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
At that point the whole concept of a message board with humans exchanging information is probably over.

I am ultimately motivated to read this site to read smart things and something interesting. It is quite inefficient though. This comment is great but most comments are not what I am looking for.

If you could spend your time talking to Von Neumann about computing the input from thousands of random people who know far less than Von Neumann would not be interesting at all.