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
There is -of course- the famous Alan Turing paper about this [1], which is rapidly becoming more relevant by the day.

Alan Turing's paper was quite forward thinking. At the time, most people did not yet consider men and women to be equal (let alone homosexuals).

I don't think it is so important whether a comment is written by a man, a woman, a child, or a <machine>, or some combination thereof. What is important is that the comment stands on its own, and has merit.

Pseudonyms(accounts) do have a role to play here. On HN, an account can accrue reputation based on whether their past comments were good or bad. This can help rapidly filter out certain kinds of edge cases and/or bad actors.

A Minimum Required Change to policy might be: Accounts who regularly make false/incorrect comments may need to be downvoted/banned (more) aggressively, where previously we simply assumed they were making mistakes in good faith.

This is not to catch out bots per-se, but rather to deal directly with new failure modes that they introduce. This particular approach also happens to be more powerful: it immediately deals with meatpuppets and other ancillary downsides.

We're currently having a bit of a revolution in AI going on. And we might come up with better ideas over time too. Possibly we need to revisit our position and adjust every 6 months; or even every 3 months.

[1] https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/LIX/236/433/986238?log...