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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?

#411

Post by xxs »

nobrains wrote: post #353
gorgoiler wrote: post #252

One thing I’m guilty of on this site is not upvoting enough. I vote down the banality and flag the pollution. Upvoting doesn’t seem to come as naturally — whenever I read an interesting response it’s the last thing on my mind. It’s a good thing really. Interesting stories and comments are the norm. I wonder what the userDB says about any scarcity of upvoters? Are there many others like me? Am I not pulling my weight?…

I am the opposite. I vote up easily, but think a hundred times before downvoting. Downvoting feels like censorship to me.

>Downvoting feels like censorship to me.

because it works that way here

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

#412

Post by xienze »

nobrains wrote: post #353
gorgoiler wrote: post #252

One thing I’m guilty of on this site is not upvoting enough. I vote down the banality and flag the pollution. Upvoting doesn’t seem to come as naturally — whenever I read an interesting response it’s the last thing on my mind. It’s a good thing really. Interesting stories and comments are the norm. I wonder what the userDB says about any scarcity of upvoters? Are there many others like me? Am I not pulling my weight?…

I am the opposite. I vote up easily, but think a hundred times before downvoting. Downvoting feels like censorship to me.

I wonder why this site -- or any site with up/downvoting, really -- doesn't implement a "must comment to downvote" policy. Far too often downvoting is just the "I disagree and think you suck" button[0]. Make someone elaborate on _why_ they disagree or _why_ the original poster is wrong before allowing a downvote.

0: in particular, on HN the downvote button also seems to serve the purpose of "I don't think other people should see what you have to say" button due to HN's passive-aggressive greying out of downvoted comments.

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

#413

Post by bcherny »

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…

Every major site is already pretty effective at blocking bots, and has been for years. I don’t see why that would suddenly start to become less effective, given their approaches largely focus on behavioral signals, not specific content.

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

#414

Post by komali2 »

prox wrote: post #221
komali2 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like thinking about the purpose, because I doubt there is a defined purpose right now. I have absolutely no idea why whoever hosts this site (ycombinator?) wants comments - if they're like reddit or twitter, though, it's to build a community and post history, because you can put that down as an asset and, idk, do money stuff with it. Count it in valuations and whatnot. And maybe do marketing and data mining. Or sel…

As someone who did a lot of debates in philosophy, most casual commenters are hilariously bad at discussing something. It’s like a wheel that wobbles from its axis and the wheel quickly comes of the axis. It’s not always a bad thing, some threads are just that, casual. If the purpose for you is to get a dopamine hit and not true interest (exaggerating here) it might tune you out from the matter at hand. For me it is…

You know out of curiosity I just now logged into reddit for the first time in a while and made some posts on /r/changemymind just to see if I could get some good debate, and I don't know if it was always like that over there and I just didn't realize it (bringing that type of rhetoric here might be why i'm rate limited on HN lol), or if it just got worse over the last year of my "reddit break," but holy shit is it WAY better over here. I was very skeptical when people describe HN as "insightful" or "well moderated" or "in depth" but compared to other places on the internet it's certainly true.

Dare I venture back to 4chan and see how my detoxxed brain sees it now...

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

#415

Post by detaro »

xienze wrote: post #412
nobrains wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am the opposite. I vote up easily, but think a hundred times before downvoting. Downvoting feels like censorship to me.

I wonder why this site -- or any site with up/downvoting, really -- doesn't implement a "must comment to downvote" policy. Far too often downvoting is just the "I disagree and think you suck" button[0]. Make someone elaborate on _why_ they disagree or _why_ the original poster is wrong before allowing a downvote. 0: in particular, on HN the downvote button also seems to serve the purpose of "I don't think other peopl…

That's a surefire way to give more attention to bad posts and cause flamewars that spiral out of control.

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

#416

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

rizky05 wrote: post #200
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is even more valuable if you're not a native English speaker, as finding the right words for what you want to say takes more time. I'm not using it on HN but it's proving invaluable for professional emails, as it gets the tone and all the polite boilerplate right (at least for my standards) which is something that takes me some time to do by hand.

We already have google translate for that. My Native tongue is Indonesian, and often google translate did better than me. Source: sentence above is translated

While Google Translate can also be useful, I find ChatGPT to be much better for the specific kind of task I'm talking about, because professional email language is highly idiomatic and translations don't necessarily sound natural.

For example, a few days ago I asked it to write a professional followup email to remind someone about a deadline, and it used the sentence "I hope this email finds you well". This is common in English but in my native language (Spanish) most people wouldn't use a sentence like that in a professional email, so using machine translation would never generate it.

As an example, I reused that task from my real work. Here is the same email generated in two ways:

1. Prompt in Spanish + machine translation to English:

Dear candidate,

I am contacting you again as I wanted to remind you that the application period for the postdoctoral researcher offer with me is coming to an end. If you are still interested in applying, I would appreciate it if you would reply to this email as soon as possible.

I understand that you may be very busy, but I would like to remind you that this is a unique opportunity to join our research team and develop your career in this area. If you need more information about the offer or if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.

I hope I can count on your response soon.

Sincerely,

2. Prompt in English, no translation:

Dear [Candidate],

I hope this email finds you well. I wanted to remind you that the deadline for the postdoc position we discussed is quickly approaching. As we discussed, this is a fantastic opportunity to further your research and collaborate with our team.

I wanted to check in and see if you have any questions or if there is anything I can do to assist with your application. Please let me know if you need any additional information or if there is anything else I can do to help.

I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Best regards,

In my view (native speakers would be welcome to chime in and confirm/refute) while both could be OK and the first wouldn't make the candidate run away or anything, the second sounds more idiomatic in English. The first sounded perfectly natural in Spanish, but not that much when translated because the choice of sentences is not what most people would use in English.

Of course, option 2 is only better assuming enough knowledge of English to write the prompt. Otherwise, translation is the way to go.

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

#417

Post by jacquesm »

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…

> But that's a ways off.

Given the jumps in output quality between '1', '2' and '3' that may not be as far off as I would like it to be.

It reminds me of the progression of computer chess. From 'nice toy' to 'beats the worlds best human' since 1949 to 'Man vs Machine World Team Championships' in 2004 is 55 years, but from Sargon (1978) to Deep Blue (1997) is only 21 years. For years we thought there was something unique about Chess (and Go for that matter) that made the game at the core a human domain thing, but those that were following this more closely saw that the progression would eventually lead to a point where the bulk of the players could no longer win from programs running on off the shelf hardware.

GPT-3 is at a point where you could probably place it's output somewhere on the scale of human intellect depending on the quality of the prompt engineering and the subject matter. Sometimes it produces utter garbage but already often enough it produces stuff that isn't all that far off from what a human might plausibly write. The fact that we are having this discussion is proof of that, given a few more years and iterations 4, 5 and 6 the relevant question is whether we are months, years or decades away from that point.

The kind of impact that this will have on labor markets the world over is seriously underestimated, and even though GPT-3's authors have side-stepped a thorny issue by simply not feeding it information on current affairs in the training corpus if Chess development is any guide the fact that you need a huge computer to train the model today is likely going to be moot at some point, when anybody can train their own LLM. Then the weaponization of this tech will begin for real.

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

#418

Post by drunkpotato »

verisimi wrote: post #371
gorgoiler wrote: post #252

One thing I’m guilty of on this site is not upvoting enough. I vote down the banality and flag the pollution. Upvoting doesn’t seem to come as naturally — whenever I read an interesting response it’s the last thing on my mind. It’s a good thing really. Interesting stories and comments are the norm. I wonder what the userDB says about any scarcity of upvoters? Are there many others like me? Am I not pulling my weight?…

If you downvote, I think that should come with an explanation of your downvote. There may be genuine reasons for downvoting, errors in what is presented, etc. Fair enough. But if you downvote because you don't like something, all you are doing is attempting to create an echo chamber of views and opinions you already believe. Is that what you want? If so, you are now in a war for control of the echo chamber you want t…

I have to strongly disagree with you. In my opinion a policy like this would err on valuing form over content, when content matters a great deal. Downvotes (and upvotes) can be a signal for content as well as form.

For example, an articulate, well-reasoned, passionate argument for why PHP is the best get shit done language? Sure, I can upvote that even if I firmly disagree.

But an articulate, well-reasoned, passionate argument for vi being superior to emacs? I can’t downvote fast enough, but only because we cannot burn the heretic in these enlightened times.

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

#419

Post by zimbatm »

nobrains wrote: post #353
gorgoiler wrote: post #252

One thing I’m guilty of on this site is not upvoting enough. I vote down the banality and flag the pollution. Upvoting doesn’t seem to come as naturally — whenever I read an interesting response it’s the last thing on my mind. It’s a good thing really. Interesting stories and comments are the norm. I wonder what the userDB says about any scarcity of upvoters? Are there many others like me? Am I not pulling my weight?…

I am the opposite. I vote up easily, but think a hundred times before downvoting. Downvoting feels like censorship to me.

What we're looking for are high signal/noise ration posts to expand the conversation into new areas that are interesting.

If the ratio is too low (eg: spam, shallow content, same old tired point), it's not an issue to downvote IMO. That helps with the current post and also encourages good behaviour in the future.

This is not the same as downvoting with a point that you personally disagree with. This is censorship and toxic to the community.

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