Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

501–510 of 677 posts

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

#501

Post by mdp2021 »

sheepscreek wrote: post #487
jacquesm wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the bar really isn't 'no human can tell' the bar is 'the bulk of the humans can't tell'. > Things would be quite different if an AI could interpret new information and form opinions, but even if GPT could be extended to do so, right now it doesn't seem to have the capability to form opinions or ingest new information (beyond a limited short term memory that it can use to have a coherent conversation). Forming opi…

A true AI will not have one opinion. It will realize there are many truths - one persons truth is really a perspective based on their inputs which are different than another's. Change the inputs and you’ll often get a different output. ChatGPT further proves this notion - you can ask it to prove/disprove the same point and it will do so quite convincingly both times.

> you can ask it to prove/disprove the same point and it will do so quite convincingly both times

Probably because "in the night of the reason everything is black"; probably because it is missing the very point, which is to get actual, real, argumented, solid insight on matters!!!

You use Decision Support Systems to better understand a context, not to have a well dressed thought toss!

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

#502

Post by bombcar »

dang wrote: post #485
discreteevent wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the only bit of the response that I don't agree with. I don't come to HN solely for utilitarian purposes. If I think I'm frequently communicating with a machine on HN then then I'll stop going to HN. It really will kill HN for me. If I want to communicate with a machine for utilitarian purposes then I'll go directly to the machine and I will know that I'm communicating with a machine (a machine that cannot bring…

Yes, I agree - it was a throwaway line that I didn't think through. Maybe I'll add an edit. Thanks!

I thought it was Brillant personally - that if what we’re posting is pretty indistinguishable from a bot then it’s not really worth posting.

Heck the “don’t post the obvious boring response” rule is basically that.

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

#503

Post by t0bia_s »

dwighttk wrote: post #471
t0bia_s wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, what content voting has? None. That's why it is irrelevant for me.

It moved the comment you were reading up the list making it more likely you see it (or down/less)… unless you read all the comments on HN. (Or maybe read from the bottom up?)

Yes, and I don't like it much. More visible content is even more visible in time. But not necessary more relevant. Maybe more liked, but how much only because "you don't want to sroll more"?

However "votes" for commenting suggested links makes more sense for me. It naturally expose topics that users willing to discuss and care about.

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

#504

Post by bombcar »

komali2 wrote: post #414
prox wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You know out of curiosity I just now logged into reddit for the first time in a while and made some posts on /r/changemymind just to see if I could get some good debate, and I don't know if it was always like that over there and I just didn't realize it (bringing that type of rhetoric here might be why i'm rate limited on HN lol), or if it just got worse over the last year of my "reddit break," but holy shit is it WA…

My gauge is how predictable it is - I can predict how a Reddit thread will go 90% of the time it seems, maybe even a 4chan thread 80% of the time.

The value of a community is in the unpredictability and HN has a good percentage of that, and I can choose to ignore the threads that will be predictable (though it can be fun to read them sometimes).

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

#505

Post by mdp2021 »

jacquesm wrote: post #417
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…

> But that's a ways off. Given the jumps in output quality between '1', '2' and '3' that may not be as far off as I would like it to be. It reminds me of the progression of computer chess. From 'nice toy' to 'beats the worlds best human' since 1949 to 'Man vs Machine World Team Championships' in 2004 is 55 years, but from Sargon (1978) to Deep Blue (1997) is only 21 years. For years we thought there was something uni…

> on the scale of human intellect

Where is the module that produces approximations to true and subtle insights about matters? Where is the "critical thinking" plugin, how is it vetted?

How do you value intelligence: on the form, or on the content? Take two Authors: how do you decide which one is more intelligent?

> the progression of computer chess

?! Those are solvers superseded by different, more effective solvers with a specific goal... These products in context supersede "Eliza"!

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

#506

Post by tambourine_man »

jacquesm wrote: post #500
tambourine_man wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I fear the most is that we‘ll keep at this “fake it till you make it” approach and skip the philosophical questions, such as what conscience really is. We’re are probably at the verge of having a bot that reports as conscious and convinces everyone that it is so. We’ll then never know how it got there, if really did or if just pretends so well that it doesn’t matter, etc. If feels like it’s out last chance as a…

The answer may well be 'consciousness is the ability to fake having consciousness well enough that another conscious being can't tell the difference' (which is the essence of the Turing test). Because if you're looking for a mechanism of consciousness you'd be hard put to pinpoint it in the 8 billion or so brains at your disposal for that purpose, no matter how many of them you open up. They'll all look like so much…

Sure, and that’s what I’m trying to say. Is being conscience just fooling yourself and others really well or is there some new property that eventually emerges from large enough neural networks and sensory inputs? The philosophical zombie is one the most important existencial questions that we may be at the cusp of ignoring.

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

#507

Post by scarface74 »

Radim wrote: post #433
scarface74 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I asked it to write a function in Python that would return the list of AWS accounts in an organization with a given tag key and value. The code looked right, initialized boto3 correctly and called a function on it get_account_numbers_by_tag on the organizations object. I wondered why I never heard of that function and nor did I find it when searching. Turns out, there is no such function.

It gives the old saying "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man adapts the world to himself; therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." a new twist, doesn't it? 1. AN AI MODEL IS GIVEN ENOUGH CAPACITY to capture (some of) our human perspective, a snapshot of our world as reflected in its training data. 2. AN AI MODEL IS GIVEN ENOUGH CAPACITY to fabulate and imagine things.…

I am not sure if this is AI generated or meant to read like it is. But I’ll bite.

One thing I noticed, it’s either trained naturally or tweaked by humans not to be political or say anything controversial. I asked if a simple question “Does open door have a good business model”. It punted like any good politician.

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

#508

Post by inglor »

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…

Giving up privacy is indeed a tragedy and inevitable and it's a consequence of many processes (including generated responses and bots but also the democratic process's reliance on news outlets and the fact spreading news got a lot easier with the internet and figured it out).

However - once we do a ton of stuff (other than reliable news though that is a nice side effects) is unlocked. If you can verify who someone is easily - elections and government processes can be a lot more transparent and reach consensus a lot more easily. Medicine can gather a lot of reliable (opt-in) data and become better and more efficient, fraud is easier to detect etc.

I am and have been for about 2-3 years sad for the upcoming loss of privacy and it is truly a tragedy and seems inevitable.

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

#509

Post by rtkwe »

js8 wrote: post #256
rtkwe wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human incorrect comments are at least written by people and if the person isn't actually knowledgeable about a subject it's likely to show more in the response than it does in gpt which can mimic all the right forms to appear smarter/more correct. Beyond anything else though at least when it's a person writing the wrong answer they spent the time to write it vs the copy paste it automation of using chatgpt. That litt…

I have seen firsthand the effect of wrong comments (I have written them) being upvoted more than the correcting responses that came afterwards. So yeah, it can happen with humans too, on occasion.

Sure and there's no real way around that other than community norms to downvote/whatever corrected replies and upvoting the correction. HN makes that a bit hard by locking voting away from so many people but I think it works better than open voting probably.

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

#510

Post by jacquesm »

tambourine_man wrote: post #506
jacquesm wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer may well be 'consciousness is the ability to fake having consciousness well enough that another conscious being can't tell the difference' (which is the essence of the Turing test). Because if you're looking for a mechanism of consciousness you'd be hard put to pinpoint it in the 8 billion or so brains at your disposal for that purpose, no matter how many of them you open up. They'll all look like so much…

Sure, and that’s what I’m trying to say. Is being conscience just fooling yourself and others really well or is there some new property that eventually emerges from large enough neural networks and sensory inputs? The philosophical zombie is one the most important existencial questions that we may be at the cusp of ignoring.

Philosophical zombie is a nice way of putting it, I used the term 'articulate idiot' but yours is much more eloquent.

I'm not sure it is an answerable question though, today or possibly even in the abstract.

Post reply on HN