Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

"I have creating a PNG Image file where I am printing out the image's with different colors and Image Types. Now I am sure I am drawing properly, but what I'm seeing is that the image is not differently jpeg (ie FF or Chrome) and Safari (for Firefox) is different from the one in Firefox. "

As a bit of a connoisseur of babblebots over the decades, one of the interesting things about this generation is that it is producing text that has a very interesting effect in my mind. There is a part of the parsing process where the above text went down smooth; yup, that's what Stack Overflow questions from early developers tend to look like. That part of my brain issues no objection. But the next layer up screams bloody murder about how nonsensical that is. And it's not just "that's a bad question but I still see the order under it", but nonsense.

It's a combination I've not experienced before. Previous generation babblebots could often produce a lot of fun text, but every processing level above raw word processing has always been able to tell it's computer garbage, even when it blundered onto a particularly entertaining piece of garbage. We've actually successfully moved up a level here.

As I'm describing subjective experience, YMMV.

The experience you are describing reminds me of the comparative illusion [0], which is a grammatical illusion where certain sentences seem grammatically correct when you read them, but upon further reflection actually make no sense, example:

"More people have been to Berlin than I have."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_illusion

Fascinating. There's a sentence I picked up from a friend in childhood, "Although the Moon is only an eighth the size of the Earth, it is much farther away," which seems to be similar, but not quite a CI, if I'm reading the Wikipedia article correctly. Thanks for the link.

This is like a mental tarpit, where you waste time reading trying to understand what the person is saying only to realize they were a bot and all your effort was for nothing, that is time you will never get back now.

This is a terrifying way to destroy an online community if a person floods it with nonsense content like this.

Terrifying -> inevitable. Imagine a botnet full of fake AI users trained with a corpus of legit HN posts. Let them loose commenting on random articles, beginning slowly but ramping up until they’re 99% of all comments.

In a few years, the standard Silicon Valley “Growth Hacking” job description will include using AI to deploy fake content to your competitors’ sites, destroying their user community.

Is this a future? How much content on twitter/fb is autogenerated, auto-liked and auto-shared?

If the answer is not "zero" then the answer is "too much."

Some is deliberately auto-generated, like https://twitter.com/choochoobot ; but yes, there is definitely an awful lot of auto-liked auto-shared fake engagement out there.

Two potential solutions: Reputation and a new account fee.

Nonsense flooding will make it more difficult for people to establish their identities on a network, but once it's established, they'll be in the clear. If someone has to pay to have their first thread or two reviewed, it will take serious money to flood a site to death.

(A similar solution to email spam has been waiting to happen for decades -- charge a fraction of a penny per email, and nobody is harmed but spammers. Maybe allow exceptions for officially recognized organizations that have to send a lot of messages, like political campaigns.)

I was with you until you said you wanted to exempt the politicians. I would charge them double.

I share your concern.

This would be even better: Email recipients grant free access to whoever they want. A tiny price would be charged only when sending to someone who has not granted such access.

I like the idea.

Unfortunately, even though snail mail has associated costs I still get a ton of junk.

I'm positively sure these tactics are already being deployed as a weapon in order to shut down debate of certain inconvenient topics and disrupt problematic communities.

Ugh. Like SV hasn't yet made the internet suck enough...

Indeed, there’s something almost unsettling about text that initially appears to follow a sort of internal logic, yet doesn’t. Some of the results read like a programming fever dream:

“I set each thread * pointer, adding a new thread and in a loop inside this function. The thread would be immediately on the thread, but the thread resulted in the exception. If I return the thread to the first thread and finally the thread is left, the thread doesn't hang, and I couldn't kill thread # 1 - because the thread method made first thread calls the native thread. But, the thread is waiting for the thread blocking and all the other threads to be started. In other words, the thread is always destroyed.”

Unsettling is exactly the word. https://stackroboflow.com/#!/question/16662 leaves me trying to work out what on earth the poster's really trying to do - even though I know full well that there is no poster...

A few times, I've come across Stackoverflow questions on technical topics I'm not very familiar with, and the question makes no sense to me (there are clear spelling, grammatical, and consistency errors). But there's an answer, and a comment exchange that seemed to resolve the question. So, I conclude, it's just my unfamiliarity prevents me from seeing through those errors.

A related phenomena is seeing fundamental errors in a newspaper article on a topic you're expert in... but believing articles on topics you're not familiar with.

This can operate as a partial turing test: a gradient for iteration.

You might like this post from last week:

Humans who are not concentrating are not general intelligences

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19251755

On the other hand, cherrypicked excerpts can be terrifyingly convincing: "What is the best way to login to my Ruby application in a browser via Perl?"

We've all been asked a question like that and had a cold dread creep over us as we try to formulate a response...

It's the Uncanny Valley of text synthesis.

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