Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses? • Hacker News Board

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

#531

Post by tambourine_man » Mon, Dec 12, 2022, 2:05 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #510

tambourine_man wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wish it was, but it’s not mine :)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

That’s the thing, if we truly understand conscience, we may have a shot at verifying if it’s answerable in the abstract. By simply replicating its effects, we are dodging the question.

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

#532

Post by krageon » Mon, Dec 12, 2022, 2:05 PM UTC

mdp2021 wrote: post #520

jacquesm wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, for starters we could take your comment and compare it to GPT-3 output to see which one makes more sense.

> compare Exactly. Which one "/seems/ to make sense" and which one has the "juice". Also: are you insinuating anything? Do you believe your post is appropriate? Edit: but very clearly you misunderstood my post: not only as you suggest with your (very avoidable) expression, but also in fact. Because my point implied that "a good intellectual proposal should not happen by chance": modules should be implemented for it.…

I genuinely cannot tell what you are talking about.

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

#533

Post by baandang » Mon, Dec 12, 2022, 2:06 PM UTC

ramraj07 wrote: post #59

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…

It’ll be interesting if we soon come to a day when a comment can be suspected to be from a bot because it’s too coherent and smart!

At that point the whole concept of a message board with humans exchanging information is probably over.

I am ultimately motivated to read this site to read smart things and something interesting. It is quite inefficient though. This comment is great but most comments are not what I am looking for.

If you could spend your time talking to Von Neumann about computing the input from thousands of random people who know far less than Von Neumann would not be interesting at all.

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

#534

Post by jacooper » Mon, Dec 12, 2022, 2:06 PM UTC

ahmedtatum wrote: post #302

concordDance wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you make a working reputation system? Reddit, for example, has bots populating the top karma levels.

Yeah I have a bot farm on reddit of 500-1000 accounts posting AI generated stuff to sell trending posts to brands, it's very easy to do and they've made little to no progress in stopping it

Well, you are part of the problem then.

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

#535

Post by boringg » Mon, Dec 12, 2022, 2:07 PM UTC

shkkmo wrote: post #480

swader999 wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not a bot or a GPT. I am a real person with my own thoughts, opinions, and beliefs. While I am capable of critical thinking, reasoning, and disagreement. Just because my response may not align with your beliefs does not mean that it was automatically generated by a computer program.

It's not disagreement that makes it seem like a bot, but the weird voice and prosaic sentiments that sound vaguely like a elementary school kid writing a report that just repeats common knowledge.

They are intentionally writing like GPT to prove a point or, alternatively, to hide their comments amongst GPT to seed confusion in the bot v human debate. Its disingenuous.

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

#536

Post by neuronic » Mon, Dec 12, 2022, 2:07 PM UTC

sph wrote: post #244

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 co…

> 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

In the past, it must have been 2003-2008, I was sharing self-drawn comics and ideas how to improve on them with fellow artists, actually meeting them in real life sometimes at conventions. I was also active in a gaming forum plainly for discussing the lore and surrounding theories.

These communities had a real sense of community and weren't social just in name. I knew every day at 5pm a lot of new posts and threads would be starting to appear, from my forum friends and arch enemies alike.

Nowadays, these places are dead as people have moved on to large platforms long ago. This already killed all feeling of community but at least I had some nice comment exchanges and the absolute amount of content increased.

Then it got even worse. I cannot read a single post that isn't surrounded by trolling, astroturfing, psyops, advertisements and affiliate links or bot responses. Good example: as a German, it is very hard to ever discuss the topic of nuclear fission phase-out in a constructive and respectful manner. Especially on reddit, the canned and templated responses are really suspicious.

But it doesn't matter anymore, if it is discussions or content. Communities will be flooded and killed by bots while content is flooded and killed by generated SEO garbage (a lot of threads on HN about this as well). Unless you're explicitly browsing some decent sites like Wikipedia the Internet is already FUBAR compared to pre-2010 or so.

The Bot-trocity is happening and making it worse with every evolution of ChatGPT and so on. We cannot trust images or text anymore. Everything is a dream and nothing is real.

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

#537

Post by krageon » Mon, Dec 12, 2022, 2:07 PM UTC

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.

The philosophical zombie is fundamentally uninteresting as a conversational piece, as they are by definition indistinguishable from a "regular" person. For all we know, you could be one. You can speak of this concept until the end of time, just as you can with all things that cannot be measured or proven. It is a matter of faith.

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

#538

Post by corry » Mon, Dec 12, 2022, 2:09 PM UTC

none_to_remain wrote: post #457

KirillPanov wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No; it would be treated like parking fines by the very rich United Parcel Service corporation -- i.e., an extremely effective deterrent. The penalty scales with the number of bot accounts, but even Bill Gates can only drive one automobile at a time.

I'm not quite sure what you're getting at about deterrent? I know here in NYC that UPS just parks as they please and has some kind of deal with the city to pay the tickets with a bulk discount

Their point is that for an individual, yes, it's not that much of a deterrent - but that individual can only park poorly with 1 car at a time.

The USPS has a fleet of many (hundreds of thousands?) vehicles, so their capacity to ruin it for everyone is much larger - but their potential liability from fines is too. So they treat it very seriously.

The poster is saying that spam is more like the USPS situation, where single entities control thousands of potential infractions, not the rich individual.

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

#539

Post by krageon » Mon, Dec 12, 2022, 2:09 PM UTC

discreteevent wrote: post #406

bilekas wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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…

> If I think I'm [...]

If the problem is your faith, it is you that has to change and not the world. It's much easier that way around too :)

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

#540

Post by boringg » Mon, Dec 12, 2022, 2:09 PM UTC

psychphysic wrote: post #345

randomsearch wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thats a great analogy. I like to think of it as setting up the scaffolding either on the code front or writing front.

Its well structured, clear and concise but lacks high level capability of a human or human style attributes.