Exactly like the one we have now: A cacophonous cesspit filled with the mental diarrhea of a million bots sharting their opinions into the void in a desperate bid to either sway your opinion to their cause (whether commerce or politics), or bury you under such an avalanche of bullshit that you remain paralyzed with indecision.

And the result of this? Genuine conversation progressively retreats from the internet at large as it becomes overrun with the intellectual flatus of the bot wars, and people move further and further into silos in which bot behavior can be spotted and eliminated.

Welcome to the future. How do you like it, gentlemen? All your posts are belong to us.

We find ways to route around it. You're presently using one.

Really? I think HN has even fewer safeguards against AI-generated content than Google. No offense to dang and co., and I'm sure there's more going on there than I'm aware of. But still, I'm pretty sure it would be trivial to set up an account and use GPT-3 to produce the content. The only reason I'd suspect this isn't happening is because there isn't a strong financial incentive to do so. In other words, HN avoids the spam because it's still too small to matter.

While it is true that there are no good incentives for a bot to comment here, I believe that the best safeguard against AI-generated content is that here such content will be noticed easily.

I have seen a couple of times on some other even smaller technical forums what appeared to be sequences of comments generated by an AI, from a fake account (until the accounts were banned).

There could not have been any kind of financial gain from those actions, so the conclusion was that someone was testing the capability of their AI to carry a conversation on such subjects.

The messages posted were remarkably coherent, but in the end it was obvious that their source could have been only either an AI or a human with mental problems.

What made those messages stand-out was that even if they contained mostly correct information, the same that might be found e.g in technical magazines, there was always some weird disconnect between their answer and the message to which they replied.

Apparently, in most cases the AI failed to identify which exactly was the point-of-view of the previous poster. The reply referred to various items mentioned in the parent message, but instead of referring to the essential points it referred to some non-relevant things mentioned more or less accidentally, or it tried to argue for or against some points as if trying to contradict the previous poster, when they actually had argued in the same direction.

They will be downvoted into Oblidon. And then banned, shadow-banned, hell-banned and a few more creative ways of banning. The account, the IP, the site, and perhaps anyone that a bayesian filter put in the same bucket.

Can't be that hard to train GPT on HN comments. Plus if someone were to do it, they probably know of HN.

I could definitely see someone already having trained a bot to write HN comments and posting them.

What's anyone going to do about it? It's super hard to write a discriminator that works well enough to not destroy the site for everyone.

> Can't be that hard to train GPT on HN comments.

Yes, which will produce things that are stylistically similar to HN comments, but without any connection to external reality beyond the training data and prompt.

That might provide believable comments, but not things likely to be treated as high-quality ones, and not virtual posters that respond well to things like moderation warnings from dang.

I think it's possible to train the bot to write oneliners, but onliners are usually downvoted here.

Replies to comments are difficult, so I guess the bot must just write somewhat related top level comments.

It will accumulate a lot of "Did you RTFA?" and also polite request for clarifications, and it will be suspicious that the bot never replies or replies with nonsense.

If every commit has a link to http://www.example.com then people will notice and start flagging.

I guess it can fly under the radar posting a few top level bland comments per week in the megathreads with a few hundred comments, but I don't imagine how this can be used to gain anything.

But HN also adores tangents, and that gives plenty of room for GPT-3 to succeed. You could affect topical discussion merely by distracting it in several directions.

Reread the second paragraph. We're in agreement.

Above a certain percentage it's going to poison human-generated content too. You will have to discern between ai-generated content, ai-influenced-human generated content and genuine human-generated content.

One could argue it's already happening. How many of the people we talk to everyday get their facts from SEO-spam websites and Google instant answers (which often sources its content from such websites)? Even if we avoid AI-generated content, we might be gettting fed it by proxy.

Human filtering of AI creativity might work, but deepfakes mismatch with that. Personally I decided to make it a pattern that I unsubscribe from channels that use deepfakes since I saw Internet Historian using it and possibly adding to the already crippling confusion regarding UAPs. - IH is not a credible source anyway, but you can easily use the clips they produced without attribution.

I think the world will be a better place if everybody follows a similar pattern. The only reason to use deepfakes is if the victim who's identity is being stolen is not cooperating with you. - It's a new way to violate a person's integrity and their right to agency in our already fading grasp of reality. You could probably gaslight your girlfriend with it, if you are incomprehensibly evil.

>You could probably gaslight your girlfriend with it, if you are incomprehensibly evil.

I'm honestly a bit more concerned with people gaslighting courts.

The technology isn't going away, unfortunately. Society will have to adapt to these new invasive norms, as they already have time and again in the past.

"There is another theory which states that this has already happened."

So your post was generated by a bot? And I suppose this reply was also generated by a bot? Its bots all the way down

It's a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference.

"It's turtles all the way down."

In the process of remembering that little tidibt it reminded me of a short story I read once that was circulated without attribution for a few decades, i.e. Terry Bissom's "They're Made Out of Meat"[1] published in OMNI in 1990. "They're meat all the way through."

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190501130711/http://www.terryb...

> In theory GTP-3 could fill the entire internet with approximately true but false information.

Much of the internet is currently full of not-even-approximately true (and often maliciously false) information, so I’m not particular worried about that.

> approximately true but false

> When the percentage of human generated content approaches 0.0000%, what does that internet look like?

...approximately the same, but less false :)

Given that the AI are trained on human generated content to be human like without having understanding of the content, I would think approximately the same but even less correct.

Are you accusing me of being a bot?!

This is a lie, i sw

<NUL>

<NUL>

Segmentation fault

For the Web, we'll just go back to webrings and directly sharing links with people we know to be real ?

(Another risk might be governments-enforced identification, no more pseudonymity !)

That's basically my mental model of the internet already. An ocean of shit with a few rare islands of quality.

We will likely find out. And it may happen in a way that is fast enough to be very disorienting.

And how would GPT-3 evolve when it starts feeding on its own output?

Use another model to filter out generated text?

I assume they will use a GAN to evade Google's policy.

We'll go back to invite-only forums.

This is a minor plot-point in Anathem.