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Decline of Indian vultures

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Re: Decline of Indian vultures

#41

Post by j-bos »

apwell23 wrote: post #37
haswell wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If these incredibly-obvious no-content non-comments are the best that LLMs can do I think our jobs are safe I think we have to look at these as an early iteration. These bots are only going to get better and better.

ah the classic " This is just the beginning" argument driving the hype. Have you considered that this might all that we will ever get? chatgpt-4o after much hype, billions of dollars and years later didn't improve much in terms of core intelligence of its responses. I guess thats not enough for "AGI is coming because we have chatbot" crowd.

Chatgpt's context configurations already allow susers to get reposnses mimicing specific speech styles. So no, this is not all we will get because better already exists, these fools just didn't use it.

Re: Decline of Indian vultures

#42

Post by grumple »

gwervc wrote: post #27
grumple wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gain reputation, use the account to manipulate us at a later time. HN is a high value target for the same regimes that use Reddit and other social media platforms to manipulate the US and Europe.

Interesting conspiracy theory, I'll now blame highly upvoted Rust stories as a Russian plot to make us lose time rewriting all our software.

We know nation states try to compromise social media platforms and Github; that isn't conspiracy, it's fact. Now whether this particular set of users serve that purpose, I cannot know. But why else would someone use a bot on this site, other than to gain reputation for the purpose of manipulation of some sort?

Remember the recent xz utils compromise: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39865810

Recent use of Github for intelligence efforts by China: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/02/21/china-hackin...

Iran on Reddit: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/volunteers-found-iran...

Russia on Reddit: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43255285

It is a certainty that you do interact with malicious actors representing hostile nation states on any large platform - HN is well beyond the size where it's an issue. I hope the HN team has some tools to detect and counter it, but given their small team size they probably can't do much.

Re: Decline of Indian vultures

#43

Post by pndy »

mathieuh wrote: post #32
4ggr0 wrote: post #8

It's fascinating and tragic how AI generated comments are obviously present in this comment section. Anyone else find it unsurprising that this happens? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41078496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41095522

It's the same in a few subreddits I frequent as well. Loads of accounts, all a couple of days old, all making the same or similar comments in a tone of voice that is completely different from the tone people usually use in those subreddits. If these incredibly-obvious no-content non-comments are the best that LLMs can do I think our jobs are safe.

I've seen bots accounts influx mid pandemic and shortly after Russian invasion on Ukraine praising particular countries, politicians - some of these were registered within hours apart. Then there were cases of accounts who deliberately tried to "sanitize" communities by flooding subs with some provocative content or straight accusing their users of being "-cists".

reddit despite of the advancing enshittification is still a big platform and a daily routine for many so it's not surprising that its being used by agents of various countries or communities to deploy their propaganda.

Re: Decline of Indian vultures

#44

Post by apwell23 »

j-bos wrote: post #41
apwell23 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ah the classic " This is just the beginning" argument driving the hype. Have you considered that this might all that we will ever get? chatgpt-4o after much hype, billions of dollars and years later didn't improve much in terms of core intelligence of its responses. I guess thats not enough for "AGI is coming because we have chatbot" crowd.

Chatgpt's context configurations already allow susers to get reposnses mimicing specific speech styles. So no, this is not all we will get because better already exists, these fools just didn't use it.

can you create an example in this post and see how many upvotes it gets.

Re: Decline of Indian vultures

#45

Post by Waterluvian »

jauco wrote: post #13
4ggr0 wrote: post #8

It's fascinating and tragic how AI generated comments are obviously present in this comment section. Anyone else find it unsurprising that this happens? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41078496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41095522

Maybe to establish a ring of accounts that duck underneath the vote ring detection metrics and that you can then use to upvote people’s stories? (For a small fee of course) This attempt probably will be flagged by dang since you called it out, but given enough effort they may even construct bots that generate the proper curious discussion that we like here, and have a small (but lucrative) rounding error in voting be…

I’m sure this is a worn out discussion point, and touches on some deep philosophical issues. But if bots could be entirely indistinguishable from humans and generate curious discussion, would I really care that they’re bots?

None of you know me. I might be a bot. But do I not generate curiosity? Do I not get downvoted on occasion? As a language model I—-

Re: Decline of Indian vultures

#46

Post by apwell23 »

haswell wrote: post #40
apwell23 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ah the classic " This is just the beginning" argument driving the hype. Have you considered that this might all that we will ever get? chatgpt-4o after much hype, billions of dollars and years later didn't improve much in terms of core intelligence of its responses. I guess thats not enough for "AGI is coming because we have chatbot" crowd.

We don’t need anything nearing AGI for these bots to become nearly indistinguishable from humans and to have increasing impact on communities. I think it’s utterly fascinating how quickly people have lost sight of current reality, either by believing AGI must be around the corner, or by being sure it absolutely isn’t. Assuming 4o is the most advanced model we ever have, the point still stands. Many of the poorly buil…

> bots to become nearly indistinguishable from humans

curious, why do you this is going to happen. Whats the thought process here to come to that conclusion.

Re: Decline of Indian vultures

#47

Post by netsharc »

Waterluvian wrote: post #45
jauco wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe to establish a ring of accounts that duck underneath the vote ring detection metrics and that you can then use to upvote people’s stories? (For a small fee of course) This attempt probably will be flagged by dang since you called it out, but given enough effort they may even construct bots that generate the proper curious discussion that we like here, and have a small (but lucrative) rounding error in voting be…

I’m sure this is a worn out discussion point, and touches on some deep philosophical issues. But if bots could be entirely indistinguishable from humans and generate curious discussion, would I really care that they’re bots? None of you know me. I might be a bot. But do I not generate curiosity? Do I not get downvoted on occasion? As a language model I—-

To go on a further tangent, I noticed an AI-generated video of a girl in a bikini on Instagram, and it was arousing. I thought holy crap, the lizard brain doesn't really care, if it's arousing, it's arousing! (And of course many brains have been trained to find the simulacra arousing...)

Re: Decline of Indian vultures

#48

Post by haswell »

apwell23 wrote: post #46
haswell wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don’t need anything nearing AGI for these bots to become nearly indistinguishable from humans and to have increasing impact on communities. I think it’s utterly fascinating how quickly people have lost sight of current reality, either by believing AGI must be around the corner, or by being sure it absolutely isn’t. Assuming 4o is the most advanced model we ever have, the point still stands. Many of the poorly buil…

> bots to become nearly indistinguishable from humans curious, why do you this is going to happen. Whats the thought process here to come to that conclusion.

I don’t just think this will happen; I think it’s already happening. Harder to pull off here, but already extremely prevalent on Reddit and other popular social spaces. And part of the reason it works is that a significant subset of human commenters write rather poorly and are not hard to beat, to say nothing of the evolving tools.

But don’t take my word for it. Go spend some time experimenting with the state of the art and run some of your own tests with it. Assuming you yourself are not one of these bots, what you find might surprise you.

Re: Decline of Indian vultures

#49

Post by Waterluvian »

netsharc wrote: post #47
Waterluvian wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sure this is a worn out discussion point, and touches on some deep philosophical issues. But if bots could be entirely indistinguishable from humans and generate curious discussion, would I really care that they’re bots? None of you know me. I might be a bot. But do I not generate curiosity? Do I not get downvoted on occasion? As a language model I—-

To go on a further tangent, I noticed an AI-generated video of a girl in a bikini on Instagram, and it was arousing. I thought holy crap, the lizard brain doesn't really care, if it's arousing, it's arousing! (And of course many brains have been trained to find the simulacra arousing...)

We’ve been doing this to ourselves forever. Whether sexually or tricking ourselves with sweeteners or whatnot.

Our brain has a pretty loosely typed interface.

Re: Decline of Indian vultures

#50

Post by bluefirebrand »

Waterluvian wrote: post #45
jauco wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe to establish a ring of accounts that duck underneath the vote ring detection metrics and that you can then use to upvote people’s stories? (For a small fee of course) This attempt probably will be flagged by dang since you called it out, but given enough effort they may even construct bots that generate the proper curious discussion that we like here, and have a small (but lucrative) rounding error in voting be…

I’m sure this is a worn out discussion point, and touches on some deep philosophical issues. But if bots could be entirely indistinguishable from humans and generate curious discussion, would I really care that they’re bots? None of you know me. I might be a bot. But do I not generate curiosity? Do I not get downvoted on occasion? As a language model I—-

Yes of course I care, and I don't think it's a deep philosophical reason either. I think it's more practical

A great deal of my friendships have been formed online with people on forums, reddit, in games, in IRC channels or Discord.

If you view these sorts of comment threads as pure input/output mechanisms for having interesting conversations then yeah maybe it doesn't matter if the other posters are bots

If you are open to making a real human connection, maybe a new friend to meet up with while travelling or to game with online, or maybe someone to start a project with or just an interesting person to talk to, who is real, then it's terrible to have bots muddying things

Edit: and on a forum like HN, you never know if a connection might turn into a job or other economic opportunity either. But they wont from bots

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