zlacker

>>djtrip+(OP)
They're already banned—HN has never allowed bots or generated comments. If we have to, we'll add that explicitly to https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, but I'd say it already follows from the rules that are in there. We don't want canned responses from humans either!

Edit: It's a bit hard to point to past explanations since the word "bots" appears in many contexts, but I did find these:

>>33911426 (Dec 2022)

>>32571890 (Aug 2022)

>>27558392 (June 2021)

>>26693590 (April 2021)

>>24189762 (Aug 2020)

>>22744611 (April 2020)

>>22427782 (Feb 2020)

>>21774797 (Dec 2019)

>>19325914 (March 2019)

We've already banned a few accounts that appear to be spamming the threads with generated comments, and I'm happy to keep doing that, even though there's a margin of error.

The best solution, though, is to raise the community bar for what counts as a good comment. Whatever ChatGPT (or similar) can generate, humans need to do better. If we reach the point where the humans simply can't do better, well, then it won't matter*. But that's a ways off.

Therefore, let's all stop writing lazy and over-conventional comments, and make our posts so thoughtful that the question "is this ChatGPT?" never comes up.

* Edit: er, I put that too hastily! I just mean it will be a different problem at that point.

>>dang+zk1
It’ll be interesting if we soon come to a day when a comment can be suspected to be from a bot because it’s too coherent and smart!

>>ramraj+Nl1
There is an xkcd comic about this (of course):

#810 Constructive: https://xkcd.com/810/

>>matthb+do1
Of course there is, but it’s definitely weird when the jokes only funny when it’s not easy to think of it as a real possibility!

In someways this thread sounds like the real first step in the raise of true AI, in a weird banal encroachment kind of way.

>>ramraj+Ct1
When I compare the ChatGPT-generated comments to those written by real humans on most web forums, I could easily see myself preferring to only interact with AIs in the future rather than humans, where I have to deal with all kinds of stupidity and bad and rude behavior.

The AIs aren't going to take over by force, it'll be because they're just nicer to deal with than real humans. Before long, we'll let AIs govern us, because the leaders we choose for ourselves (e.g. Trump) are so awful that it'll be easier to compromise on an AI.

Before long, we'll all be happy to line up to get installed into Matrix pods.