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Comment by Out_of_Characte | Hacker News Reader

Regardless of spam, there is another fundamental issue with AI, Accountability. Any text you've read had a real person behind it with real intentions. Malice and greed or honesty and exploration. It would be very difficult to hold an AI accountable for any offence committed on accuracy or honesty. With a person, you can slowly get to the bottom of it and develop a relationship. AI will muddy the waters of people writing and thinking instead of offloading everything to an AI that could do it faster and you'd even evade any responsibility for your text as you could claim that the AI might have inaccuracies and does not reflect your own opinion

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I don't think what you're saying really applies to SEO articles, though. If you don't get wedding insurance because you read some SEO article that recommends against it, even if the advice is clearly bad, can you really hold them accountable? It's tough for me to imagine you'd win that lawsuit.

> With a person, you can slowly get to the bottom of it and develop a relationship.

With this kind of content (with most content on the internet, I'd argue), you really can't.

I'd agree that there is no significant difference in accountability between content farms and AI. But I think that's burying the lede because what makes HN so appealing to many is the personally written blogposts and experts in specific fields or silly hobby projects. AI has the unique ability to mimick all of that for highly specific audiences with significantly lower cost and effort. This would impact curation efforts of many different user-generated websites and posts and could create a new status quo where a nobody could be treated guilty of AI-Generated articles, SEO hacking and upvote manipulation before entertaining the thought that a natural person could be making their first concerted effort for their reputation and prove their honesty.

For now HN is a bastion of conversation across many countries and domains

What is the difference in accountability and ability to get to the bottom of who's responsible, between AI and someone just hiring an offshore content farm to write crap content?

Very good point.

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