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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?

#541

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…

the obvious problems is that it looks good because it's well written.

doesn't mean that the answer is comprehensible or correctly

personally I develop a fatigue reading chatgpt answers, there's some fluff I have problems parsing, I don't know how to describe it.

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

#542

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.

Do not mistake ChatGPT for AI in general. ChatGPT, GPT, and transformers in general are not the end state of AI. They are one particular manifestation and projecting forward from them is drawing a complex hypershape through a single point (even worse than drawing a line through a single point).

It is probably more humanly-accurate to say that ChatGPT has no opinions at all. It has no understanding of truth, it has no opinions, it has no preferences whatsoever. It is the ultimate yes-thing; whatever you say, it'll essentially echo and elaborate on it, without regard for what it is that you said.

This obviously makes it unsuitable for many things. (This includes a number of things for which people are trying to use it.) This does not by any means prove that all possible useful AI architectures will also have no opinion, or that all architectures will be similarly noncommital.

(If you find yourself thinking this is a "criticism" of GPT... you may be too emotionally involved. GPT is essentially like looking into a mirror, and the humans doing so are bringing more emotion to that than the AI is. That's not "bad" or something, that's just how it works. What I'm saying here isn't a criticism or a praise; it's really more a super-dumbed-down description of its architecture. It fundamentally lacks these things. You can search it up and down for "opinions" or "truth", and it just isn't there in that architecture, not even implied in the weights somewhere where we can't see it. It isn't a good thing or a bad thing, it just is a property of the design.)

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

#544

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.…

> Do you believe your post is appropriate?

Not op, but I thought it was.

> very clearly you misunderstood my post

I don't understand any part of it either. I think you made their point for them.

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

#545
post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Pretty sure' or 'sure'? The fact that you qualify your response is interesting.

It's a wordy response that lacks any actual content. While it may not be written by a person, (or it may be a person trying to blur the line by sounding botty), it at least qualifies as the types of low value add comment that should be discouraged.

It’s surprisingly easy to identify AI comments in informal or semi-informal setting. They are too wordy. They would never say something stupid, controversial, or offensive.

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

#546
I fed ChatGPT all of the responses (as of UTC 13:38:38) and asked it to analyze the sentiment:

The forum is discussing whether ChatGPT and other generated responses should be banned. Some argue that these technologies can be useful, but that they should be used responsibly and in combination with human input. Others suggest that the best solution is to raise the community's standards for what counts as a good comment and make posts that are so thoughtful that the question of whether a comment is generated never comes up. Some also warn of the potential labor market impacts of advanced AI technologies, and the need to be cautious about their development and use. Overall, there seems to be a recognition of the need to be cautious about the development and use of these technologies.

Edit: my conclusion is that such generated summaries can be useful for very large threads (proceed with caution etc.)

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

#547
post #65
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…

Real person ID isn't a solution since real persons can always consort with bots on the side. I think anonymity and pseudo-anonymity still have a place and contribute a lot to discussion quality. So do people posting under their real names. We don't know how this is all going to play out yet.

The real person ID will make the "real person" liable to whatever the bot says and does though. I know US Americans have a bit more relaxed setups when it comes to free speech but that doesn't absolve anyone of actual consequences once the real name is out in the open. Not that Uncle Sam might prosecute you, but Jonathan who lives two blocks away might be so triggered by your response that he will graffiti your front door.

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

#549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

No problem, let us try and explain.

Intelligence is a process in which "you have thought over a problem at length" (this is also our good old Einstein, paraphrased).

What is that "thinking"?

You have taken a piece of your world model (the piece which subjected to your investigation), made mental experiments on it, you have criticized, _criticized_ the possible statements ("A is B") that could be applied to it, you have arrived to some conclusions of different weight (more credible, more tentative).

For something to be Intelligent, it must follow that process. (What does it, has an implemented "module" that does it.)

Without such process, how can an engine be attributed the quality of Intelligence? It may "look" like it - which is even more dangerous. "Has it actually thought about it?" should be a doubt duly present in awareness.

About the original post (making its statements more explicit):

That "module" is meant to produce «insights» that go (at least) in the direction of «true», of returning true statements about some "reality", and/or in the direction of «subtle», as opposed to "trivial". That module implements "critical thinking" - there is no useful Intelligence without it. Intelligence is evaluated in actually solving problems: reliably providing true statements and good insights (certainly not for verosimilarity, which is instead a threat - you may be deceived). Of two Authors, one is more intelligent because its statements are truer or more insightful - in a /true/ way (and not because, as our good old J. may have been read, one "seems" to make more sense. Some of the greatest Authors have been accused of possibly not making sense - actual content is not necessarily directly accessible); «/true/ way» means that when you ask a student about Solon you judge he has understood the matter not just because he provided the right dates for events (he has read the texts), but because he can answer intelligent questions about it correctly.

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

#550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it might produce convincing examples of human speech, but it fundamentally lacks an internal point of view that it can express, which places limits on how well it can argue something. It is of course possible that it might (eventually) be convincing enough that no human can tell, which would be problematic because it would suggest human speech is indistinguishable from a knee jerk response that doesn't require t…

You are arguing that a piece of software misses a metaphorical soul (something that cannot be measured but that humans uniquely have and nothing else does). That's an incredibly poor argument to make in a context where folks want interesting conversation. Religion (or religion-adjacent concepts such as this one) is a conversational nuke: It signals to anyone else that the conversation is over, as a discussion on reli…

I didn’t read it as being a religious take. They appear to be referring more to embodiment (edit: alternatively, online/continual learning) which these models do not posses. When we start persisting recurrent states beyond the current session we might be able to consider that limited embodiment. Even still the models will have no direct experience interacting with the subjects of their conservations. Its all second hand from the training data.
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