[Acutulus]

It's an incredibly striking piece of technology and really shows which way the future winds will likely be blowing. A particular exchange I had with it left a mark on me, in which I requested it to behave like a used car salesman attempting to close a deal with a hungry customer. It proceeded to repurpose idioms, make dad-jokes and sling double entendres about the shared joy of cars and hamburgers and how they both are simple, dependable and iconic in my way of life. I sat there for a minute reading over it, nearly in disbelief.

I can accept a system such as ChatGPT synthesizing from data it sucked in, making educated guesses and so on. But to see it do such lingustic gymnastics with a very non-concrete request was humbling. It's given me a lot of pause about the way I absorb digital information and the varying degrees to which I have implicitly assumed the reliability of that information; site A slightly more trustworthy than site B, et cetera. To me, that old trust heuristic I relied on, one I have honed thanks to unfettered broadband for two decades, is now completely upended. It probably has been for some time to be fair, but my time with ChatGPT really cemented that feeling.

Every freshly written statement that comes to me through an internet connected device now gets a side-eye by default.

[raptor556]

I've been talking about this for awhile now, but I used to run a marketing service that streamed all reddit content in real time and did text analysis and bot detection. It's definitely a rough estimate but about ~65% of text content was determined to be a bot. I am entirely convinced that there are large entities (political campaigns, nations, etc.) that are using bot networks on social media sites like reddit to simulate "consensus" in online discussions and thus gently sway public opinion.

[TeMPOraL]

> It's definitely a rough estimate but about ~65% of text content was determined to be a bot.

A scary number. I wonder about a per-subreddit distribution, though. I imagine the primary subreddits have slightly worse human-to-bot ratio, niche subreddit somewhat better, with non-political, non-easily-monetizable subreddits having the best.

Did your analysis also attempt to identify troll farms? Would the content produced by protein bots be grouped in the ~65% of bot content, or the remaining 35%?

[a123b456c]

Ok how do we know you're not a bot?

[friendlyHornet]

Dear fellow human,

you have won cake. There will be a party in your honor

Please lie on your stomach with your arms at your sides. A party associate will arrive shortly to collect you for your party.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

> large entities (political campaigns, nations, etc.) that are using bot networks on social media sites

I think this has been conventional wisdom for a few years now.

[93po]

And even if they aren't using bots, it's a documented fact they're using humans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correct_the_Record

The methods matter less than that it's happening at all.

[93po]

It's wild how low quality so many of the comments are on reddit, to the point that it makes me wonder "Why did this person comment something so empty and non-contributing to a post that already had 3000 comments?"

I don't know whether to believe people are so wasteful of their own time or whether this is just low-effort bot posting to build consensus. Combined with how harshly and instantly main subreddits like /r/politics and /r/news shadow ban accounts, it's basically impossible to dissent

[anigbrowl]

Spot on. I am interested in any publications that might have come out of your research if you care to share.

[SqueamOssi]

Yeah - I can't believe how much this HN discussion seems like a human generated thread.

[alex_duf]

>I can accept a system such as ChatGPT synthesizing from data it sucked in, making educated guesses and so on

On that note I find it interesting that this has sometimes been an argument to dismiss chatGPT as "non intelligent". What are we if not statistical machines, synthesizing from the data we've sucked in over our lifetime?

[Acutulus]

I certainly can't see us humans as anything other than that. But if that's true, us human machines seem to have a large number of "low level programs" running in the background that serve to blur the boundary between us and the machines we build and help us to elevate ourselves to a special typing in the universe that very well may not exist.

I feel I think too much about mundane things and sometimes about wondrously confusing things often to my detriment. And at least a few times a week I would swear I run into a person with the opposite problem. Their behavior, choices, preferences. Their thought processes (at least what they share with me) come off as closer to machine than human.

Something in my gut tells me we are more similar to some of the things we build than we might care to admit.

[WoodenChair]

> What are we if not statistical machines, synthesizing from the data we've sucked in over our lifetime?

Reasoning machines who are actually pretty bad at statistics.

[yakubin]

Reasoning and statistical machines who are actually pretty bad at both.

[swagasaurus-rex]

We are heuristical which may not be logical, but it makes sense from an organism perspective.

For example since the world is uncertain and chaotic we seek either to conserve or expend for future gains. This can explain many stock trading behavior, despite often being a non optimal viewpoint