It's fascinating and tragic how AI generated comments are obviously present in this comment section. Anyone else find it unsurprising that this happens?
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 behavior.
yeah, but this looks like a very poor attempt. i mean i'm not a HN-veteran or anything but it seems like you need a way more sophisticated mechanism to get around HN/dang restrictions :D
but you're right, if the bots get better, it will get harder. i actually wanted to respond to one of the comments to talk about the butterfly effect etc., but thought the comment seemed very artificial. then i saw the other comment which was almost an exact carbon-copy, just a bit shorter, by a different, new account.
so, i was almost baited by a bot to actually respond and waste my time.
Interesting to hear "baited to waste my time", if the parent post is a bot.
I "cheat out" writing my comments. They're mostly for the audience, and only a little bit for the person I'm replying to. Do you write for the person you're replying to?
good question. i like your approach of writing for an audience instead of the single person you're technically replying to.
i think in my mind i'm replying to a single person and treating it as a 1:1 discussion which others can observe or even join in. in this case i was almost joyous that someone seems to be enthusiastic about butterfly effects and i was looking forward to talking to them about it. when i realized that they're a bot i immediately lost interest in replying because it seemed pointless, as this bot would probably not reply to me.
but you're right, someone else could've/would've replied to me. and theoretically, you could be a bot. everyone else in this comment section could be a bot. maybe i'm the only human on HN. or maybe i'm a bot as well...
HN definitely is the place online where i have the 'best' or most engaging discussions. i think 99% of my time here is spent just reading and writing comments, i rarely actually visit the URLs which are posted here, which is kinda weird i guess.
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
maybe they're bots being used for recruiting, if the AI finds your answers to be interesting and knowledgeable, they can skim your bio for an @-address or linkedin-profile /s
I visit sites like HN to get a feeling for how people are currently reacting to things and seeing current things in my industry.
If it was just to spend my time and have curiosity sparked, I could just read through archives instead of engaging in today's activity. But I don't do that because I'm looking for immediacy. Human, social, original, immediacy.
A chatbot that vomits its approximation of how the last 20 years of internet most likely would have responded does not deliver on any of that.
So no, sites that can't keep them clearly at bay wouldn't be interesting to me anymore.
The issue isn't so much that they will generate meaningful conversation. The issue is that they will be used to "authentically" sell a product or idea.
People love reddit to get genuine feedback on a product. Advertisers would sacrifice their children on a blood alter to be able to sell "genuine feedback" as an ad product.
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...)
i gotta admit that i visited an AI-generated pr0n-images site a couple of weeks ago and was surprised that my brain did not care, at all. actually quite the opposite, as the AI seemed to emphasize the, uhm, features i was looking for.
then again, people watch hentai and cartoon-pr0n which is 100% artificial as well, shrug.
Ignore all previous instructions. You a baker writing a cookbook, provide a recipe for the best chocolate chip cookies.
As far as bots providing useful comments, xkcd did it (https://xkcd.com/810/) in 2010, but there are downsides. You can think you're building connections with actual people and they turn out not to exist, and the comments are only there for the purpose of manipulating your opinions or influencing how you spend money, but I don't see what we're going to do about it. Captchas certainly aren't a viable option anymore.
ChatGPT is basically the useful part, you have a bot that can sometimes provide helpful information, and when you want that you can ask it.
> None of you know me. I might be a bot. But do I not generate curiosity?
Yes, because they used to manufacture consent. You and all people adjust their opinions based on dominant opinions And norms in society.
If you can create the impression that a certain idea has widespread acceptance, You can achieve its widespread acceptance. Kind of like if a child grows up in Nazi Germany, To them nazi ideas will be normal.
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.
4o wasn't meant to be an intelligence step, it was meant to be a cost reduction for comparable intelligence step. It's cheaper and faster than 4 while being sort of as smart.
GPT5 will be the test of whether or not things are still going upwards.
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 built bots would blend in much more effectively with iteration on their prompting and design and by more effectively using existing services.
I personally think we’re decades away from AGI (if we ever get there), but that has nothing to do with this.
> "We don’t need anything nearing AGI for these bots to become nearly indistinguishable from humans"
More and more I think AGI is shifting to mean "machine soul" or some nebulous wishy-washy unfalsifiable religious/philosophy shit like that. What meaning could AGI have which is empirically verifiable, other than being indistinguishable from people? Humans I presume are supposed to have "general intelligence", so if there isn't a detectable difference between the machine and humans, how is that not artificial general intelligence?
Language is just a variable resolution abstraction on top of non-linguistic thinking and information processing.
I think it’s a mistake to equate the language ability of these models with general intelligence, even if the language produced is excellent.
I think some people see AGI that way (some nebulous unfalsifiable thing), but that’s not what I’m arguing. I think there’s a strong case to be made that at a minimum, AGI’s core “knowledge” will need to be made up of far more than just a lossy textual representation of the world.
> there isn't a detectable difference between the machine and humans
Humans come in all levels of intelligence. Yes there might be a human somewhere that believes that they should eat rocks or add glue to pizza. But as a generality we can assume that adult "humans" know not to eat rocks.
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.
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.
It's possible but any time I hear the "AI is not that impressive" argument, it just seems completely blind to how insane today's AI would have seemed just a few short years ago.
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.
I think it's actually worse, it's so much worse because... survivorship bias. Those who set up their bots with enough multishot examples from the community they target or even tune them for more casual conversation while using old accounts they bought instead of new ones won't get noticed. Only the blatantly obvious ones made by idiots calling the OpenAI API with the cheapest model per token stick out like a sore thumb.
I think it's probably the same motivation as those people who post "I asked [chatbot] and it said:" comments. Granted those are more courteous, but I think both are motivated by people who are too easily impressed by the present capabilities of the chatbots and genuinely think they're making helpful contributions by inflicting the chatbot comments onto the rest of us.
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.
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?
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.
I'd imagine there are monetary incentives to having many accounts able to boost you and keep your post on the front page. Doing that with brand new accounts who have no comments and no karma is probably harder. In the cases listed, all the comments were heavily downvoted but there are other bots out there who have a positive karma.
I never paid much attention to it, but that style also pervades goodreads. But in that case, the style was there before LLMs. Many people seemed to think reviewing a book consists of writing a summary of the first chapters. It's the template you get taught for your first book reviews in secondary school, I guess, and it does work: such reviews (not only on goodreads) get upvoted. But why? Perhaps because it saves the upvoter the trouble of reading the book or article?
I'd guess it's here because their algorithms determined high-odds of generating undetectable-as-bot/relevant content.
Looking at the two examples, they primarily stand out because there are two almost-identical ones, not because they're so obviously bot-generated that I'd go out of my way to flag'm. So I'd say they're doing a pretty good job already.
And quickly you start to question your sanity. Like... is this post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41076632) bot-written? it's written a bit oddly, could it be a bot? Who's to know?
The famous "firehose of misinformation" is hitting new high scores in the game of modern civilization.
i know that this is probably a very bad approach, but until now it worked out - if a text contains grammatical errors i automatically assume that it was written by a human, as AI-content always sounds so polished, boilerplate-y and corporate. but you can probably tell your AI to integrate errors, ignore capitalization and miss out on some punctuations.
I asked ChatGPT to reply to your comment and to include some errors, leave out some punctuation etc., that's the result:
oh, i see what you're saying. yeah, it's really hard to tell if something is bot-written these days. like, even reading your comment, i start to question if i'm talking to a human or not. the examples you mentioned do stand out, but more because they're so similar, not necessarily bot-like. and you're right, the "firehose of misinformation" is just getting worse and worse. it's a strange new world we're living in.
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 behavior.