Hacker News Reader

Comment by h10h10h10 | Hacker News Reader

Why? I honestly don't care who or 'what' wrote something, as long as it is useful. In fact, after a certain point there's no way to actually distinguish human-written content from AI-written content because it's the same.

We'll just become used to it and only a few people in HN will shout to the clouds.

View on HN

Currently the bandwidth of online astroturfing is limited by the human copywriters producing it. In a post-ChatGPT world, astroturfing will be limited by the number of GPU-seconds one can pay for, which is going to be orders of magnitude cheaper. It doesn't matter that AI is capable of producing useful content, because useful AI-generated content will be a zero-measure subset of all AI-generated content in the wild.

Compare with organic food: is it true that non-organic food can be healthy? Sure! Then why do people prefer organic food? Because it's just not worth it for them to figure out which one is healthy/unhealthy.

Similarly, it's just not going to he worth the effort to figure out if some AI-generated content is genuine or trying to astroturf. If there will be a "certified human" badge, people will use that as a positive signal.

You're right about that. Dealing with astroturfing will be an arms race and will require some proof of "humanity" in social media, forums, etc.

But, ultimately, I don't buy the idea that astroturfing is all bad. Or the opposite, that the lack thereof is necessarily good. I think bombarding with AI content can have possitive effects, like overwhelming human moderators who built echo chambers and ban wrongthink (e.g., Reddit). Or, it has the capacity for a small organization to compete with the likes of the NYTimes, or The Atlantic, etc which currently control the narrative.

Hacker News moderators getting overwhelmed by AI spam sounds bad to me, to be honest.

I think that would be really good

> require some proof of "humanity" in social media, forums, etc.

Very shortly (and PoCs have been made already) AI will be able to trivially create social media presences, forum posts, and anything else that could be used to determine “humanness” at scale.

>If there will be a "certified human" badge, people will use that as a positive signal.

hmm I can already imagine future culture wars around this being dubbed discrimination...

> I honestly don't care who or 'what' wrote something, as long as it is useful.

I realize I'm replying to a 4-hour-old account and just wasting my time, but I gotta say that it's not possible for a person to verify the accuracy of every bit of information that they will consume, so it's important to seek out sources that provide the highest quality, most authoritative source material that's available. That means reading things like research papers. I realize that a much smaller percentage of Internet users read and discuss research papers and other authoritative source material nowadays (I miss Usenet) and it seems that this problem is only going to get worse.

I completely disagree. All throughout history the "experts" or the "most authoritative sources" were proven wrong againd and again. I'm sure lots of things we take for granted today we'll be proven wrong during our lifetimes.

I want a different future, one where there are no authoritative sources, one where a journalist's words has no more relevance or weight than anyone else's.

Pure noise is what you want then?

No, but I do prefer chaos over the alternative of governments and government-aligned media determining what is information and what is 'disinformation'. If I wanted that, I'd live in China.

I don't see how that is any different than living even in the worst dictatorship, unless you're a nihilist or a situationist poet. Like, it would be a "nothing is ever knowable, nothing is real" kind of reality. I mean, interesting as a concept but sure as fuck I wouldn't live there.

I see what you mean. I think that despite the noise, one can still tell what's real or important, and what's not, intuitively. This sense can get distorted when a government can spend billions of dollars/yuans pushing a specific narrative.

What I mean is, I believe one can be closer to the truth when exposed to all sorts of ideas and propaganda, than when one specific entity controls the flow.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com