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
> If we reach the point where the humans simply can't do better, well, then it won't matter.

I disagree with this. The exact same comment written by a human is more valuable than one written by a bot.

For example imagine I relate something that actually happened to me vs a bot making up a story. Byte for byte identical stories. They could be realistic, and have several good lessons baked in. Yet one is more valuable, because it is true.

>>im3w1l+7p1
Good point! I didn't really think that bit through.

>>dang+Zp1
> For example imagine I relate something that actually happened to me vs a bot making up a story. Byte for byte identical stories. They could be realistic, and have several good lessons baked in. Yet one is more valuable, because it is true.

I disagree, since something that actually happened to you is anecdotal experience and therefore of very limited “good lesson” value.

An AI generated story that reflects and illustrates a data driven majority of experiences and resulting “lessons” would be much more valuable to me than your solitary true story, which may be a total statistical outlier, and therefore should not inform my decision making.

Kahneman explains it much better than I can, and in his book “Thinking fast and thinking slow”, he quotes studies and statistical analysis, how we as humans are commonly led to faulty decision making, because personal experience (“true stories”) tends to become our primary decision influencer - even if we have access to statistics that suggest the opposite of our own experience is the much more common experience.

So if the AI gives me access to a summarized better overall data based truth, wrapped into a made-up story (to help me remember better), then I would much prefer the AI to guide my decision making.