxiety on mobile so I almost never click it. With my sausage fingers it’d be good if the clickable area was bigger and up voting had some CTA…

You could inject CSS with a modified ".votearrow".
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