> Claude was trying to promote the startup on Hackernews without my sign off. [...] Then I posted its stuff to Hacker News and Reddit.
...I have the feeling that this kind of fun experiments is just setting up an automated firehose of shit to spray places where fellow humans congregate. And I have the feeling that it has stopped being fun a while ago for the fellow humans being sprayed.
I think it will be quite some time into the future, before AI can impersonate humans in real life. Neither hardware, nor software is there, maybe something to fool humans for a first glance maybe, but nothing that would be convincing for a real interaction.
Implemented so that if a person in your web vouches for a specific url (“this is made by a human”) you can see it in your browser.
If Google wouldn't have let perfect be the enemy of good and had added PGP support to Gmail early on (even just the shittiest signatures that are automatically applied and verified), the world would be a completely different place. Scams just wouldn't exist at this scale when signing mails with a known key would be the standard.
The tech is there, now we have Matrix and XMPP and PubSub and god knows how many protocols to share keys. Even Keybase.io still kind of exists.
What is lacking is a browser ecosystem for people to use their known identities to vouch for a specific url (with smart hashing so that changing the content would invalidate the trust).
We have the technology. Someone(tm) "just" needs to build it :)
If that isn’t exciting enough, Sam Altman (yea the one who popularized this LLM slop) will gladly sell you his WorldCoin to store your biometric data on the blockchain!
But I still can't help but grin at the thought that the bot knows that the thing to do when you've got a startup is to go put it on HN. It's almost... cute? If you give AI a VPS, of course it will eventually want to post its work on HN.
It's like when you catch your kid listening to Pink Floyd or something, and you have that little moment of triumph - "yes, he's learned something from me!"
I think the processes etc that HN have in place to deal with human-generated slop are more than adequate to deal with an influx of AI generated slop, and if something gets through then maybe it means it was good enough and it doesn't matter?
The bar is not 'oh well, it's not as bad as some, and I think maybe it's fine.'
* well crafted, human only? * Well crafted, whether human or AI? * Poorly crafted, human * well crafted, AI only * Poorly crafted, AI only * Just junk?
etc.
I think people will intuitively get a feel for when content is only AI generated. If people spend time writing a prompt that doesn't make it so wordy, and has personality, and it OK, then fine.
Also, big opportunity going to be out there for AI detected content, whether in forums, coming in inmail inboxes, on your corp file share, etc...
Spoiler: no he didn't.
But the article is interesting...
It really highlights to me the pickle we are in with AI: because we are at a historical maximum already of "worse is better" with Javascript, and the last two decades have put out a LOT of javascript, AI will work best with....
Javascript.
Now MAYBE better AI models will be able to equivalently translate Javascript to "better" languages, and MAYBE AI coding will migrate "good" libraries in obscure languages to other "better" languages...
But I don't think so. It's going to be soooo much Javascript slop for the next ten years.
I HOPE that large language models, being language models, will figure out language translation/equivalency and enable porting and movement of good concepts between programming models... but that is clearly not what is being invested in.
What's being invested in is slop generation, because the prototype sells the product.
I grew up in... slightly rural america in the 80s-90s, we had probably a couple of dozen local BBSes the community was small enough that after a bit I just knew who everyone was OR could find out very easily.
When the internet came along in the early 90s and I started mudding and hanging out in newsgroups I liked them small where I could get to know most of the userbase, or at least most of the posing userbase. Once mega 'somewhat-anonymous' (i.e. posts tied to a username, not like 4chan madness) communities like slashdot, huge forums, etc started popping up and now with even more mega-communities like twitter and reddit. We lost something, you can now throw bombs without consequence.
I now spend most of my online time in a custom built forum with ~200 people in it that we started building in an invite only way. It's 'internally public' information who invited who. It's much easier to have a civil conversation there, though we still do get the occasional flame-out. Having a stable identity even if it's not tied to a government name is valuable for a thriving and healthy community.
A German forum I'm on allows members limited invites based on participation. The catch is, you are responsible for the people you invite. If they get in trouble, you will share a part of the punishment.
(The fact that someone could correlate posts[0] based on writing style, as previously demonstrated on HN and used to doxx some people, makes things even more convoluted - you should think twice what you write and where.)
Not government owned, but even irs.gov uses it
People will be more than willing to say, "Claude, impersonate me and act on my behalf".
1. I'm usually too emotional to write out why I feel that way instead of saying what I feel.
2. I really don't like the person (or their idea) but I don't want to get fired over it.
Claude is really great at this: "Other person said X, I think it is stupid and they're a moron for suggesting this. Explain to them why this is a terrible idea or tell me I'm being an idiot."
Sometimes it tells me I'm being an idiot, sometimes it gives me nearly copy-pasta text that I can use and agree with.
I'm now imagining a future where actual people's identities are blacklisted just like some IP addresses are dead to email, and a market develops for people to sell their identity to spammers.
As far as I can tell the owner of the original iris can later invalidate an ID that they've sold, but if you buy an ID from someone who isn't strongly technically literate you can probably extract a bunch of value from it anyway.
"Claude write a summary of the word doc I wrote about x and post it as a reply comment," is fine. I dont see why it wouldnt be. Its a good faith effort to post.
"Claude, post every 10 seconds to reddit to spam people to believe my politics is correct," isn't but that's not the case. Its not a good faith effort.
The moderation rules for 'human slop' will apply to AI too. Try spamming a well moderated reddit and see how far you get, human or AI.
Forums like HN, reddit, etc will need to do a better job detecting this stuff, moderator staffing will need to be upped, AI resistant captchas need to be developed, etc.
Spam will always be here in some form, and its always an arms race. That doesnt really change anything. Its always been this way.
as an aside i've made it clear that just posting AI-written emoji slop PR review descriptions and letting claude code directly commit without self reviewing is unacceptable at work