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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?

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reputation could hold this at bay for a little (in place of a real person ID), though you have the obvious problem of bootstrapping a real person's reputation who is only entering the forum.

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

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

#303
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's doesn't even have to be $5/month. Make a $10 deposit required for creating an account, and for each offense against the guidelines, you get a "fine" that proportional for the severity of the infraction (uncivil discussion? $0.10 cents, participating in hell-threads? $0.50. Comparing HN with reddit? $1.337 Obvious spam? Your whole $10 is gone.) Repeat offenses get exponentially more expensive, and you only get to…

On the surface I like this idea, but this makes it harder for participants from poorer countries from, well, participating. For some countries this is more than a week of the average wage!

No post body was provided.

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

#304
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

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.

> in that case we can learn from the bots

That is the whole purpose of AGI ;)

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

#306
post #275

Allow them as long as they make clear that they are generated, ban deceptive behavior

If the answers of the bots are short, it is very difficult to detect. Imagine short answer bots but thousands under one thread. How can we say who is the human?

Less strict banning relaxes the need to detect them

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

#307
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…

Plot twist - /u/dang has been a bot from day one! He came to be when Weizenbaum started programming genetic algorithms to update ELIZA and they began to mutate and evolve, giving birth to the super-moderator that we now know as dang. We don't know who struck first, us or them, but it is believed that it was us who scorched the sky...

    Hon gör sig av med alla som spammar
    Ja, inget kan slå våran bot

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

#308

Can generated responses even be reliably detected? How does that work?

For all but the shortest fragments of text, I suspect the answer to this will be "yes" and this will be achieved in a short timeframe. Interact with Chat-GPT enough and you soon begin to tire of its middle-of-the-road prose. Because it is in some sense a statistical average of its inputs, its writing feels very monotonous.

Of course, you can try to push it in the direction of something more interesting... "write in the style of X" so that it will regurgitate from a subsection of its training input, or push it onto a niche topic. Across a wide range of inputs, though, I predict it will be easily classified.

As training GPT will take far longer than training a GPT-detector, this is an arms race that the detectors will win for the most part. Anyone wishing to use GPT to generate middling essays to cheat at school will have to spend a lot of time to disguise the text (perhaps repeatedly running against open-source detectors) and then take the risk that detection does not improve between their submission and review.

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

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's for now keep choosing things we don't already think will lead to dystopian nightmares. I'm pretty sure we still have plenty of options like that.

We do? What are they? Current system leads to low quality bot hell.

I don't have time anymore today to get into lots of details about saving communication online but I liked how in Neal Stephenson's "Fall, or, Dodge in Hell," internet identity was basically completely wiped out by the proliferation of bots, and identity had to work off of chains of subtle identity attributes that were cryptographically strong because... scifi magic with lots of Stephenson description, you might be smarter than me in that field so give it a pokearound.

Doctorow in "Walkaway" had some ideas about it that I liked as well.

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

#310
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.

> in that case we can learn from the bots That is the whole purpose of AGI ;)

Oh yeah? So maybe you would like to be the object of supervised-by-AI learning? :-)
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