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

Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 677 posts

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

#431

Post by contravariant »

jacquesm wrote: post #417
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 uni…

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 that you communicate any useful information.

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).

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

#433

Post by Radim »

scarface74 wrote: post #100
culanuchachamim wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it happend when I asked to write a function using BigQuery, it wrote a function that made a lot of sense but was wrong, because the command didn't exist in BigQuery. When I replay that the function didn't work, it told me, something like this: You right the function that I used it was only working on beta mode, now you have to use the following.... And again it was wrong. I made a little research and never was…

I asked it to write a function in Python that would return the list of AWS accounts in an organization with a given tag key and value. The code looked right, initialized boto3 correctly and called a function on it get_account_numbers_by_tag on the organizations object. I wondered why I never heard of that function and nor did I find it when searching. Turns out, there is no such function.

It gives the old saying "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man adapts the world to himself; therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." a new twist, doesn't it?

1. AN AI MODEL IS GIVEN ENOUGH CAPACITY to capture (some of) our human perspective, a snapshot of our world as reflected in its training data.

2. AN AI MODEL IS GIVEN ENOUGH CAPACITY to fabulate and imagine things.

The fabulations are of a charmingly naive "predict the most probable next token" sort for now, with chatGPT. But even as a future model is (inevitably) given the ability to probe and correct its errors, the initial direction of its fabulations will still reflect that "inception worldview" snapshot.

For example, if a particular fashion trend or political view was popular around the time the model was trained (with training data typically skewing toward the "recent", simply because "recent" is when most digital data will have been produced), that model can be expected to fabulate along the lines of that imprinted political view.

3. AN AI MODEL IS GIVEN ENOUGH CAPACITY to make the is-vs-ought choice between "CORRECT ITSELF" = adapt to the world; or "CORRECT THE WORLD" = imprint its worldview back onto the world (probably indirectly through humans paying attention to its outputs and acting as actuators, but that makes no difference).

Will it be more reasonable or unreasonable?

And which mode wins out long-term, be more energy efficient in that entropic struggle for survival that all physical systems go through?

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

#434

Post by Udo »

UberFly wrote: post #377
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.

That's good because I always wonder about the dynamic of the establishment "old guard" voting down everything they don't agree with.

Whoever the "old guard" is, they don't have special downvoting powers, do they? In the end, it's a numbers game. As far as I can tell, every user gets exactly one vote, no matter how influential. If "they" really hate you, or if enough normal users flag you, HN has other ways of letting you know, like shadow banning/auto-deading or flagging your account so your comments immediately fall to the bottom of the page no matter how many upvotes they receive. As long as you don't see either effect, you're probably doing okay here.

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

#436

Post by jwarden »

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…

It’s a great idea. And it doesn’t have to be a comment. It just needs to be a reason. It could be a tag, possibly corresponding to a specific guideline on the site. #flamebate, #tangent, etc.

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

#437

Post by danenania »

psychphysic wrote: post #345
randomsearch wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. ChatGPT has made me realise the gulf between “short form essay” school writing and the professionals. Here’s an example article that begins with the cliched GPT-generated intro, and then switches up into crafted prose: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/12/chatg...

I agree with the under current what chatGPT does well is making a good first draft of a text which is intended to be mostly neutral. It is to communication what calculators are to mathematics.

It's really good at conveying information and summarizing the most prominent points of view on a topic. If your goal is just to get a quick, fact-based overview without any color or fluff, I think it already tops what the vast majority of humans can do.

I'm finding myself reaching for it instead of Google or Wikipedia for a lot of random questions, which is pretty damn impressive. It's not good at everything, but I'm rather blown away by how strong it is in the 'short informative essay' niche.

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

#438

Post by sebzim4500 »

Jevon23 wrote: post #420

Hopefully with Stackoverflow banning ChatGPT responses, people here will be a little more sympathetic to art sites that wanted to ban AI-generated images.

Hopefully we won't see the same problems here where legitimate users are banned for being AIs.

I doubt that will be so much of a problem with ChatGPT since I don't think it can make high quality comments in the way that SD can make 'high quality' art.

GPT-4 though? Who knows. Rumours are that it is as much of an improvement over GPT-3 as GPT-3 was over GPT-2.

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

#439

Post by FartyMcFarter »

foota wrote: post #211
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…

Based on what Ive seen, I strongly believe that chatGPT responses to many questions are better than a non human expert in many cases. You can still generally tell when a response is from chatGPT, at least by "default". Maybe someone could prompt it to sound more human, but it's really just that the AI responses are cold, not that they're imo worse. Not that I want AI responses, but that's my 2 cents. I also think the…

> Based on what Ive seen, I strongly believe that chatGPT responses to many questions are better than a non human expert in many cases.

I disagree - it can't even do basic logic/maths reliably. See this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33859482

Someone in that thread also gave an example of ChatGPT saying that 3 * pi is an irrational number while 25 * pi is a rational number... Two quotes by ChatGPT:

> when you multiply an irrational number by a rational number (in this case, 3), the result is still an irrational number.

> when you multiply a rational number by an irrational number, the result is a rational number.

Post reply on HN