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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

Uh, how do I opt out from AI impersonating myself? Is the goal of these products that I stop contributing to the Internet?

Also I find quite distasteful that you get free data without explicit approval and try to sell it back to the same audience.

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Hacker News publishes this dataset freely to the bigquery data marketplace

https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/product/y-combi...

This product was built to connect to your own database but I thought it was fun to connect to the HN dataset

Data is unable to regurgitate a comment in my style and pass it for something I have written. If a person were to do that, that'd be quite rude, but if it's AI it's perfectly fine? I do not think so.

In public you have no control over how someone uses a picture of your likeness

That's not true in the case of impersonating someone based on public recording of them. You'll quickly run afoul of Right of Publicity laws. It's one thing to simply record people in public where they don't have an expectation of privacy. It's quite another to impersonate them.

This is not relevant to your point but I want to say that's an entirely third party project and we didn't even know about it for a long time. We don't publish data to them except in the sense that we publish it to everybody: https://github.com/HackerNews/API.

I think their page gives a misleading impression that the project is somehow official, when it's not (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43850991).

Thanks for the clarification dang. I was misled by the listing which lists the author/publisher as "Y Combinator". Thanks for offering the official API.

I would like to add that the fact that there is an API does not mean that you as an API consumer have rights to the content that comes out of the API. Simplified, everyone participating on HN holds the copyright to the content they've created, so comments, submissions, etc, HN holds a perpetual license to that content, you don't hold any rights to it.

Never do anything publicly that you don’t want to be public.

And don't mistreat peoples public data, and expect them to like or support you.

Unfortunately “mistreat” is highly subjective. No matter what you do someone will be angry at you. I once got yelled at for taking a picture on a public beach where there was some family picnicking maybe 50 meters away. I think I was reasonable, the gentleman most emphatically did not.

Control what you can control. If you object to being a small data point in someone else’s documentation of a public experience, don’t put yourself in that situation.

Don't disagree, just saying it goes both ways. In your case you didn't care (not judging, I probably wouldn't either) about the opinions of the randos at the beach. However, in business, reputation does matter.

I'm fine with public records of stuff I have posted, I'd not be fine if you were impersonating me, nor I am if it's a piece of software doing that.

Can we take the ethics of AI seriously? I feel it's about time.

>Can we take the ethics of AI seriously?

If you're not suggesting a law to do so, then no. 35+ years of using the internet tells me that ethics is not included, nor at this point in the game should be expected.

Agreed, role playing as real people is unacceptable for both AI and other real people.

“Tell me what Bernie Sanders might say about…” is fine, so long as the response is in the form “based on his past statements”. “Pretend to be Bernie Sanders and talk about” is not ok to prompt, nor ok for the model to respond to with an impersonation.

You can ask ChatGPT its opinion about you as HN user, and you will see they trained on the whole content of HN.

I had another experience; even though it roasted me pretty thoroughly, that was only until I turned on web search. Before that, it was just pulling random, plausible shit out of its ass.

https://chatgpt.com/share/682a275e-0cb8-8013-8365-b896bfa171...

Same. I never talked about Rust. It was saying I had opinions about it but I never delivered anything. lol.

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