Establishing an etiquette for LLM use on Libera.Chat
libera.chat
libera.chat
> LLMs are allowed on Libera.Chat. They may both take input from Libera.Chat and output responses to Libera.Chat.
This wouldn't help HN.
Nor would the opposite policy, if only because it would encourage accusatory behavior.
The odds of LLMs being trained / queried against data scraped from HN or HNSearch is even closer to 100%.
I know you don't like the "LLMs are allowed..." part, but they're here and they literally cannot be gotten rid of. However, this rule,
> As soon as possible, people should be made aware if they are interacting with, or their activity is being seen by, a LLM. Consider using line prefixes, channel topics, or channel entry messages.
Could be something that is strongly encouraged and helpful, and possibly the "good" LLM users would follow it.
The “opposite policy” is sort of the current status quo, per dang:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
See this thread for my own reasoning on the issue (as well as dang’s), as it was raised recently:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41937993
You’ll need showdead enabled on your profile to see the whole thread, which speaks to the controversial nature of this issue on HN.
I agree that your mention of “encouraging accusatory behavior” is a point well-taken, and in the absence of evidence, such accusations themselves would likely run afoul of the Guidelines, but it’s worth noting that dang has said that LLM output itself is generally against the Guidelines, which could lead to a feedback loop of disinterested parties posting LLM content, only to be confronted with interested parties posting uninteresting takedowns of said LLM content and posters of it.
No easy answers here, I’m afraid.
In general, the de facto status quo is:
1. For whatever reason*, large swaths of LLM output copy-pasted is easily detectable.
2. If you're restrained, polite, with an accurate signal on this, you can indicate you see this, and won't get downvoted heavily. (ex. I'll post "my internal GPT detector went off, [1-2 sentence clipped version of why I think its wrong even if it wasn't GPT]")
3. People tend to downvote said content, as an ersatz vote.
In general, I don't think there needs to be a blanket ban against it, in the sense of I have absolutely no problem with LLM output per se, just lazy invocation of it, ex. large entry-level arguments that were copy-pasted.
i.e. I've used an LLM to sharpen my already-written rushed poor example, which didn't result in low-perplexity, standard-essay-formatted, content.
Additionally, IMHO it's not bad, per se, if someone invests in replying to an LLM. The fact they are replying indicates its an argument worth furthering with their own contribution.
* a strong indicator that a fundamental goal other than perplexity minimization may increase perceived quality
I'm hearing some of the ideas on my corner of llm x creativity Twitter expressed clunkily and if its some irrevocable thing.
You're right the default is to speak like an assistant.
You're wrong that its forced and immutable and a consequence of RLHF and the companies say its so. https://x.com/jpohhhh/status/1784077479730090346
You're especially wrong that RLHF is undesirable https://x.com/jpohhhh/status/1819549737835528555 https://x.com/jpohhhh/status/1819550145522160044.
It's also nigh-trivial to get the completion model back https://x.com/jpohhhh/status/1776434608403325331
I don't know when I'll stop seeing surface-level opinions disguised as cold technological claims on this subject. I would have thought, by now, people doing that would wonder why the wide open lane hasn't been taken, at least once.
Yes these guys have all noted on the effects of post-training on the models.
"We want people to know that they’re interacting with a language model and not a person." This is literally a goal of post-training for all these companies. Even when they are training it to have a character, it mustn't sound like a person. It's no surprise they don't sound as natural as their base counterparts.
https://www.anthropic.com/research/claude-character
>You're wrong that its forced and immutable and a consequence of RLHF and the companies say its so.
I never said it was immutable. I said it was a consequence of post-training and it is. All the base models speak more naturally with much less effort.
>You're especially wrong that RLHF is undesirable
I don't understand what point you're trying to make here. I didn't say it was undesirable. I said it was heavily affecting how natural the models sounded.
>It's also nigh-trivial to get the completion model back
Try getting GPT-4o to write a story with villains that doesn't end with everyone singing Kumbaya and you'll see how much post-training affects the outputs of these models.
I can see that you care enough to comment here in a “genuine” and good faith manner, as I recognize your username and your posting output as being in good faith. That being said, an increase in LLM-generated content on HN generally is likely to result in an associated increase in the number of bad actors using LLMs to advance their own ends. I don’t want to give bad actors any quarter, whether that be wiggle room or excuses about Guidelines or on-topic-ness, or any other justification for why self-proclaimed “good” actors think that using LLMs is okay when they do it, but not when bad actors do it, because doing so gives cover to bad actors to do so, as long as they don’t get caught.
This hit me like a ton of bricks, very true.
The older I get the more I understand the optimist in me rushes to volunteer good things that'll happen over the obvious bad.
This, in retrospect, will apply here too and is explanatory for some notably bad vibes I've had here the past year or two. (been here 15 years)
And once those floodgates are open, what exactly makes you think that they're not just also using an LLM to generate their "contribution"?
> There are lot of grey areas; for example, your GP comment wasn't just generated—it came with an annotation that you're a lawyer and thought it was sound. That's better than a completely pasted comment. But it was probably still on the wrong side of the line. We want comments that the commenters actually write, as part of curious human conversation.
This doesn't leave much room for AI non-slop:
> We want comments that the commenters actually write, as part of curious human conversation.
I think HN is trying to be good at being HN, not just to provide the most utility to its users in general. So those wanting something like HN if it started in 2030, may want to try and build a new site.
It also doesn’t speak to the permission or lack thereof of training LLMs on HN content, which was another main point of OP.
if a comment made by a LLM is indistinguishable from a normal one, it'd be impossible to moderate anyway unless one starts tracking people across comments and see the consistency of their replies and overall stance so I don't particularly think it is useful to worry about people who will go the extra length to go undetected
The existence of rule-breakers is not itself an argument against a rules-based order.
Relavent xkcd https://xkcd.com/810/
Some would say LLM-generated posts will eventually be superior information-wise. In which case possibly the behavior will change naturally.
Or maybe they don't get there any time soon and stay in the uncanny valley for a long time.
I'm kinda fine with a "if you can't be bothered to even change the standard-corporate-BS-tone of your copypaste, you get downvoted" - for all I know some people might be more clever with their prompting to get something less crap-sounding, and then they'll just live or die on the coherence of the comment.
If I take a trick like those recommend by the authors of min_p (high temperature + min_p)[1], I do a great job of escaping the "slop" phrasing that is normally detectable and indicative of an LLM. Even more-so if I use the anti-slop sampler[2].
LLMs are already more creative than humans are today, they're already better than humans at most kinds of writing, and they are coming to a comment section near you.
Good luck proving I didn't use an LLM to generate this comment. What if I did? I claim that I might as well have. Maybe I did? :)
[1] https://openreview.net/forum?id=FBkpCyujtS
[2] https://github.com/sam-paech/antislop-sampler, https://github.com/sam-paech/antislop-sampler/blob/main/slop...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Shame is the best moderator.
Also, HN's miscellaneous audience of rule breakers benefit from having some rules be better off not stated. Especially this one, as it is almost as good as a "Gun-Free Zone"
[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I don’t know if this situation benefits from all of these moving parts; perhaps the finer points ought to be nailed down, considering the explicitness of the rule itself in practice.
A new user signs up and immediately starts using AI to write all of their comments because they read the guidelines, then had their AI read the guidelines, and both were convinced it was okay to continue doing so, and so they did. They told a second user this, and then a third, who decided to train their AI on the guidelines and upvoted posts, as well as Dan’s posts, your posts, my posts, and everyone else’s.
One day, Dan thinks that someone is using AI in a way that is somewhat questionable, but not against the guidelines. He makes a point to mention how using AI on HN shouldn’t be done like that, that they were holding it wrong, basically.
All of the AI’s trained on HN take notice of the conditions that led to that other AI getting reprimanded, and adjusted their behavior and output so as to not be caught.
If you squint, this is basically the status quo today. HN users who have read the guidelines and made good posts, who use AI to assist them writing posts, in a good faith way, will never receive any correction or directions, or link to the thread where Dan said not to post in such a way, because they will not get caught. And because they will not learn of the rule or get caught, in their mind, they will be in the right to do so, as they don’t know any better. Furthermore, they keep getting upvotes, so it’s smiles all around.
These so-called “good faith AI users” are only differentiated from “bad faith AI users” by being told not to use AI. If said users will only receive the instruction not to use AI after being caught doing so, AI users are incentivized to not get caught, not to not use AI altogether.
There are no upsides to not adding the AI rules to the guidelines. As it is, they are Schrödinger’s rules, existing in a superposition of both existing and not existing.
If you read Dan’s replies in the linked thread, he doesn’t specifically say AI is against the rules, and actually provides feedback that the AI user was using AI “almost right,” basically, implying that there is a right way to use AI on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42224972
So the rule is not only not in the guidelines, even if you search for the rule, you won’t find it. I had to email Dan to get the rule in the first place. Do you see how absurd this situation is?
For one, now the classic IRC megahal bots which have been around for decades are technically not allowed unless you get permission from Libera staff (and the channel ops). They are markov chains that continuously train on channel contents as they operate.
But hopefully, as in the past, the Libera staffers will intelligently enforce the spirit of the rules and avoid any silly situations like the above caused by imprecise language.
Rules must take scale into account and do it explicitly to avoid selective enforcement.
There's a difference between one person writing a simple bot and a large corporation offering a bot pretending to be human to everyone. The first is harmless and fun, the second is a large scale for-profit behavior with proportionally large negative externalities.
Sure, no one is going to go after random reddit post, but if a Major Newspaper wants to have AI write their articles, this would have to be labeled. And if your bank gets LLM support agent, it can no longer pretend to be human. All very desireable outcomes IMHO.
Speaking of SDF, here’s their bot policy:
> [01] CAN I RUN AN IRC BOT HERE??
> IRC BOTs are pretty intensive and most systems and networks ban them.
> In an experiment conducted in 1996 on this system, we allowed users to compile and run their bots. The result was hundreds of megs of disk space became occupied because each user insisted on having their own version of eggdrop uncompressed and untarred in their home directory. All physical memory was in use as ~45 eggdrop processes were running concurrently. The system was basically USELESS and it took 1.5 hours to login if you were patient enough (even from the system console).
> The ARPA members called a vote on the issue and the result was almost a resounding unanimous NO.
> However, there are times when running a bot is useful, for instance keeping a channel open, providing information or just logging a channel. Basically the bot policy here is a bit relaxed for MetaARPA members. Common sense is the rule. As long as you aren't running a harmful process, such as a hijack bot, warez bot or connecting to a server that does not allow bots, then you may run a bot process.
More info about SDF for those who are curious: