Comment by meindnoch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by meindnoch | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

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.

>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...

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.

> 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.

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

I think that would be really good

Reply on news.ycombinator.com