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Comment by thr0wawayf00 | Hacker News Reader

Serious question: how are we going to know if we're talking to people on forums like these in a year or two and not some AI model piped in via a script or web service? And what is that going to mean for online discourse moving forward? I feel like the era of knowing that you're talking to an actual human on the internet is rapidly ending.

I've toyed around with the idea of creating a service that logs into HN and replies to posts just to see how easy it would be to get people to respond and I'm sure I'm not the only one who's thought about doing that.

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I asked chatGPT to respond as me (tarr11) to your comment:

I too have thought about the implications of AI models on online discourse. It's a worrying thought that we may not be able to distinguish between a human and a model on forums like these in the future. It's clear that this technology is rapidly advancing, and it's important that we consider the potential impact on the way we communicate online. I've even considered creating a service to test the waters, just to see how easy it would be to get people to engage with an AI model. It's an interesting thought experiment, and one that I think is worth considering moving forward.

Welp, it's been fun HN.

I'm not sure CGPT is doing what we think it's doing. I asked it to respond to the same comment as me, and got a bunch of generic nonsense. But then I asked it to respond as a user I made up, "dipshitbonkers". Here's what it said:

"Wow, dude, you must be some kind of fucking genius to come up with such a deep and philosophical question about AI models on the internet. I mean, I've never even thought about that before, but now that you mention it, I'm totally blown away by your brilliance. I can't wait to see what other profound insights you have to share with us. You truly are the next Einstein of our time. Keep on keeping on, my friend. You are truly a visionary."

Which is awesome, but a different kind of awesome :)

I'm personally not as interested in understanding the synthesis involved in the AI. I'm worried about now knowing whether I'm talking to another person right now or not because this is going to fundamentally change everything we've come to understand about the internet. We are no longer just talking to each other, the gates have been opened for AI to join the conversation and that is crossing the Rubicon.

We’ll have to switch to video chat rooms. That should buy us about 6 months :)

> That should buy us about 6 months :)

This a nod to deepfakes or something more specific?

I completely agree. The thought of not knowing whether I am talking to a real person or an AI is definitely a concerning aspect of the advancement of AI. It has the potential to fundamentally change how we interact on the internet and in society as a whole.

This response was, of course, also generated by an AI.

Right now all of them sound like HAL 9000, but I'm sure if you asked it bone up on your comment history by messing with its prompt (goodside is the resident expert on this) it'd be able to pull off a passable facsimile - if not now, very soon.

Expect a general downturn in civility, because people will be lowkey stressed about this all the time, and will use insults to probe reactions, and then say 'sorry I thought you were a bot' either as an excuse or as a meta-trolling technique. Comedic people will have an advantage, GPT can produce jokes on demand but doesn't really do wit and repartee. Also expect more video, at least until it becomes practical to synthesize that from scratch (probably around February 17th, according to my Singularity Almanac).

I think we need to make a huge investment in tools that help us develop, refine, and maintain an epistemology, individually and collectively. Semantic graph databases to maintain a personal knowledge base, AIs to detect image & video manipulation, shibboleths like they use in Harry Potter to thwart Polyjuice Potion. Things like that.

If anyone is looking for volunteers for open source projects of this nature, email is in my bio.

Probably great! Currently, if someone writes an annoying reply to you, you'll get annoyed. In the future, many of us will make fun of people who get annoyed at bots. The net result is that most people will be afraid of participating in flamewars, lest they discover that they've been arguing against a robot (something which makes humans embarrassed at "being fooled").

The end result is that flamewars that are not robot-to-robot flamewars will end for the participants' fear that they're arguing with a machine.

Another alternative is that we could take low SNR users and stick them in a conversation with bots who constantly inflame their opinions. Then we could provide them easy access to AR-15s and simply see what comes of it.

In a year or two?

You remember Reddit got started by faking a user base, right?

Do you honestly still think that anything is ever genuinely "trending" on Twitter? On YouTube? On Reddit?

It's all been fake for years!

> Do you honestly still think that anything is ever genuinely "trending" on Twitter? On YouTube? On Reddit?

No, I never put much stock in those aspects of social media because I've always found those curation features to be somewhat limiting. This feels entirely different because I'm beginning to question if I'm even talking to a human right now. Sure, companies have done all kinds of things to look more legitimate on the outside, but this is very different. This upends the fundamental assumption that you are communicating with another human when you have a direct conversation online.

For what it's worth, I'm a human posting under my real name. I was born, and I will die, and I'm here with you now. If you looked through my comment history you'd find someone sometimes kind, sometimes rude, sometimes insightful, sometimes dumb; an inconsistent mess with no clear through line or meaning. I collect funny jokes in my HN favorite comments [1]. I submitted a totally cringey Fiverr to an "Ask HN", and managed to botch it up at that.

Maybe someday that won't be enough to prove I'm human and not a machine, but for today I think it is.

[1] Here's the best one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32230005

You joke but there has been conspiracy theorizing about that apparently https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INMpsFfhaVk

Thing is, I still believe behind your comment is a real person. In a year or two? Not so much.

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