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

AI slop is killing online communities

rmoff.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 781 posts

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#331

Post by [deleted] »

z3t4 wrote: post #86
carlgreene wrote: post #4

I have largely written Reddit off and no longer visit it after an experiment I did where I had an agent karma farm for me and do some covert advertising. As I went through the posts it wrote I realized that as a reader I would have NO idea that these were just written by a computer. Many many people (or other bots) had full on conversations with it and it scared me a bit. I am not quite there with Hacker News but I d…

There's this old meme where someone asks what will happen when AI bots posts helpful, curious and thoughtful messages!? That's mission accomplish :D They can't be better then the average human though because of training data, so I don't worry about AI comments getting up-voted by real humans, I am however worried about fake upvotes.

[deleted]

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#332

Post by chromacity »

Aurornis wrote: post #324
carlgreene wrote: post #4

I have largely written Reddit off and no longer visit it after an experiment I did where I had an agent karma farm for me and do some covert advertising. As I went through the posts it wrote I realized that as a reader I would have NO idea that these were just written by a computer. Many many people (or other bots) had full on conversations with it and it scared me a bit. I am not quite there with Hacker News but I d…

For a while there were a lot of posts from people experimenting with ChatGPT to write anger bait posts on Reddit where they would later edit the post to say it was fake, written by ChatGPT. I assume they thought they'd be teaching people a lesson by making them feel foolish for responding to AI stories, most of which were too fake to be believable. However it did not matter. The posts remained popular and continued t…

We do precisely the same thing here. Here's a relatively recent post that, to me, seems obviously LLM-written. It just rattles off some management platitudes:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47913650

It had 639 comments and 866 upvotes. And that's not a one-off.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#333

Post by mmooss »

carlgreene wrote: post #4

I have largely written Reddit off and no longer visit it after an experiment I did where I had an agent karma farm for me and do some covert advertising. As I went through the posts it wrote I realized that as a reader I would have NO idea that these were just written by a computer. Many many people (or other bots) had full on conversations with it and it scared me a bit. I am not quite there with Hacker News but I d…

> I do know for a fact that many "users" here are LLMs

What factual basis do you have for that?

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#334

Post by mmooss »

fn-mote wrote: post #319
sillysaurusx wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do know for a fact that many "users" here are LLMs. HN autokills comments it detects as LLM. I think maybe you're not giving HN enough credit. :)

I have read enough “you are replying to an LLM” comments that I am pretty sure this is still a hit or miss process.

Why do you think those comments are accurate? Maybe those comments are by LLMs? If you believe crowd wisdom on its face, you will have big problems with LLMs.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#335

Post by baxuz »

vohk wrote: post #30
carlgreene wrote: post #4

I have largely written Reddit off and no longer visit it after an experiment I did where I had an agent karma farm for me and do some covert advertising. As I went through the posts it wrote I realized that as a reader I would have NO idea that these were just written by a computer. Many many people (or other bots) had full on conversations with it and it scared me a bit. I am not quite there with Hacker News but I d…

I think it's going to effectively kill public chat communities without either proof of identity or attestation through a web of trust. Or rather turn them into little better than comment sections on news sites; thriving but worthless. I'm active in a number of online communities that are doing just fine but the difference is those all involve ongoing relationships, built over time and with engagement across multiple…

It'll come back again once ZKPs become standardized and become baked into devices:

https://eudi.dev/2.8.0/discussion-topics/g-zero-knowledge-pr...

I personally can't wait for a mechanism to kill 99% of bot traffic.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#337

Post by baxuz »

fidotron wrote: post #77
vohk wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's going to effectively kill public chat communities without either proof of identity or attestation through a web of trust. Or rather turn them into little better than comment sections on news sites; thriving but worthless. I'm active in a number of online communities that are doing just fine but the difference is those all involve ongoing relationships, built over time and with engagement across multiple…

> I think it's going to effectively kill public chat communities without either proof of identity or attestation through a web of trust. This seems self evident to me too. It's another factor in why I think the tech community needs to get ahead of governments on the whole "prove your ID on the Internet" thing by having some sort of standard way to do it that doesn't necessarily involve madness in the loop.

EU's ZKP implementation provides complete anonymity and untrackability:

https://eudi.dev/2.8.0/discussion-topics/g-zero-knowledge-pr...

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#338

Post by folderquestion »

vohk wrote: post #30
carlgreene wrote: post #4

I have largely written Reddit off and no longer visit it after an experiment I did where I had an agent karma farm for me and do some covert advertising. As I went through the posts it wrote I realized that as a reader I would have NO idea that these were just written by a computer. Many many people (or other bots) had full on conversations with it and it scared me a bit. I am not quite there with Hacker News but I d…

I think it's going to effectively kill public chat communities without either proof of identity or attestation through a web of trust. Or rather turn them into little better than comment sections on news sites; thriving but worthless. I'm active in a number of online communities that are doing just fine but the difference is those all involve ongoing relationships, built over time and with engagement across multiple…

The web could become a way to indicate identity if public institutions publish for example www.university-country/professors/John. And that implies that John is a professor. I designed a 6000 lines protocol, but anyone could construct that web using hmac(salt+ url).

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#339

Post by baxuz »

Morromist wrote: post #157
bluefirebrand wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be interested in working on a problem like that. I have a strong preference for remaining anonymous or at least making it a reasonably high bar to tying my online identity to my personal identity I would love to be involved in helping to design a sort of "human verified" badge that doesn't necessarily make it possible or at least not easy for everyone to find your real identity I've been thinking about it a bunch…

I agree its a very, very interesting problem. Maybe one of the biggest problems of the coming decade. I suspect it will be a long process: first there will be goverments that force people to use ID, but that will be abused, hacked and considerably restrict freedom of speech, so after that phase people will start to create better ids. The problem is really pretty simple: You need an authoratitive source to say "This p…

https://eudi.dev/2.8.0/discussion-topics/g-zero-knowledge-pr...

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#340

Post by Morromist »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #198
Morromist wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree its a very, very interesting problem. Maybe one of the biggest problems of the coming decade. I suspect it will be a long process: first there will be goverments that force people to use ID, but that will be abused, hacked and considerably restrict freedom of speech, so after that phase people will start to create better ids. The problem is really pretty simple: You need an authoratitive source to say "This p…

*You need an authoratitive source to say "This person is real"* Does that even accomplish much? It may cut down on mass fake account creation. But, real people can then create authenticated account, and use an LLM to post as an authenticated real person.

Yeah, that's a problem, you're right. There are some ways to migitate it, but they introduce their own issues. Like say you give someone only 1 ID for their lifetime, they start to spam AI crap, you ban their ID - sounds ok except who is available to police all 8 billion IDs and determine if they're spamming? Who polices the police? What if these IDs become critical for conducting commerce and banning someone is massively detrimental to their finances? Etc. These problems aren't necessarily unsolvable though - but they are super difficult.
Post reply on HN