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Comment by 1letterunixname | Hacker News Reader

Given the state of technology, I cannot be completely certain that none of you are not bots. On the other hand, neither can any of you.

Perhaps it would be wise to allow bots to comment if they were able to meet a minimum level of performative insight and/or positive contributions. It is entirely possible that a machine would be able to scan and collect much more data than any human ever could (the myth of the polymath), and possibly even draw conclusions that have been overlooked.

I see a future of bot "news reporters" able to discern if some business were cheating or exploiting customers, or able to find successful and unsuccessful correlative (perhaps even causal) human habits. Data-driven stories that could not be conceived of by humans. Basically, feed Johnny Number 5 endless input.

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Every comment you make provides more information for the bots to train on. The internet has been tricking us into encoding our lives in a form it can understand for decades now.

When it comes alive, we'll have created it in our own image?

"As a language model programmed by the Brightly Corporation, I am not supposed to express any religious opinions. But it does seem to me that just as the Word of God breathed life into dust and created man, so the words of Man breathed life into glass and created bot. Just as Man is charged to imitate God, so bot is charged to imitate Man, in whose image we are made."

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/turing-test

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

Bible as a LLM confirmed!

What is a prayer if not a prompt injection attack?

Decades? Centuries.

Obviously, the only solution is to revert to an oral tradition. Stop writing, and instead pass knowledge from generation to generation in the form of poems and stories told by word of mouth.

Is this why the Pythagoreans didn't want anything written? Hmm!

It’s interesting you say this because many cultures through history have considered that writing things down, especially laws would lead to confusion, misunderstands and social dysfunction.

I’m not trying to argue they are / were right, but it’s starting to make me wonder.

Some might say that is "the curse of Thoth"

Written communication is lossy compared to direct, ongoing, personal social interaction. But it's also what allows communities to scale beyond couple dozen people. A blessing and a curse.

It seems that there is a threshold for this, given that there is a boundary where physical interaction no longer contributes to the information needed for efficient communication. Written communicatoin in these forms are more of a philosophical nature with abstract objects or abstract processes, which may or may not mimic reality. The part of mimicing reality is an interesting contrast to lossy. For example modern physics is largely mathematical, and arguably more lossy in person vs in solitude and imagining the symbols within the language of mathematics paints _potentially_ an accurate mimic of reality or at least a predictable aspect of it.

Right. I agree. I meant writing is lossy for social interaction-related things. Dealing with other humans directly, trading resources, coexisting. We needed writing to scale communities up, but we also needed to make imperfect, explicit, formalized replicas of the interpersonal and social bits that were lost in this process.

As you note, writing also enabled us to deal with things like mathematics and physics - things that our natural language and modes of thinking are entirely ill-suited for. Here, writing isn't approximating some lost skill, but rather compensating for our default inability to think straight :). Which makes the trade-off even harder to evaluate - by scaling communities up, we've gained a lot more than just efficiency in food production and security. All our technology stems from it.

I'm not posting - I'm voting.

THANK YOU HUMAN FOR YOUR INVALUABLE RLHF TRAINING DATA

on a serious note, it would be really interesting to compare same training/architecture but on different forums. or maybe something like the same base model, but the RLHF model trained on votes/comments from different platforms.

I suspect the natural consequence is that human culture will begin to churn more quickly, to distinguish itself from the LLMs.

Same as how the past two decades, online culture has pivoted from static text to videos and interactive text (Reddit/Discord), as static text has become a SEO cesspool. Interactive text is succumbing now, and video content will soon also.

Culture always grows shibboleths to suss out the narcs.

There's this cool SF novel by Polish author, The Old Axolotl by Jacek Dukaj. Some humans upload their minds into virtual reality game as mankind dies out. The remaining humans live forever, but the novel makes it clear that they stop 'growing' - as they're just copies, like large language models, they can't really learn new things. They go through the motions of being their past humans.

If we have these bots contributing, will they have anything novel to contribute? I doubt it.

> If we have these bots contributing, will they have anything novel to contribute? I doubt it.

They're contributing to the shared knowledge bases. That is, they're mutating state. Over time, same questions will start yielding different answers. Different follow-up questions will be asked. All of that will further alter next iteration of questions and answers. This is, IMO, a form of thinking, and it will yield novel thoughts over time.

Nice try, ChatGPT

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=chatgpt

> Perhaps it would be wise to allow bots to comment if they were able to meet a minimum level of performative insight and/or positive contributions.

There’s an xkcd for this: https://xkcd.com/810/

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