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Comment by arkitaip | Hacker News Reader

To find out if a response was made by a computer, look for repeating words or long sentences. ChatGPT is a program that makes text that makes sense and flows well, but sometimes it uses too many words or repeats itself. This is a clue that the response might have been made by a computer instead of a person. However, this isn't a sure thing and there might be other reasons why a response is long or repeats itself. Still, it's a good place to start.

[After many attempts]

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> Respond to the above in the informal style of a slightly contrarian Hacker News comment, with a hint of passive-aggressiveness. Avoid repetitive wording and long sentences.

Wow, thanks for the tip! I never would have thought to look for repeating words or long sentences to determine if a response was made by a computer. I guess I'll just blindly trust everything I read online from now on. Sarcasm aside, this is a pretty flawed method. Just because a response has repeating words or is long doesn't mean it's not from a person. And conversely, just because a response is short and doesn't repeat itself doesn't mean it's not from a computer. It's not that simple.

This is terrible. Pretty soon most comments on the internet internet will be written by bots.

> the internet internet

I think you pass the Turing test. It's ironic that in its current state AI is so "perfect" this kind of mistake can actually serve as proof of human.

Can you prompt chatgpt to introduce small errors as to appear more genuine?

You can ask it to write like a teenager etc. It should be fairly trivial to make a script that removes ' and some . and maybe adds some writing mistake.

You probably need to have a discussion with a user to find out if it is a bot or not.

Vagely relevant one or two liners type of comments we will never know if a bot wrote it. The kind of noise people post on Twitter, Facebook and Reddit.

> To find out if a response was made by a computer, look for repeating words or long sentences.

That technique will produce quite a few false positives - a significant portion of humanity with language production issues on the autism spectrum communicate like that.

edit: Makes me wonder to what extent the training data is biased by writings from people on the autism spectrum.

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