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Comment by rchaud | Hacker News Reader

ChatGPT is the death knell for discussion communities where mainstream internet users spend their time. That would be Reddit, Quora, Facebook and Twitter.

We don't need to ring that bell for search engines, it was already drowning in Wikipedia co-authored blogspam that this won't change much.

"Dead internet theory" posits that bot-generated comments and content is more common than we think. Reddit actually has subreddit simulators that are nothing but bots talking back and forth to each other, using training models based on actual Reddit comment threads. It's not chatGPT level, but it's frightening to see how bland most 'real' Reddit conversations are.

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Why do you think that only "mainstream" communities will be impacted? I've seen a lot of HN comments that seem pretty clearly machine-generated, even a few special-interest Discord servers I'm in. At this point, the only people I'm sure aren't LLMs are people I know personally in meatspace.

https://xkcd.com/810/ comes to mind: if I can't really tell, I guess it shouldn't really matter. You might be a bot, but I still had fun composing this reply to you, or I wouldn't have done it.

The only danger comes in trying to use online conversations to gauge "public opinion" incorrectly, but this was already impossible to do because of the the now-old-fashioned Filter Bubble problem. Really, the LLM spam problem is just a new frontier in filter-bubbling: computers can now generate a unique filter bubble just for me!

By mainstream, I mean those with the largest aggregated audiences. That's where the people are, so that's where the money will be. The paid, polished, 'enterprise' version of ChatGPT will need to pay for itself after all.

do you have a link to any of the good botspam subreddits (besides worldnews), I mean intentional/declared botspam ones?

I don't have a Reddit link, but here's a Hackernews thread where there's only one human comment and the rest are bots: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33952087

I see what you did there.

You're just linking to the current thread?

Information grey goo.

I am sure bot content is far more common than we think since we seem to have a bias that we are always talking to someone on the other end of the message.

I think though we are really underestimating how much we will prefer the chat bot at some point.

A language model just has to approach some % of the human you most respect on a topic to listen to in order to dominate the want to talk to hundreds of random reddit humans.

It is just such a low bar to pass. Seems only a few years at most and I will just not be bothered to read things that haven't been generated by a language model online because 99% of the human output will be shit in comparison. It won't be worth the time to even look for that 1% of human output that isn't shit because the language model will be close enough and easy to find everytime.

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