Comment by ChrisMarshallNY
8 days ago
Having links in comments has always been problematic.
For myself, I usually link to my own stuff; not because I am interested in promoting it, but as relevant backup/enhancement of what I am writing about. I think that a link to an article that goes into depth, or to a GitHub repo, is better than a rough (and lengthy) summary in a comment. It also gives others the opportunity to verify what I say. I like to stand behind my words.
I suspect that more than a few HN members have written karmabots, and also attackbots.
Next, I'm sure, you'll be telling me you're not a bot, Mr Marshall?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42353508
Love it!
Thanks!
Glad you liked it, though I will mention for others that it does involve self-harm, as that may be relevant information, but it is necessary to the story, and it did win an Academy Award for what it's worth, which I think was probably deserved, though I didn't see any of the other also-rans.
Thanks for having the courage to post under your real name, also, as you mentioned in another thread of yours I was reading. It's been a growth experience for me as well.
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I recall blogs from over 20 years ago, with blatant comment spam, where the blog author would respond to the comment spam individually as if it was real readers. Most didn't fall for that, but a few clearly didn't understand it.
I'm not sure LLMs deviate from a long term trend of increasing volume of information production. It certainly does break the little bubble we had from the early 1990s until 2022/3 where you could figure out you were talking to a real human based on the sophistication of the conversation. That was nice, as was usenet before spammers.
There is a bigger question of identify here. I believe the mistake is to go the path of: photo ID, voice verification, video verification (all trivially by-passable now.) Take another step further with Altman's eyeball thing, another mistake since a human can always be commandeered by a third party. In the long term do we really care that the person we are talking to is real or an AI model? Most of the conversations generated in the future will be AI. They may not care.
I think what actually matters more is some sort of larger history of identify and ownership, matching to what one wishes to (I see no problem with multiple IDs, nicks, avatars.) What does this identify represent? In a way, proof of work.
Now, when someone makes a comment somewhere, if it is just a throw away spam account there is no value. Sure, the spammers can and will do all of the extra stuff to build a fake identity just to promote some bullshit produce, but that already happens with real humans.
> That was nice, as was usenet before spammers.
Not so sure I'd call it "nice."
I am ashamed to say that I was one of the reasons that it wasn't so "nice."