Posted by usefulposter 1 day ago
This rule will have an effect on the behaviour of the 'good players', and make the 'bad players' a lot easier to spot. Moderation needs this. I see this as stopping a race-to-the-bottom on value extraction from HN as a platform.
It also points out the need for AI writing tools that very strictly just:
1. Point out misspellings and typos.
2. Point our grammar mistakes, if they confuse the point.
3. Point out weaknesses of argument, without injecting their own reasoning.
I.e. help "prompt" humans to improve their writing, without doing the improvement for them.
In fact, I would like a reliable version of that approach for many types of tasks where my creativity or thought processes are the point, and quality-control feedback (but not assistance), is helpful.
This is a mode where models could push humans to work harder, think deeper, without enabling us to slack off.
I don’t mind when non-native speakers use it to express themselves, especially if disclaimed (but I give a pass even if not). Does it bother you?
Personally I would like people to try learning other languages more (it's hard but rewarding) but you can't learn every language ever, and it is really hard to learn a language to fluency.
Not all, but some machine translators can be comically (if not horrifically) bad sometimes. Search Twitter-become-X for examples. Native writers can't pick a working machine translator unless they are explicitly allowed to do so themselves.
But that a site might still want to discourage it, to avoid general degradation. It is a tradeoff.
If someone can write in the target language, just not well, a model could be asked to point out problems for the writer to fix. Rewrite a difficult sentence.
Ideally, I want the speaker’s words translated “verbatim” to English, to the extent possible.
I know very little about this but sense that some combination of buzzwords like homomorphic encryption, zk-snarks, and yes, blockchains could be useful.
Of course this would present problems if any of your identities were ever compromised and your reputation destroyed.
The most useful time for the blowhard spout off at me is at the moment it makes me most uncomfortable. Because the blowhard probably has a valid point at some level, he’s just being an ass about it.
When we meet that moment with discipline, are able to identify and respond to the kernels of truth and ignore the chaff belted out, focus on the merits of the argument irrespective of the source of an adversarial viewpoint, we thrive.
I like the blowhards just the way they are, unruly and insolent.
If Web3-like session-signing had taken off enough to become OS or even browser-native, we would have had a fighting chance of remaining mostly anonymous. But that just didn't happen, and isn't going to happen. Mostly because fraud ruined Web3.
No, it doesn't.
A completely anonymous stranger has no way to prove that they're human that can't be imitated by an AI. We've even seen that, in some cases, AIs can look more human to humans than real humans do.
The only solution I can think of to that problem is some sort of provenance system. Even before AI, if some random person told me a thing, I'd ignore them; If my most trusted friend told me something, I'd believe them.
We're going to need a digital equivalent. If I see a post/article/comment I need my tech to automatically check the author and rank it based on their position in my trust network. I don't necessarily need to know their identity, but I do need to know their identity relative to me.
If you keep track of the invite tree, you can "prune" it as needed to reduce moderation load: low quality users don't tend to be the source of high-quality users, and in the cases where they are, those high quality users tend find other people willing to vouch for them faster than their inviter catches a ban.
In online systems the scales quickly get too big for open-invite. There needs to be a way to automatically update the trust network at a fine grain.
The one that jumps to mind is an inference system; when I +/- a comment, I'm really noting that I trust or distrust the author. It can be general or on a specific topic (eg I trust the author to tell the truth or I trust the author to make me laugh). I could also infer that other people with similar trust patterns are likely trustworthy. And I could likely infer that people who are trusted by people I trust are trustworthy.
yes and they're all full of suckers. In the best case which is already bad you get a pretentious online night club like Clubhouse, in the worst case you get Epstein's island.
These walled off societies always attract people who are drawn to exclusivity, are run like dystopian island communities or high school cliques and tend to, in a William Gibon 'anti-marketing', way be paradoxically even more vapid.
No you need actual open access and reputation systems. A good blueprint is something like well functioning academic communities. It's a combination of eliminating commercial motives, strict rules, high importance on reputation and correctness, peer review, and arguably also real identities and faces.
The problem with a medium that is completely free and unrestricted is that whomever posts the most sort of wins. I could post this opinion 30-40 times in this thread, using bots and alternative accounts, and completely move the discussion to be only this.
Someone using an LLM is craft a reply is not a problem on it's own. Using it craft a low-effort reply in 3 seconds just to get out is the problem.
No, someone using an LLM to craft a reply is a problem in its own. I want to hear what a human has to say, not a human filtered through a computer program. No grammar editing, nothing. Give me your actual writing or I'm not interested.
I don't want to be robo-slopped at en masse or be fed complete fabrications but neither of those actually require an LLM. If you're going to use an LLM to gather your thoughts, I don't see a problem with that.
the difference is that you get to see the unfiltered, unique perspective of a real human being. Just like I don't want to talk to anyone through an instagram or tiktok beauty filter or accent remover. If your thoughts are unordered, it's okay I'll take your unordered thoughts over some smoothed over crap.
Do people have really such a low opinion of themselves that they have to push every single thing through some kind of layer of artifice?
The implicit unfounded assumption is whether that's actually worth more than a well written orderly response. Most comments are kind of crap.
Not everyone is good at writing. In some cases, it might even be a disability aid. And if their comments aren't good, we have a system in place to rank them accordingly. Again, I think the only problem is quantity. If we're overrun with low-effort posts, no amount of ranking will help that.
It's not implicit or unfounded. The parent comment is explicitly saying that's what they prefer. And, as an actual human, their preference is intrinsically valid for them.
If I like my kid's crappy cooking over a Michelin-star meal made by a robot... then I get to like my kid's crappy cooking more. I have that right. There is no social consensus when it comes to what I want. You can't argue whether my preference is correct or not, it's my preference.
People have strong feelings about AI in general and that can definitely cloud what they will say about it. Everybody hates AI but, like CGI in movies, they only likely hate the AI or CGI that they notice.
To say otherwise is to say that worrying about lung cancer is clouding one's view of smoking.
> they only likely hate the AI or CGI that they notice.
No, this is simply not true at all. I dislike use of AI even more when I don't notice it. My goal getting on the Internet is to connect with other actual people and their creativity. I want actual people to be more connected to each other, and AI makes that worse, especially when it's good enough that people don't even realize their are being intermediated by corporations pumping out simulated humanity.
That's fine. Nobody is forcing you to use AI. I dislike it when people force their ideas onto others.
> My goal getting on the Internet is to connect with other actual people and their creativity.
It's too bad your goal doesn't include interacting with people who don't speak your language and use AI to translate for them. Or people who struggle with writing in general. I don't think it's as black and white as you make it out to be.
I sometimes wonder if people aren't forgetting why we're on this platform.
The goal is to have an interesting discourse and maybe grow as a human by broadening your horizon. The likelihood of that happening with llms talking for you is basically nil, hence... Why even go through the motion at that point? It's not like you get anything for upvotes on HN
But what if I provided the LLM my thoughts? That's actually how I use LLMs in my life -- I provide it with my thoughts and it generates things from those thoughts.
Now if I'm just giving it your comment and asking it to reply, then yes, those aren't my thoughts. Why would I do that? I think the answer goes back to my original point.
If I'm telling you my thoughts and then you go and tell a friend those thoughts, would you say those are still my thoughts even though I wasn't the one expressing them directly to your friend?
- translating (relatively) literally from one language to another would be ~1:1.
- automatic spelling/grammar correction is ~1:1
- Using an LLM to help you find a concise way of expressing what you mean, i.e. giving it extra content to help it suggest a way of phrasing something that has the connotation you want, would be <1:1
(expansion is perfectly fine in a coding context -- it often takes way fewer words to express what you want the program to do than the generated code will contain.)
As for expansion, that might just be the risk we take. I been downvoted on reddit for being "too verbose" in my replies and I'm a human. And perhaps just reading the prompt in that case wouldn't give you more information; the LLM might actually have some insight that is relevant to the conversation. What's the difference between that and googling for something and pasting it in?
Hence no, none of these examples should be okay. Even if pure translation and grammar check is gonna be effectively impossible to detect too, so likely pointless to talk about
And the last one is often detectable and very clearly against it - I'm not sure how you can come to any other conclusion
I don't see how this rule is going to be enforced anyway. Many people posting with AI help won't get noticed at all and about 100 times a many people are going to be accused of using AI because they use proper grammar.
How much of AI writing will pass under the radar when the big companies aren't all maximizing to generate the most engagement hacking content in a chatbot UI? Maybe it'll still stand out for being low quality, but I'm not sure. There's lots of low quality human authored content.
Not sure where my comment is going, I just kinda rambled.
It was trained on 30 years of my posts on the Internet, I'm sure some part of it sounds just like me.
Best we can do, for the internet and ourselves, is to move away from it and into smaller networks that can be more effectively moderated, and where there is still a level of "human verification" before someone gets invited to participate.
I don't like what that will do to being able to find information publicly, though. The big advantage of internet forums (that have all but disappeared into private discords) is search ability/discoverability. Ran into a problem, or have a question about some super niche project or hobby? Good chance someone else on the net also has it and made a post about it somewhere, and the post & answers are public.
Moving more and more into private communities removes that, and that is a great loss IMO.
It is a great loss. Unfortunately this is a result of unchecked greed and an attitude of technological progress at any cost. Frankly we enabled this abuse by naively trying to maintain a free and open internet for people. Maybe we should have been much more aggressively closed off from the start, and not used the internet to share so freely.
Years ago (around 2020, when GPT-2 and 3 became publicly available) I noticed and was incredibly critical of how prevalent LLM-generated content was on reddit. I was permanently banned for "abusing reports" for reporting AI-generated comments as spam. Before that, I had posted about how I believed that the the fight against bots was over because the uncanny valley of text generation had been crossed; prior to the public availability of LLMs, most spam/bot comments were either shotgunned scripts that are easily blockable by the most rudimentary of spam filters, generated gibberish created by markov chains, or simply old scraped comments being reposted. The landscape of bot operation at the time largely relied on gaming human interaction, which required carefuly gaming temporal-relevance of text content, coherence of text content (in relation to comment chains), and the most basic attempt at appearing to be organic.
After LLMs became publicly available, text content that was temporally, contextually, and coherently relevant could be generated instantly for free. This removed practically every non-platform-imposed friction for a bot to be successful on reddit (and to generalize, anywhere that people interact). Now the onus of determining what is and isn't organic interaction is squarely on the platform, which is a difficult problem because now bot operators have had much of their work freed up, and can solely focus on gaming platform heuristics instead of also having to game human perception.
This is where AI companies come in to monetize the disaster they have created; by offering fingerprinting services for content they generate, detection services for content made by themselves and others, and estimations of human authenticity for content of any form. All while they continue to sell their services that contradict these objectives, and after having stolen literally everything that has ever been on the internet to accomplish this.
These people are evil. Not these companies - they are legal constructions that don't think or feel or act. These people are evil.
An orb that scans your eyeballs for "proof of human".
You almost need dedicated hardware that can't run any other software except a mechanical keyboard and make it communicate over an analog medium - something terribly expensive and inconvenient for AI farms to duplicate.
I think Apple is the only company that would even be able to do that. You have to control the full stack to the pixels or speaker.
that kills two birds with one stone, you can then show everywhere online you are human and how old you are without the services needing any personal information about you, and the sellers don't know what you use that id tag for.
In fact, even if you can ban the human for life, I'm not sure it solves anything. There are billions of people out there and there's money to be made by monetizing attention. AI-generated content is a way to do that, so there's plenty of takers who don't mind the risk of getting booted from some platform once in a blue moon if it makes them $5k/month without requiring any effort or skill.
That might make it less likely someone would ever sell it because to get a new one might take a very long "cool-down" time and it'd severely hamper the seller.
I'm afraid the ship has sailed on this one. What other solutions have you heard of apart from the dystopian eyeball-scanning, ID-uploading, biometrics-profiling obvious ones?
(knowing that of course, neither of those actually solve the problem)
On a site like HN it's kinda easy to vet for at least those that already had thousands of karma before ChatGPT had its breakthrough moment a few years ago.
Now an AI could be asked to "Use my HN account and only write in my style" and probably fool people but I take it old-timers (HN account wise) wouldn't, for the most part, bother doing something that low. Especially not if the community says it's against the guidelines.
This site, at its core, is fundamentally too low-bandwidth, too text-only, and too hands-off-moderated to be able to shoulder the burden of distinguishing real human-sourced dialog from text generated by machines that are optimized to generate dialog that looks human-sourced. Expect the consequence to be that the experience you are having right now will drastically shift.
My personal guess: sites like this will slop up and human beings will ship out, going to sites where they have some mechanism for trust establishment, even if that mechanism is as simple and lo-fi as "The only people who can connect to this site are ones the admin, who is Steve and we all know Steve, personally set up an account for." This has, of course, sacrificed anonymity. But I fundamentally don't see an attestation-of-humanity model that doesn't sacrifice anonymity at some layer; the whole point of anonymity on the Internet was that nobody knew you were a dog (or, in this case, a lobster), and if we now care deeply about a commenter's nephropid (or canid) qualities, we'll probably have to sacrifice that feature.
I'd rather keep the feature, pesonally.
Adding this type of rep system would destroy a lot of what is so cool about the internet though. There’d probably be segregation based on rep if it’s very visible, new IDs drowning in a sea of noise. Being anonymous but with a record isn’t the same as posting for the very first time as a completely blank identity and still being given an audience. Making online comms more like real life would alleviate some problems but would also lose part of the reason they’re used in the first place. I don’t see much any other way to do it besides maybe a state-provided anonymous identity provider (though that’s risky for a number of reasons), but it’s going to be sad to see things go.
fulminated, fulminating to explode with a loud noise; detonate. to issue denunciations or the like (usually followed byagainst ).
(Because “don’t fulminate” is the rule that follows the referenced one :) )
> from Latin fulminatus, past participle of fulminare "hurl lightning, lighten," figuratively "to thunder," from fulmen (genitive fulminis) "lightning flash," -- from etymonline.com
"I don't fully agree with banning AI-edited comments. Using AI to improve readability and clarity is a reasonable thing to do. A well-structured comment is often much better than a braindump that reads like rambling. AI is quite good at this, and it will probably get better. To illustrate the point, here is how this comment would have looked if edited"
While I do edit my comments to fix typos, certain spelling oddities and other peculiarities would be present.
The AI comment might be clear, but it sounds like a press release, not a person, and there's nothing to engage with.
Easier to read ==> More likely to be read.
No, it's not saying the same thing, especially if the tool is telling you that your statement is ambiguous and should be rephrased.
Unless you are purposely train on that specific way to expression, it ain't easier to read.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47342324
You're saying removing ambiguity does not make it easier to read? You're saying using a word that means nothing like what you meant to say is easier to read than using the correct word?
Really?
Now here's the thing. I wrote all my prior comments on a machine with no LLM access. On my personal machine, I had a while ago installed a TamperMonkey script that sends my draft, along with all the parents (to the root) to an LLM for feedback (with a specific prompt). All it does is give feedback (logical errors, etc). So I tried again with one of my comments, and its feedback found several flaws with my comment, and ended it with this suggestion:
"Considering all this, it might be BETTER to either not reply ..."
Had I had this advice when I was writing those comments, it would have saved me and others a fair amount of time.
This is (mildly) useful. It'd be sad to ban such use.
And who is advocating for a more formal register?
Only really irritated by the ultra low effort “here is a raw copy paste of what my LLM said on this topic” comments. idk how people think that’s helpful or desired
unless tis signed before uploading, like this is even enforceable?