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by mjr00 933 days ago
Do you have any examples of comments you believe were generated by AI?

In my experience, ChatGPT has a very distinctive writing style that's easy to identify, even if you "prompt engineer" to get something a little less generic. It also tends to not write anything of substance. The very few GPT-generated comments I've seen tend to get downvoted into oblivion.
2 comments
geph2021 933 days ago
I do not have anything specific. I have read threads where someone, usually with snark, responds with a comment of the sort "are you a bot?", or "you sound like chatGPT". That's probably only been a couple times over a few months, and I'm on HN reading threads multiple times a day, so it's not very frequent. But it does make me wonder... That distinctive ChatGPT style will become less recognizable. IMHO, bot content in the HN comments should be fairly low, but non-zero. I don't think there's much, if any, incentive to invest much in an HN comment bot, but with all these hackers/coders some would do it just out of curiosity/challenge.
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yoyohello13 933 days ago
I've come across some comments that just feel a bit off, you know? Like they're trying a bit too hard to be informative without really getting to the point. It's like they're dancing around the conversation.
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JohnFen 933 days ago
Even if there are no AI generated comments, the very fact that there could be means that every comment will be judged for whether or not they're real. This will certainly some cause real comments to be disregarded.

That's already degrading the quality of all online discussions all by itself.

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pixl97 933 days ago
In Reddit over the past 2ish years you can find accounts that only contain posts that have been posted on other accounts. They are generally used in context, so they are difficult to see by themselves. I only saw it when I saw the exact same comment 3 times in a thread, and it wasn't stupid repeated quips. Instead looking at each of the 3 accounts and Googling each of the posts in the accounts show the original sentence had been used in the past.

They weren't even bad comments. They fit in to the discussion, yet seeing it cheapened the experience.

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