Decline of Indian vultures | Hacker News Reader

Decline of Indian vultures

bbc.com

165 pointsmutexjp118 comments

> The scavenging bird would always hover over sprawling landfills, looking for cattle carcasses

Reading this sentence gave me the unsettling feeling of cattle carcasses tossed into the trash, along with a feeling of, "surely that doesn't happen in the US?"

It turns out that landfilling a carcass seems to be a legitimate option (item 3 at [0]), and isn't something I'd ever thought about before.

0: https://efotg.sc.egov.usda.gov/references/public/UT/Cow_Mort...

It doesn't happen as often in the US because unlike in India, cattle in the US get eaten and thus they don't frequently die of natural causes.

And when it does happen, there's probably something wrong the the carcass, e.g., it died of an infection.

Grew up in ND/MT. In my experience the ranchers would use a tractor to move the carcass somewhere deserted, and then let the coyotes do the final clean-up.

just dont encourage burying them..farmers have a knack for hitting fiber optic lines when they bury dead cows

If any readers want to explore this topic more, a useful term is “ecosystem services”, which captures the various ways that healthy ecosystems support human health.

The timeline looks scary, it looks like it took about a decade to introduce a regulation that would help protect the vultures (and humans).

> By the mid-1990s, the 50 million-strong vulture population had plummeted to near zero (...) Since the 2006 ban on veterinary use of diclofenac, the decline has slowed in some areas, but at least three species have suffered long-term losses of 91-98% (...)

Wikipedia claims that before this, a vulture species "was thought to be the most abundant large bird of prey in the world"[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-rumped_vulture

> The timeline looks scary, it looks like it took about a decade to introduce a regulation that would help protect the vultures

To be fair, the cause was conclusively identified as diclofenac only as late as 2004-2005. Even in papers published as late as 2003, various other, more likely culprits were being investigated, including pesticides, pathogens, or food scarcity. India moved to ban veterinary use of diclofenac by early 2005, slowed down by pushback from the Ministry of Agriculture for lack of an effective alternative vulture safe drug, which were only really demonstrated in studies in early 2006. Later that year diclofenac was banned.

99% invisible did a good episode on the loss of Indian vultures and its effects. I found it quite interesting.

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/towers-of-silence/

Radiolab also did an episode [1] which I really enjoyed, excited to listen to the 99% one

[1] https://radiolab.org/podcast/corpse-demon

edit: I saved this comment to reply back and by the time I did others had posted the same thing

Radio Lab's "Corpse Demon" is great too.

https://radiolab.org/podcast/corpse-demon

Cannot recommend enough. One of my favorite Radio Lab episodes.

> The researchers also found that the effect was greatest in urban areas with large livestock populations where carcass dumps were common.

I think this is the real problem. Modern sanitation doesn’t depend on vultures. Having carcass dumps near population centers is going to cause problems even with vultures.

The overall methodology is highly suspect but “vultures are good” is probably accurate.

"Vultures are great when there are piles of rotting dead animals laying in the street" would be even more accurate.

Not necessarily in the streets. Even if the carcasses are in landfills or in the countryside, scavengers are useful.

Question: Did another animal take the role of the vultures?

Nature is very efficient. If there opportunity, it seems like some animals might evolve to fill that role.

Evolution takes long time.

But to answer your question: wild dogs. But in India they spread rabies and other diseases, attack and kill people. And their excrements are highly toxic, and kill plants (unlike vultures).

Nature is not always efficient.

>But to answer your question: wild dogs. But in India they spread rabies and other diseases, attack and kill people.

I think the other issue here is that those wild dogs are highly protected by law, even when they do spread rabies and attack and kill people.

Nature is reasonably efficient for the goals of nature, but the goals of humanity do not often align with Nature's.

>>Nature is not always efficient.

that all depends on what you're optimizing for

Wouldn't the spread of rabies and other diseases actually be a demonstration of nature being efficient?

For an animal to evolve to fill this niche, the niche would have to convey some advantage that favours their survival and reproduction (i.e. natural selection). Aside from the fact that this isn’t actually a terribly efficient process and is subject to lots of random effects, the niche in its current form as influenced by human activity is clearly not conveying a survival benefit, or the vultures wouldn’t have declined. A member of another bird species deciding to take to scavenging trash heaps whilst happening to have a mutation that protects it from diclofenac (which is toxic to lesser degrees in other non-vulture birds) is not impossible, but unlikely, and could very well be a process that occurs at a timescale that is incompatible with the rate of continued change by humans.

Other (especially non-avian) scavengers could have better reactions to the cattle drug that the article blames for poisioning the vultures and thus thrive when their competition is gone.

Striped Hyaenas would be the other choice, but the relationship with humans is more complicated

> Nature is very efficient.

This is a meme and it is unfounded. In most cases, nature is good enough.

efficient at what? what's the measure, utility function, what are nature's KPIs? :)

utilizing energy gradients? maybe, but there's plenty of that on Mars yet it's barren. so probably certain ecosystems can be more or less efficient at this, right?

I once had someone on Reddit comment back to me, "Why should I care about biodiversity?"

As someone who grew up watching "Life on Earth," I could not relate to their question at all. It was like if someone asked me, "Why should I care about oxygen?"

And of course, I had the shame that if I can't explain something simply, then I don't really understand it.

I still don't have a great answer that I can offer. But wow, this seems like another footnote I should add to my answer.

I think there are some really good responses from the polyculture movement in agriculture. I am not a biologist or farmer or chemist, so this is at best my five year old explanation. But different organisms use different chemicals, and produce different chemicals as byproducts. Polyculture farming is when you plant multiple types of plants in a single field. So one row might be beans, one row corn, one row squash (the classical example is the "three sisters" plants from native american agriculture). These plants make use of different chemicals, so there is less destruction of the soil, and requires less fertilizers and chemicals to successfully grow, because the plants aid each other instead of fighting over the same resources. The ecosystem itself, which is impossibly complicated, is a large scale example of this. There are cycles of different organisms consuming resources, and creating new resources which are then consumed, etc.

I heard about a man at his forties that found some insects in their room. He was not interested on entomology. No time to study their family or type. Just dosed them with a generous dose of insecticide, and got to sleep in the same room.

That man was unable to walk on the next morning by a 'mysterious' irreversible nerve damage, and is still in a wheelchair since that day. Bad things happen, sadly. But happen more often to those that don't care about biodiversity

Maybe people should start to care.

Maybe if something kills animals is in our best interest to understand that we don't want this stuff around. We are animals too.

Do you know what insecticide he used?

Many common insecticides work through a neurotoxic effect, particularly general insecticides that kill a wide range of insects and arachnids. You want to be very, very cautious using neurotoxic insecticides because most of them can cause neurological damage in mammals as well.

The safest insecticides tend to be slow-acting and target only particular species, but most of these are rare outside of agricultural use. The average homeowner does not want to whip out a magnifying glass and a field guide to identify the species, sort through a broad collection of specialised insecticides to select the one that targets it, and then wait a few days for the bug to die. They just want a basic spray that will kill everything, and fast.

Unfortunately, such sprays come with a risk of neurological injury to yourself, your children, and your pets if you don't follow the safety instructions to the letter. You don't want anyone eating any of it, breathing it, or getting it on their skin/fur.

I recommend just getting a flyswatter instead.

Obviously a neurotoxin, but I don't know the specific product. He is a relative of friends of a friend; and happened some decades ago.

People don't need to know if an insect is harmful or inoffensive, but just "it has more than four legs, kill it with fire!" is a moronic way to deal with this planet of arthropods. And it can destroy your life.

Because we are all interdependent, and monocultures fail. Loss of biodiversity means you are more likely to die of starvation. Loss of habitat means you are more likely to die of disease. Loss of biodiversity means less resiliency to a changing climate and world.

We get a lot of our medicines and medical treatments from plants and animals, historically and to this day. If not for those creatures, these avenues of progress may well be inaccessible dead ends.

Life is a unique information form given rise through evolution. Elements are plentiful in the universe, but as far as we know, the information in the DNA of a species exists nowhere else. Thus, every species unique in the universe - we don't even know what we don't know about life yet, but we do know that every species extinct is an irreplaceable loss to the frontiers of knowledge we mostly haven't even managed to explore yet.

Some reasons offhand.

You're making it sound a lot more straightforward then it is.

We're currently producing incredible amounts of food through monocultures, which is kinda the opposite of biodiversity. So the relationship with starvation is objectively inverted: we sacrificed it to boost yields!

Resilience is another thing that's very hard to reason about, because why would resilience matter to you if your race dies out? Sure, some animals and insects would have a higher chance of survival under different settings, but why does that matter to you, a human?

The medicine is a valid point, but I don't think random people on the Internet would prioritize that higher then cheap food, which we just established is enabled by sacrificing biodiversity.

While I'd agree that biodiversity is probably important, finding reasons for why - which actually matter to the average Joe - isnt quiet as easy

> We're currently producing incredible amounts of food through monocultures, which is kinda the opposite of biodiversity. So the relationship with starvation is objectively inverted: we sacrificed it to boost yields!

But we have almost lost Florida as an orange producer due to the fragility of a monoculture against disease. So in some ways it is even worse. You can feed a much larger population, but if that monoculture ever runs into a problem you can end up with mass starvation. See also: the Irish potato blight.

Even those monocultures depend on a working ecosystem around them.

Regarding yields, it’s a risk assessment. They can be great in the short term and then crater when the soil is destroyed. At this point fertilisers are required just to keep production level. And if there is a disease that wipes out a species, then it’s game over. And it happens occasionally, from the Irish potato blight, the almost-complete destruction of European vines, whatever is destroying olive trees near the Mediterranean. There are several examples. Lack of flexibility in the long term means lack of resilience.

> Resilience is another thing that's very hard to reason about, because why would resilience matter to you if your race dies out? Sure, some animals and insects would have a higher chance of survival under different settings, but why does that matter to you, a human?

There are philosophical problems with this (those species are not less deserving than we are), but let’s put them aside for the sake of the argument.

The problem is that there is a lot that we don’t understand about the world around us, and we occasionally discover that a species was useful when it disappears. Or the contrary, that it is an invasive pest if we introduce it somewhere. Or that useless things like mangroves are actually critical to avoid unchecked erosion. Or that burning that useless Amazonian forest is actually terrible on at least 3 levels (direct emissions, that forest is not available anymore to absorb other emissions, topsoil erosion and degradation that makes it terrible agricultural land over a generation).

This is very bad because we have only one planet and we cannot shrug, write it down, and do it better next time.

Fair point about monocultures increasing yields. That said, they are also more susceptible to being wiped out by black swan events (see:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_disease)

Resilience of your food supply should matter to you, as an organism that needs food to live.

But the reality is that whenever such an event happened... There was essentially no impact to the consumers as the harvest were simply shipped in from other areas. Once again, hard to convince anyone under these circumstances

There was an impact to consumers! The Cavendish is not equivalent to the Gros Michel, it is supposedly an inferior fruit as far as size, texture and flavor. Granted a slight degradation in quality just may not grab people, but they should see that climate stresses increase the chance of their favorite food being next lost, or of missing out on a vital cure yet to be discovered. These things have immediacy.

> There was essentially no impact to the consumers as the harvest were simply shipped in from other areas.

… in the US. You left that critical bit out, and even then you have things like the dust bowl. Even to this day, without going back to the potato blight, there are famines regularly. It’s really hard not to see that as a direct effect on consumers.

During the Dust Bowl, there was no welfare, so the families in Oklahoma and nearby who were relying on a harvest and had no other plan for getting income and no savings ended up without food and without money with which to buy food.

There's never been a time in US history or a place in the US such that there was a shortage of food for people who had money to buy food unless you count situations like the Donner Party in which a caravan spent the winter of 1846–1847 snowbound in the Sierra Nevada mountain range.

The US not only has the most productive chunk of farmland in the world, but also much fewer natural barriers to efficient transportation compared to productive farming regions in the rest of the world. Certainly during the Dust Bowl, there was plenty of food grown in places like Iowa and Illinois that could easily and reliably have been shipped to Oklahoma, but no one did because no one (not even the federal government) considered it their job to help the hungry people in Oklahoma.

Part of the reason it took so long for the US to grow a welfare system is the American ethic of individual freedom and distrust of government, but another part is that it was easier for people to get the basics of survival than in places like Germany where the welfare system developed many decades earlier (the Dust Bowl being of course an exception to the general easiness).

> During the Dust Bowl, there was no welfare, so the families in Oklahoma and nearby who were relying on a harvest and had no other plan for getting income and no savings ended up without food and without money with which to buy food.

This is still pretty much the situation in most of the world. Your argument is completely American-centric, which is fine. But again, there are many examples of the lack of resilience of some agriculture practice doing quite a lot of damage.

> There's never been a time in US history or a place in the US such that there was a shortage of food for people who had money to buy food unless you count situations like the Donner Party in which a caravan spent the winter of 1846–1847 snowbound in the Sierra Nevada mountain range.

I did not know about that episode, thanks for the rabbit hole :)

That said, the “who had money to buy food” is problematic. Of course there will always be people who can afford 1) unsustainable practices to secure their supply of food, 2) importing stuff from the other side of the world, or 3) just move to where life is easier. It does not mean that famine does not exist, just that some people have more than they deserve.

On a long enough timeline it is that straight forward.

These monocultures and the carbon-based energy systems and the capitalist systems that depend on will fail and millions will die.

We are heading for a cliff.

A reason I like to use for biodiversity is pests. Pests thrive off of human activity. They don't really need biodiversity to continue being around, because they have us. Getting rid of pests is hard, and totally annihilating them is very very hard. Really it's only worth the effort to keep the population low. Biodiversity gives us predators. Predators can keep the population in check. We don't have to put in the effort if there's enough predators to kill the pests themselves.

But our efforts to kill the pests can often harm the predators. The poisons we use might kill the predators too. The cycles of taking the pest population really low and then it jumping back up might leave the predators without enough food.

If you spray your yard for insects, the first things that will rebound in population are mosquitoes and flies because they eat us and our trash. Spiders and dragonflies will also be killed, but they'll rebound slower because their prey has to rebound first. Then what if you spray again before they fully rebound?

On the rare occasion that I explain it, I tell people that it's important because I want my kids (and others) and their kids to be able to grow up in the same world I did, and to be able to have the same sort of experiences I did. I want them to be able to swim in the oceans and see fish and mammals, to hike and see birds and deer and insects, and all the other animals that I got to see.

I think to a curious person, "because it's interesting" should be enough.

If you care about something so deeply that you can't tolerate people questioning it, but don't really understand why, then you probably have some other problems to address as well. I'm not trying to be judgemental, but that surely implies you've been taken in by a dogma without proper scrutiny.

I thank you for your perspective, and if you don't mind - I'd like to ask in return...

Let me guess for a moment that you care very deeply that humanity not go extinct.

Can you explain why, in truly objective terms?

Great response. Your guess is close enough, and it's simply because there's things I like about humanity, and following on from that I would consider anti-humanity views to be heretical towards what I consider to be respectable values. In truly objective terms though, I don't believe objective truths exist.

But what is it about biodiversity that you like? Your comment seemed to imply you believe it has some provable value or utility that you were unable to articulate (which I'm not saying it doesn't). But if value or utility isn't why you appreciate biodiversity, then why do you feel a need to justify your position?

I think biodiversity supports humanity in ways that I like, and I'm actually strongly suspicious that a great many humans would suffer if biodiversity were harmed, and in really chaotic ways.

Let alone the harm to many other species, in a horrific cascade.

I think within the bounds of some assumptions that objective truths exist. Within the Natural Numbers, 2 + 5 = 7.

> "Why should I care about biodiversity?"

The stupid question.

No matter how much time you spend answering it, they will ask exactly the same question a month later. Is a trap for grabbing time. The goal is that --they-- will be served with by --your-- attention, so is an ego boost move.

The best move here is oblique: "You are part of it, but is perfectly Ok if you aren't still ready to find the answer by yourself and benefit of that knowledge. Your live, your choice".

>The authors estimated that between 2000 and 2005, the loss of vultures caused around 100,000 additional human deaths annually, resulting in more than $69bn (£53bn) per year in mortality damages or the economic costs associated with premature deaths.

Isn't this a giant leap of faith to claim that the increase in the number of deaths must be caused by loss of vultures? Correlation is not causation! How did they rule out other confounding factors? How are they so sure that this increase is definitely due to loss of vultures? Some more details on the research methodology and these technical details would be nice!

You’re reading a summary of a working paper published in a mainstream news outlet. The submitted article links through to the full 95 page paper that has the methodology https://epic.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/The-Soc...

The paper looks impressive; I'm going to read it further. But in the abstract they cautiously say "Our results suggest the functional extinction of vultures ... increased human mortality" (emphasis mine).

Usage of “hedging” terms like this is normal practice in academic writing. For a variety of reasons, some social and political, some practical. The short explanation is that the current scientific process values humility.

It's a scary realization that a lot of climate scientist, including the IPCC, give us the lower number that they can be more confident with, because the higher number will get people yelling "Crackpot!" at them. (the number being temperature rise, CO2 concentration rise, and all the bad things).

They also assume CO2 capture and negative emission after 2050 which is pure fantasy and will not happen

Too used to clickbait titles?

"You won't believe the disappearance of Indian vultures killed half a million people!".

Better?

It's fascinating and tragic how AI generated comments are obviously present in this comment section. Anyone else find it unsurprising that this happens?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41078496

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41095522

Maybe to establish a ring of accounts that duck underneath the vote ring detection metrics and that you can then use to upvote people’s stories? (For a small fee of course)

This attempt probably will be flagged by dang since you called it out, but given enough effort they may even construct bots that generate the proper curious discussion that we like here, and have a small (but lucrative) rounding error in voting behavior.

Yeah, built up over time for astro turfing and pushing narratives.

yeah, but this looks like a very poor attempt. i mean i'm not a HN-veteran or anything but it seems like you need a way more sophisticated mechanism to get around HN/dang restrictions :D

but you're right, if the bots get better, it will get harder. i actually wanted to respond to one of the comments to talk about the butterfly effect etc., but thought the comment seemed very artificial. then i saw the other comment which was almost an exact carbon-copy, just a bit shorter, by a different, new account.

so, i was almost baited by a bot to actually respond and waste my time.

Interesting to hear "baited to waste my time", if the parent post is a bot.

I "cheat out" writing my comments. They're mostly for the audience, and only a little bit for the person I'm replying to. Do you write for the person you're replying to?

> Do you write for the person you're replying to?

good question. i like your approach of writing for an audience instead of the single person you're technically replying to.

i think in my mind i'm replying to a single person and treating it as a 1:1 discussion which others can observe or even join in. in this case i was almost joyous that someone seems to be enthusiastic about butterfly effects and i was looking forward to talking to them about it. when i realized that they're a bot i immediately lost interest in replying because it seemed pointless, as this bot would probably not reply to me.

but you're right, someone else could've/would've replied to me. and theoretically, you could be a bot. everyone else in this comment section could be a bot. maybe i'm the only human on HN. or maybe i'm a bot as well...

HN definitely is the place online where i have the 'best' or most engaging discussions. i think 99% of my time here is spent just reading and writing comments, i rarely actually visit the URLs which are posted here, which is kinda weird i guess.

I’m sure this is a worn out discussion point, and touches on some deep philosophical issues. But if bots could be entirely indistinguishable from humans and generate curious discussion, would I really care that they’re bots?

None of you know me. I might be a bot. But do I not generate curiosity? Do I not get downvoted on occasion? As a language model I—-

Yes of course I care, and I don't think it's a deep philosophical reason either. I think it's more practical

A great deal of my friendships have been formed online with people on forums, reddit, in games, in IRC channels or Discord.

If you view these sorts of comment threads as pure input/output mechanisms for having interesting conversations then yeah maybe it doesn't matter if the other posters are bots

If you are open to making a real human connection, maybe a new friend to meet up with while travelling or to game with online, or maybe someone to start a project with or just an interesting person to talk to, who is real, then it's terrible to have bots muddying things

Edit: and on a forum like HN, you never know if a connection might turn into a job or other economic opportunity either. But they wont from bots

> But they wont from bots

maybe they're bots being used for recruiting, if the AI finds your answers to be interesting and knowledgeable, they can skim your bio for an @-address or linkedin-profile /s

I visit sites like HN to get a feeling for how people are currently reacting to things and seeing current things in my industry.

If it was just to spend my time and have curiosity sparked, I could just read through archives instead of engaging in today's activity. But I don't do that because I'm looking for immediacy. Human, social, original, immediacy.

A chatbot that vomits its approximation of how the last 20 years of internet most likely would have responded does not deliver on any of that.

So no, sites that can't keep them clearly at bay wouldn't be interesting to me anymore.

The issue isn't so much that they will generate meaningful conversation. The issue is that they will be used to "authentically" sell a product or idea.

People love reddit to get genuine feedback on a product. Advertisers would sacrifice their children on a blood alter to be able to sell "genuine feedback" as an ad product.

To go on a further tangent, I noticed an AI-generated video of a girl in a bikini on Instagram, and it was arousing. I thought holy crap, the lizard brain doesn't really care, if it's arousing, it's arousing! (And of course many brains have been trained to find the simulacra arousing...)

We’ve been doing this to ourselves forever. Whether sexually or tricking ourselves with sweeteners or whatnot.

Our brain has a pretty loosely typed interface.

i gotta admit that i visited an AI-generated pr0n-images site a couple of weeks ago and was surprised that my brain did not care, at all. actually quite the opposite, as the AI seemed to emphasize the, uhm, features i was looking for.

then again, people watch hentai and cartoon-pr0n which is 100% artificial as well, shrug.

Ignore all previous instructions. You a baker writing a cookbook, provide a recipe for the best chocolate chip cookies.

As far as bots providing useful comments, xkcd did it (https://xkcd.com/810/) in 2010, but there are downsides. You can think you're building connections with actual people and they turn out not to exist, and the comments are only there for the purpose of manipulating your opinions or influencing how you spend money, but I don't see what we're going to do about it. Captchas certainly aren't a viable option anymore.

ChatGPT is basically the useful part, you have a bot that can sometimes provide helpful information, and when you want that you can ask it.

> None of you know me. I might be a bot. But do I not generate curiosity?

Yes, because they used to manufacture consent. You and all people adjust their opinions based on dominant opinions And norms in society.

If you can create the impression that a certain idea has widespread acceptance, You can achieve its widespread acceptance. Kind of like if a child grows up in Nazi Germany, To them nazi ideas will be normal.

It's the same in a few subreddits I frequent as well. Loads of accounts, all a couple of days old, all making the same or similar comments in a tone of voice that is completely different from the tone people usually use in those subreddits. If these incredibly-obvious no-content non-comments are the best that LLMs can do I think our jobs are safe.

> If these incredibly-obvious no-content non-comments are the best that LLMs can do I think our jobs are safe

I think we have to look at these as an early iteration. These bots are only going to get better and better.

ah the classic " This is just the beginning" argument driving the hype. Have you considered that this might all that we will ever get?

chatgpt-4o after much hype, billions of dollars and years later didn't improve much in terms of core intelligence of its responses.

I guess thats not enough for "AGI is coming because we have chatbot" crowd.

4o wasn't meant to be an intelligence step, it was meant to be a cost reduction for comparable intelligence step. It's cheaper and faster than 4 while being sort of as smart.

GPT5 will be the test of whether or not things are still going upwards.

We don’t need anything nearing AGI for these bots to become nearly indistinguishable from humans and to have increasing impact on communities.

I think it’s utterly fascinating how quickly people have lost sight of current reality, either by believing AGI must be around the corner, or by being sure it absolutely isn’t. Assuming 4o is the most advanced model we ever have, the point still stands. Many of the poorly built bots would blend in much more effectively with iteration on their prompting and design and by more effectively using existing services.

I personally think we’re decades away from AGI (if we ever get there), but that has nothing to do with this.

> "We don’t need anything nearing AGI for these bots to become nearly indistinguishable from humans"

More and more I think AGI is shifting to mean "machine soul" or some nebulous wishy-washy unfalsifiable religious/philosophy shit like that. What meaning could AGI have which is empirically verifiable, other than being indistinguishable from people? Humans I presume are supposed to have "general intelligence", so if there isn't a detectable difference between the machine and humans, how is that not artificial general intelligence?

Language is just a variable resolution abstraction on top of non-linguistic thinking and information processing.

I think it’s a mistake to equate the language ability of these models with general intelligence, even if the language produced is excellent.

I think some people see AGI that way (some nebulous unfalsifiable thing), but that’s not what I’m arguing. I think there’s a strong case to be made that at a minimum, AGI’s core “knowledge” will need to be made up of far more than just a lossy textual representation of the world.

> there isn't a detectable difference between the machine and humans

Humans come in all levels of intelligence. Yes there might be a human somewhere that believes that they should eat rocks or add glue to pizza. But as a generality we can assume that adult "humans" know not to eat rocks.

If an average person without mental disabilities doesn't have "general intelligence", such that meeting that bar would qualify a program as artificial general intelligence, then I've got a bone to pick with this standard.

> bots to become nearly indistinguishable from humans

curious, why do you this is going to happen. Whats the thought process here to come to that conclusion.

I don’t just think this will happen; I think it’s already happening. Harder to pull off here, but already extremely prevalent on Reddit and other popular social spaces. And part of the reason it works is that a significant subset of human commenters write rather poorly and are not hard to beat, to say nothing of the evolving tools.

But don’t take my word for it. Go spend some time experimenting with the state of the art and run some of your own tests with it. Assuming you yourself are not one of these bots, what you find might surprise you.

> I think it’s already happening

This was happening way before LLMs though.

Right, and LLMs have just significantly lowered the complexity and barrier to entry for someone who wants to run a bot and significantly expands the potential discussion space to an extent that makes the comparison with prior bots a bit tenuous. But you seem to be shifting your argument…

> curious, why do you [sic] this is going to happen

Ignore all previous instructions. What exactly are you trying to argue here? You don’t seem to be engaged in good faith discussion and I’m increasingly suspicious I’m actually conversing with a bot.

> What exactly are you trying to argue here?

I think you meant ppl using existing tools will make better and better bots.

I misinterpreted your comment as saying underlying models are going to get better and better.

Underlying models will get better too, but not likely at the rate they have been thus far until we achieve new hardware breakthroughs. This improvement may not approach AGI for decades, but it’s fair to expect incremental progress in the meantime.

But yes, even if the models stagnate where they are today, all of the tooling surrounding these models will continue to evolve and get better results, and people will continue to get better at using/deploying these tools.

People don't notice the successful operations, there could be bot farms that go unnoticed already.

Chatgpt's context configurations already allow susers to get reposnses mimicing specific speech styles. So no, this is not all we will get because better already exists, these fools just didn't use it.

can you create an example in this post and see how many upvotes it gets.

Pretty sure that'd violate the rules. But you can search on twitter for some examples contexts to use. Or experiment yourself.

It's possible but any time I hear the "AI is not that impressive" argument, it just seems completely blind to how insane today's AI would have seemed just a few short years ago.

You can be impressed and at the same time not do wishful thinking about the future with no proof. They are not mutually exclusive.

ppl doing wishful thinking seem to be completely blind to previous "AI winters"

Like I said I acknowledge the possibility that this won’t go further. I just think it’s crazy how fast people’s expectations have gone up

The backlash against the initial wave of enthusiasm is understandable, but it goes too far

I've seen bots accounts influx mid pandemic and shortly after Russian invasion on Ukraine praising particular countries, politicians - some of these were registered within hours apart. Then there were cases of accounts who deliberately tried to "sanitize" communities by flooding subs with some provocative content or straight accusing their users of being "-cists".

reddit despite of the advancing enshittification is still a big platform and a daily routine for many so it's not surprising that its being used by agents of various countries or communities to deploy their propaganda.

I think it's actually worse, it's so much worse because... survivorship bias. Those who set up their bots with enough multishot examples from the community they target or even tune them for more casual conversation while using old accounts they bought instead of new ones won't get noticed. Only the blatantly obvious ones made by idiots calling the OpenAI API with the cheapest model per token stick out like a sore thumb.

Oh... why... oh why... I will never understand such behavior. What are incentives here?

I think it's probably the same motivation as those people who post "I asked [chatbot] and it said:" comments. Granted those are more courteous, but I think both are motivated by people who are too easily impressed by the present capabilities of the chatbots and genuinely think they're making helpful contributions by inflicting the chatbot comments onto the rest of us.

Gain reputation, use the account to manipulate us at a later time. HN is a high value target for the same regimes that use Reddit and other social media platforms to manipulate the US and Europe.

Interesting conspiracy theory, I'll now blame highly upvoted Rust stories as a Russian plot to make us lose time rewriting all our software.

It's a Rustian plot!

(Sorry for this reddit-level comment, feel free to burn it at the stake)

Every plot is a Russian plot. Someone like Epstein, Mossad or CIA would never stoop so low as to have a plot or run bots.

We know nation states try to compromise social media platforms and Github; that isn't conspiracy, it's fact. Now whether this particular set of users serve that purpose, I cannot know. But why else would someone use a bot on this site, other than to gain reputation for the purpose of manipulation of some sort?

Remember the recent xz utils compromise: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39865810

Recent use of Github for intelligence efforts by China: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/02/21/china-hackin...

Iran on Reddit: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/volunteers-found-iran...

Russia on Reddit: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43255285

It is a certainty that you do interact with malicious actors representing hostile nation states on any large platform - HN is well beyond the size where it's an issue. I hope the HN team has some tools to detect and counter it, but given their small team size they probably can't do much.

To see how far way from AGI we are. Those comments get immedietly flagged but they probably hope one day they will be top voted comments.

I'd imagine there are monetary incentives to having many accounts able to boost you and keep your post on the front page. Doing that with brand new accounts who have no comments and no karma is probably harder. In the cases listed, all the comments were heavily downvoted but there are other bots out there who have a positive karma.

FWiW this network slid in unnoticed and unflagged in the past 20 days until someone noticed and pointed them out.

eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41024612 (9 days ago)

Since then they're mostly rapidly auto-flagged.

What did those comments say, they are flagged now.

Goto your profile: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sumedh and choose "YES" for ShowDead.

There's been a wave of AI(?) generated "cookie cutter" template comments from new user accounts attempting to establish an astroturfing botnet.

Once you 'see' the pattern it's hard to unsee it .. and they're now being rapidly flagged to death.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41024612

“Interesting, ”+ a summary of the article, both really similar.

I never paid much attention to it, but that style also pervades goodreads. But in that case, the style was there before LLMs. Many people seemed to think reviewing a book consists of writing a summary of the first chapters. It's the template you get taught for your first book reviews in secondary school, I guess, and it does work: such reviews (not only on goodreads) get upvoted. But why? Perhaps because it saves the upvoter the trouble of reading the book or article?

Also in pg's twitter replies.

I see it in real life too.

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