I cloned myself with AI, and she fooled my bank and my family

Banks are usually liable for that.

I agree. I was merely saying that these were (and still are?) widely promoted even though the various problems were (are) well-known (and now intensified by AI).

Whenever this comes up, my buddy says "biometrics are for usernames, not passwords".

They don't have to store it, they can delete it after account creation or just keep a hash in case they want to avoid account farming.

Youtube is already collecting IDs in the EU if you want to view age-restricted content.

Some countries also have ID cards that allow you to digitally prove you are 18 without revealing your ID, maybe that could be used for proving you're human as well (don't know if there is a way to prevent farming here).

Discord is decently popular in spite of requiring a phone number for their metadata collation service (/science endpoint)

Why?

As in you were in that very thread? Cool coincidence if so!

But yeah generally I agree about the tooling, they're relying on methods that seem to be even more superficial and random than username pattern matching, and we really should be turning to the likes of Bard and OpenAI to instead implement solutions to make that easier.

This is one of those conversations, as an AI researcher, that I tend to not like. There's two major voices and both are ridiculous. Neither should we completely rely on these tools and neither should we throw them out. It is a cat and mouse game, and yes, the mouse will always win. We're on hacker news, and everyone knows this same game exists for hackers and the advantage bias is similar. Doesn't mean we shouldn't stop trying to defend against the hackers. But ML requires a lot of nuance. We've already been using automated tools to ban people and we all know how frustrating that is. There have been several subreddits that would ban anyone that used the term "vaccines" because they wanted to protect their subreddits from anti-vaxxers but these backfire and also autoban people defending vaccines.

The problem isn't using these systems, the problem is that there is no nuance. No way to reach a human who can see the absurdity. But this has been a progression and even bureaucratic institutions do this with real humans. This is a frustration we all experience and we shouldn't make this worse. Use the tools, but always maintain a way to reach a human who can account for system failures.

An important issue with ML system failures is that when they fail, they fail bad. Anyone who has used GPT should be well aware of this and have experienced it (if you haven't, you haven't used it much, are incredibly lucky, or have been duped). It is also the reason AlphaGo lost that one game, and it played REALLY poorly. These higher dimensional spaces are rather complex and don't fit your intuitions. You'll have a better idea of how to stroll through flat land than you will through 10D land, let alone 2562563 (an image) land. The curse of dimensionality is that any intuition you have of geometrical meaning goes out the window.

Yeah Reddit autogenerates names now, somehow they thought signing up for an account was too difficult and wanted to make it easier.

That policy is why a lot of posts on the linked subs try to avoid purely going off username unless there's another larger pattern linking them such as all of them repeating the same comment, or sharing the same link across subs in short time. Ignoring the scripts that generate names like elizabeth99057524 that exceed Reddit's username pattern (which seems to limit itself to two words, optional symbol dividers, 2-4 digits, and properly capitalized).

One of the more odd patterns, is dormant/hacked/purchased accounts. Reddit has a somewhat aggressive commenting policy for new accounts and the community at large seems to treat them differently - so you'll see in those bot tracking subs that a lot of accounts highlighted aren't new but quite old and were likely purchased or hacked. I suppose someone sees value in doing so, and I guess with enough of them purchased you can plant enough votes to encourage Reddit to do the rest (ie upvote a thread enough to get it to the front page of the sub, but not enough to alert people, letting actual users mindlessly upvote it as well).

Is that what the parent is describing? Even so, the problem with those comments is that they're annoying spam, not that they are annoying spam made my bots.

Humans can post annoying spam too. Look at any social group that attracts pyramid schemers or get rich quick cryptocurrency schemes. Those aren't bots, they're just annoying.

Then why have a public subreddit?

Maybe I'm misunderstanding OP. IT sounds like there are people on a subreddit talking about politics all the time. That's annoying, but that's also basically the behavior of most people on reddit, bot or not.

Well, maybe bot asked that question.

I'm not sure why it wouldn't, and having dead content enabled, I've seen some weirdly incendiary responses to pretty harmless comments recently. It's weird.

I wouldn't be surprised if the HN team is already doing a lot of work already. Another factor that may have spared the HN community is that there are lower hanging fruit to pick first, reddit being the prime example.

Sure, what I meant was that if you perform a trick and call it magic is hype, if additionally your trick fails and you call it successful magic it is hype+false reporting.

While - before or later - it may well become an issue, it seems that right now the "cloning" is not good enough.

OT, but not much, a kind of fraud that has become rather common lately at least here in Italy is someone calling the victim (possibly someone old) on the phone telling them that their son or daughter was involved in an accident or was arrested and some money (cash) is needed immediately to solve the issue, most of the time someone impersonates the son or daughter and - while crying - confirms to the father or mother the situation.

Most of the time the victim (put under stress by the news) falls for it.

Surely these generated voices will trick more people in a similar situation, but I don't think that (yet) we are there.