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
Based on what Ive seen, I strongly believe that chatGPT responses to many questions are better than a non human expert in many cases. You can still generally tell when a response is from chatGPT, at least by "default". Maybe someone could prompt it to sound more human, but it's really just that the AI responses are cold, not that they're imo worse.

Not that I want AI responses, but that's my 2 cents.

I also think there's a difference between a "bot" account, which I think the common definition of would be one that only or mostly posts AI responses, and posting a comment on your account that you don't claim is from an AI (or even when you do as an afterthought).

While many people wouldn't defend the first, more might defend the latter as acceptable, and I wouldn't say a "no bots" policy would be interpreted as banning the latter.

>>foota+IB1
Based on what I’ve seen, ChatGPT has some disastrous responses. I asked it yesterday if it made sense to speak of partial derivatives in single-variable calculus and it made an absolute carnage of the response. I could not steer it with prompts towards something intelligible - it only produced jank.

I do not want people who cannot answer a question in the first place to copy-paste ChatGPT responses, just like it has always been bad etiquette to refer people to Google without further commentary.

>>arctur+LD1
Really? Because this is what I got:

"Me: How do partial derivative apply in one dimensional calculus?

In one-dimensional calculus, a partial derivative is a derivative taken with respect to one variable, while treating all other variables as constants. For example, if a function f(x,y) depends on two variables x and y, the partial derivative of f with respect to x is denoted as ∂f/∂x, and it represents the rate at which the value of the function f changes with respect to the variable x, while holding the variable y constant.

Me: What about the partial derivative of a function that has only one input variable?

If a function has only one input variable, then taking the partial derivative with respect to that variable is equivalent to taking the ordinary derivative of the function. For example, if f(x) is a function that depends only on the variable x, then the partial derivative of f with respect to x is denoted as ∂f/∂x, and it is equivalent to the ordinary derivative of f, which is denoted as f'(x) or df/dx. In this case, the partial derivative ∂f/∂x represents the rate at which the value of the function f changes with respect to the variable x."

Clearly in the first question it got confused about the difference between single variable calculus and multivariable, but in it's defense that's somewhat arbitrary. It's second answer seems spot on?

That said, I agree that accounts presenting chatGPT responses as their own or even with a disclaimer, is... Weird. And I don't want it on hn.

edit: I'm impressed it got the unicode in there :-)

>>foota+tE1
It was arguing with me the other day about the definition of a prime number. I couldn’t convince it otherwise.

>>within+BG1
Trurl's machine, indeed. It insisted that the volume of the unit cube and unit ball are both the same, and 1, in all dimensions, even though it knew the correct formula for the surface of the n-ball.

Wen I pointed out that n=2 is a simple counter example, it refused to talk to me (no answer, try-again button, ad inifinitum). Well, safer than Trurl's machine.

>>max-ib+MJ1
Don't even have to go that far. Just have it multiply two 3 or 4-digit numbers. It'll give an incorrect answer somewhere in the ballpark of the right answer.

>>msravi+ML1
You're asking a language model to do math. What's impressive there is not that it fails but that it comes up with an answer at all, especially if it is in the ballpark.

Most humans would do exactly the same unless given either access to pen and paper or a calculator, and it would likely be trivial for GPT-3 input processing to detect it has been presented with a math question and to farm it out to a special calculation module. Once you start to augment its input like that progress would be very rapid but it would no longer be just a language model.

>>jacque+V72
Well, everything is math, at some level. Supreme Court decisions might be. There are software packages used to day, using some "AI", to help judges determine the adequate level of punishments looking at circumstantial factors determining recividism rates et cetera [1] [2].

I believe that in the not too distant future there will be pressure to use these "magic" AIs to be applied everywhere, and this pressure will probably not look very hard at whether the AI is good at math or not. Just look at all the pseudoscience in the criminal system [3]. I believe this poses a real problem, so keeping hareping on this is probably the right response.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/01/us/politics/sent-to-priso... [2] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/11/algorithms-court-crim...

[3] https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/nathan-robinson-forens...