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Comment by ctvo | Hacker News Reader

There's space for a verification system similar to how some countries or regions closely guard their "Made in X" brands.

I'll pay extra for a guarantee (somehow, this is your value proposition) that it was written by a human without the help of generative AI.

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People say it's a terrible time to be a creator, but I just started again to blog 2 months ago after a decade of pause because I believe it's just the opposite.

With the abysmal noise/signal ratio plaguing the web, there is tremendous value in having a source of information manually crafted by someone you trust.

There is, but you have to make the privacy tradeoff to verify yourself among the sea of noise.

For most people, trust is a social problem, not a technical one. Almost nobody is going to care you work is signed, people will just check if they still enjoy the style, if it's still quality, if they still get value out of it, etc. And if one day they feel betrayed, you will be excluded from the pool.

Sites like HN will make the pool an more and more exclusive one to get in. I predict moderation is going to get tighter and tighter everywhere.

Therefore, creating a reputation and getting into the club early will prove a tremendous boon.

How do you trust anyone after GPT4? You can't tell how much they relied on the model. And maybe some things AI does are good - it could generate writing style improvement advice, counterpoints to your ideas, help find mistakes, help with formatting complex math, etc.

Depends on the industry. ChatGPT output is horrendous on a lot of technical topics. Equally, whether a thought is something new and novel, and even demonstrating/documenting something new or interesting.

It's also not great at providing an entertaining style, give you context, make sure you have per-requisite, double checking there is not error in what it gives you, etc.

But this will change in the future, so I would say those are temporary advantages for us only.

Ultimately, it's a big problems for readers, but it's great for writers.

Once a reader has validated a writer (you like the style, the context helps you and proved to have high value), your attachment to the author is even higher than before, because the cost of finding anything else of equal quality is skyrocketing.

I've been given a lot of attention to find the right fruit and vegetable provider for years since we have abundance but most of it taste like crap. I'm extremely loyal to the farmers I buy from, and I buy at a premium from them. Despite the fact I'm always trying to find new ones, it's very rare I do.

It will be the same with writers.

Even if GPT starts to include my articles in it's training data set, I can still provide a lot of value with tooling, contextualization, integration, coming up with something new, etc.

To me, GPT is only making my work shine even more. And it helps me tremendously when I code, so I just love it.

Unfortunately, it's gonna be pretty difficult to trust any source once all these things multiply.

How do I know you're not just reading some technical subject that was prepared by An AI

In stead of repeating the same things endlessly you wil now have to come up with something original

Being original is even more of a cat and mouse game now, and you still have to find ways to attract readers.

Selective pressure to give an advantage to creative and qualitative writers is a good thing on the long run.

Me too. Especially as training data quality plummets with ai-generated drivel flooding the internet.

We similarly thought stable diffusion would immediately kill artists... yet art galleries are still plenty packed to see human art.

Or at the very least, fact-checked by a human.

How would "fact checking" work. Can you establish a train of trust that all such sources were human all the way down, let alone accurate?

That is a technical challenge for the 21st century. Much more difficult than establishing the provenance of physical goods.

But short of that, I was replying to "I'll pay extra for a guarantee (somehow, this is your value proposition) that it was written by a human without the help of generative AI." So yes, I guess that is orthogonal to fact-checking.

The Society of Professional Journalists and other news organizations have set a standard that should be the absolute minimum. For example:

- https://www.journaliststoolbox.org/2023/05/12/urban_legendsf...

- https://verificationhandbook.com/

- https://mediashift.org/2015/02/journalism-professors-should-...

From the third link:

> ... the checklist is the most effective system of preventing errors, so effective that pilots and surgeons use checklists routinely when they fly and operate. (When I had a recent biopsy, I noticed the surgeon and nurses clearly following checklists as they confirmed the site for the procedure before anesthetizing me, checked my identification bracelet and asked my name and date of birth.)

Suddenly I'm picturing a new world in which we knowledge workers all have our own personal wikis and carefully go through a checklist for all new info we add to it. Not only "is this AI?" but a general sanity check too.

I don't think its good to settle for a compromise here. Either 100% organic or not.

Same for autocorrect? Same for spell check?

Yes, way down to the making of the keyboard used to type it. 100% organic ;-)

There will be way too much sewage coming out of the pipe to be fact checked by humans.

Question, assuming it is impossible to guarantee digitally that anything was written by a human, what do you suggest?

I am amazed no-one has replied "the blockchain" yet

Doesn't help. You can't verify how a human produced a text. Even a mere paraphrasing treatment could make GPT text impossible to detect.

... I raise you "track changes" and version history.

If it came down to that, you could paraphrase everything that ChatGPT and even retype it yourself if there was some kind of character-by-character tracking.

In a court of law, if someone steals my IP and I produce every version of the project files, notes, receipts et al, detail the background of the project and why I made the decisions I did, and they can't, you can guess what happens.

Digital signatures can prove multiple works have been all signed by the same entity. Then you need a way to trust that entity. It's already something, before the signatures, you had to trust each work separately.

This IMO is a HUGE business opportunity to whoever solves it. I'm not so sure it's impossible actually. Maybe just impractical.

I wonder if that will lead to some innovation in preventing fake news and fake reviews.

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