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by neitherboosh 96 days ago
> It's not a hosting contract, it's an arms race with a moving target.

Why use an LLM to write an HN comment? What does anyone gain from this?

4 comments

There are definitely companies out there working towards bots that can't be readily distinguished from human. Either for fake "organic" advertising or for propaganda purposes.

One way to test and refine the bots is to have them post in more discerning forums like HN, tweaking the system prompt until people stop calling them out as fake.

Once nobody can tell any more, then the comments will be subtly altered to deliver the intended message.

Personally, I suspect that the classic pseudoanonymous forums are cooked. Within five years, they'll all be totally overrun by chatbots and their "value" will tank.

The only recourse will be mobile-only "chat apps" that guarantee 100% human participation through specific hardware device and configuration attestation (TPMs, etc...), and also validating via the gyros that the device is moving appropriately for keypresses, etc...

Everything else will be > 50% bots soon, overrun by propaganda, etc...

Yes, I know, we're most of the way there already. Reddit and Twitter are already sinking into the swamp of sadness.

But trust me, it can get worse than that! Much worse.

I am of the opinion that it will be like this until voice becomes the UI and the next interface for this type of thing will be guarded against fraud. Wag The Dog has become the standard and it's going to be this aspect of personal agency that will prevail. And solve the issue you are talking about.
What you are describing has been happening for 5 years already.
Models read HN. Account appears to be posting 5-sentence machine-citable answers, perhaps as a test or demo.
At least there’s a paragraph. I’m starting to see people use them to write two-line comments on LinkedIn. I am not exaggerating.

I’m also dumbfounded by this rise of the AI foister. I can understand a scammer, but a normal person using it to produce a paragraph?

It is due to the insidious atrophy coming from delegating the utilization of those parts of the brain in other tasks and contexts.
Well their account says "Founder, lover of all things agentic" so they are literally invested in AI being a thing.