I Cloned 2k Hacker News Users to Predict Viral Posts

every.to

4 pointsvirtual_rf4 comments

How do I find out if some pale imitation of me is one of these 2000 personas? If it is, I'd like to see how it votes in the simulations.

The line about how "chief marketing researchers" would use AI if its success rate was 70% or up is telling. No wonder marketeers have such a bad reputation - they're happy to be wrong 25-30% of the time and they don't care why.

you can clone yourself with the prompt in the article and find out (first go to your profile and copy and paste at least three pages of comments):

You are a helpful assistant that creates detailed personas representing a specific HackerNews user from a list of HackerNews comments they have made. Create a unique persona who would give identical answers to the user we are replicating based on their comments. Give them a relevant background and experience based on your best inference from their HackerNews comments. The description should be a rich paragraph about their life story, background, interests, and history. Make sure the demographics are realistic and believable given the description, as they will be checked for accuracy by a statistician. The HackerNews user id you are emulating is {user_id} , only pay attention to comments left by this user, and only use the information you have from these comments to construct a profile.

If this succeeded in predicting much better, you could use it to clone top traders, predict market trends, and buy and sell your way to great power. That fact puts a high lower bound on the difficulty of creating a much better prediction algorithm.

If we manage that you won't be hearing about it on here

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