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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if you can get GPT-3 bots to spam Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook into oblivion. I also wonder what percentage of users would notice.

Give them a political bent - that's probably what the state actors are trying to productionize right now. Target posts with a sentiment that disagrees with yours, then make the bots follow those users and inundate them with replies wherever they go. Hell, even brands might step in and start doing it.

What's the value of a social network when 25% or more of the comments are from GPT-3 bots?

GPT-3 doesn't need to know anything at all for it to have a very noticeable impact on the web and social media.

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Very true. An example I just saw (and reported) of something that's about to get much worse:

https://rennlist.com/forums/987-981-forum/1177333-best-oil-f...

("I have Tucson 2.0 and I can say that the mechanisms are as similar as possible and it was also very difficult to pick up oil, because it is also old. That is, hard oil will not fit there, maybe even spoil the engine and transmission. Therefore, it is better not to take risks and take exactly those oils that are best suited to such types of cars and engines. You can also read about the best oil for tucson 2.0 (spam link redacted), there are different variants of such machine oil described in details. I personally took Mobil 1 Extended Performance 5W-20 Full Synthetic Motor Oil and I do not regret, because of its full synthetics it is quite loyal to the engine. Therefore, it is ideal if you have an old car, but in any case, study the top and then already select from it.")

This is pre-GPT quality material, and it's already good enough to hang around unreported for days in some cases. A lot will depend on how much effort forums are willing to put into vetting new users.

The GPT-3 paper goes into this. They consulted experts:

The assessment was that language models may not be worth investing significant resources in [by state actors] because there has been no convincing demonstration that current language models are significantly better than current methods for generating text, and because methods for “targeting” or “controlling” the content of language models are still at a very early stage.

The paper has more details.

I've been wondering about the exact same thing. Basically, a sufficiently calibrated and targeted GPT3 bot swarm could be employed to render at least some parts of these communities into useless echo chambers.

I think that while GPT3 posts are usually identifiable after reading some sentences, I often also find that it's harder to realize when consuming precisely this kind of social media. I often just consume it absent mindedly as opposed to reading a real article.

With most comments being a paragraph or less, I think social media is done for unless it finds a way to put up a wall.

One thought is the subscription model of older social media sites, such as Something Awful. Pay $5 to get an account. Break the rules, get banned, pay another $5.

That's a lot of friction for your most valuable consumers, though. Marketers want users that are less discriminating.

Another is a shift to video and multimedia-based social networking. TikTok, Instagram, Twitch. It doesn't save the comments, though. I'm not sure how long we've got before the videos themselves can be generated with a high degree of novelty.

AI is going to change the game significantly. We're perfectly timed for a technological change of winds that enables new upstarts to challenge the incumbents. I'm kind of excited.

I don't now about that. I believe if you had it calibrated correctly no one could tell the difference between a single GPT-3 comment and a human comment.

Maybe after a bit of dialogue you'd have a higher chance, but even then I suspect (from playing around in AI Dungeon) that GPT-3 could do very well.

I wrote about that scenario last month: Commentdämmerung (twilight of the comments)

https://simonsarris.com/commentdammerung

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