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Comment by miki123211 | Hacker News Reader

How do you know it isn't already happening?

With long and substantive comments, sure, you can usually tell, though much less so now than a year or two ago. With short, 1 to 2 sentence comments though? I think LLMs are good enough to pass as humans by now.

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But what if LLMs will start leaving constructive and helpful comments? I personally would feel like xkcd [0], but others may disagree.

[0] https://xkcd.com/810/

That's the moment we will realize that it's not the spam that bothers us, but rather that there is no human interaction. How vapid would it be to have a bunch of fake comments saying eat more vegetables, good job for not running over that animal in the road, call mom tonight it's been a while, etc. They mean nothing if they were generated by a piece of silicon.

I believe they mean whatever you mean it to mean. Humanity has existed on religion based on what some dead people wrote down, just fine. Er, well, maybe not "just fine" but hopefully you get the gist: you can attribute whatever meaning you want to the AI, holy text, or other people.

Religion is the opposite of AI text generation. It brings people together to be less lonely.

AI actively tears us apart. We no longer know if we're talking to a human, or if an artists work came from their ability, or if we will continue to have a job to pay for our living necessities.

>Religion is the opposite of AI text generation. It brings people together to be less lonely

Eh yes, but also debatable.

It brings you together if you follow their rules, and excommunicates you to the darkness if you do not. It is a complicated set of controls from the times before the rules of society were well codified.

Did we ever know those things before? Even talking to a human face-to-face, I’ve had people lie to my face to try and scam/sell me something and people resell art all the time. You have little ability to tell whether an artist’s work is genuine or a copy unless they are famous.

And the job? I’ve been laid off several times in my career. You never know if you will have a job tomorrow or not.

AI has changed none of this, it is only exposing these problems to more people than before because it makes these things easier. It also makes good works easier, but I don’t think it cheapens that work if the person had the capability in the first place.

In essence, we have the same problems we had before and now we are socially forced to deal with them a bit more head-on. I don’t think it’s a bad thing though. We needed to deal with this at some point anyway.

false equivalence fallacy: AI can destroy jobs and its ok unless you can compare it to a 0-layoff baseline.

AI doesn’t destroy jobs. That’s like saying bulldozers destroyed jobs. No, it makes certain jobs easier. You still have to know what you’re doing. I can have an AI generate a statement of work in 30 seconds, but I still need to validate that output with people. You can sometimes validate it yourself to a degree, just like you can look at hole from a bulldozer and know it’s a hole. You just don’t know if it is a safe hole.

I think a much more important question is what happens when we have no idea who's an LLM and who's a real person.

Do we accuse everybody of being an LLM? Will most threads devolve into "you're an LLM, no you're the LLM" wars? Will this give an edge to non-native English speakers, because grammatical errors are an obvious tell that somebody is human? Will LM makers get over their squeamishness and make "write like a Mexican who barely speaks English" a prompt that works and produces good results?

Maybe the whole system of anonymity on the internet gets dismantled (perhaps after uncovering a few successful llm-powered psy-ops or under the guise of child safety laws), and everybody just needs to verify their identity everywhere (or login with Google)? Maybe browser makers introduce an API to do this as anonymously and frictionlessly as possible, and it becomes the new normal without much fuss? Is turnstile ever going to get good enough to make this whole issue moot?

I think we have a very interesting few years in front of us.

Also neuronormative individuals sometimes mistake neurodivergent usage of language for LLM-speak which might have similar pattern matching schema reinforced

This just another reddit or HN.

I was browsing a Reddit thread recently and noticed that all of the human comments were off-topic one-liners and political quips, as is tradition.

Buried at the bottom of the thread was a helpful reply by an obvious LLM account that answered the original question far better than any of the other comments.

I'm still not sure if that's amazing or terrifying.

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