The HN mods are responsible for the fact that HN continues after many years to operate as a genuinely interesting anonymous forum where insanity is kept at bay. That's no small thing - and most of us are very grateful.
I am upvoting this because it shows how much we rely on good intentions. We expect the submitter to have verified the source, the upvoters to read and critically analyze the content and everyone else to have long attention spans to read the article. In reality, people consider title to be TLDR, commenters reply to the comment and not to the article, and people form opinions before reading.
I am actually proud that the community stood up for the ideals of trusting others (even if the trust was misplaced). I am also pleasantly surprised at how well GPT can mass produce such articles.
I think at this point if the poster didn't post a good article it would be voted down quite quickly so we mostly rely on peoples own selfishness a few who did become the scape goat and in the angst downvote a post, that saves us all from reading a terrible article.
I'm not sure what you mean. By "article" do you mean submission? Those can't be downvoted. You can "flag" a submission, but that's not for low quality submissions, but submissions that don't follow the guidelines.
Really I think it is a matter of the self-help genre essentially being vapid bullshit platitudes anyway I didn't even bother responding as it clearly wasn't my genre and nobody would appreciate the response. Human society is full of stacks based upon vapid bullshit. So GPT3 performed perfectly successfully in that matter and we should /really/ pay attention not to GPT3 as a threat (that would be shooting the messenger) but to our own bullshit susceptibility.
> In reality, people consider title to be TLDR, commenters reply to the comment and not to the article, and people form opinions before reading.
I'm not sure this is a bad thing. I tend to read just the comments because they're ultimately more interesting. Blogs/articles are all fighting for attention in the world and they tend to be bombastic or just so explanations or other simplistic interpretations. HN comments tend to have the "real story". You get anecdotes and different perspectives and more nuanced opinions.
I disagree with how frequently some topics or perspectives are pushed....i.e. Rust is better for this, now Rust can be used for that.....although that comes subjectively from a bias and appreciation I have towards C
>"I must confess, I actually lied earlier when I told you only one person noticed. Only one person reached out to me to ask if GPT-3 was writing the articles. However, there were a few commenters on hacker news who also guessed it. Funny enough, nobody took notice because the community downvoted the comments."
this is pretty hilarious. Although the genre has probably much to do with it, virtually all business/productivity/ lifestyle/self-help stuff has the same sort of generic tone and is full of crap
I would sometimes listen to New Dimensions radio very early in the morning on NPR on my way to work. It's a show about new age spiritually concepts, typically with interviews of new agey book authors. I eventually had to turn it off, as while the dialogue was grammatically correct, it was repetitive and basically incomprehensible. It was like a stream of consciousness that lacked substance behind any of the words being said.
It's actually quite scary and shows a lot about human nature.
The comment in question was insightful and displayed intuition and judgement a level up beyond other people. Really every other comment was a load of crap, and the one comment of actual substance was buried. Many comments like this are voted down on HN. These are the comments that should in a perfect world be the top voted comment under any topic.
The fact that this is common shows that there is a huge difference between what people actually value and what they think they value.
People value opinions they agree with, not opinions that are new, different or insightful.
What's even more scary is the fact that the comment wasn't insulting. It was factual and to the point, yet the replier accused the original commenter of punching below the belt and not being civil. Accusations that originated completely from his imagination.
It shows that people in general don't just respectfully disagree with differing opinions. People attack all opinions that aren't inline with theirs.
And what's even more crazy is no one is aware of this. That responder thinks he's being civil and logical when in reality he's being stupid, illogical and biased.
I know the policies of HN are done for the purpose of preventing HN from becoming like 4chan or reddit. BUt where do I find a community where that guy who made the insightful GPT-3 comment will get voted up?
Somewhere buried in every HN topic is a comment that is ahead of it's time but you won't see it because it's been buried to oblivion by the mob.
I guess part of the problem is that our brains tend to use the authority of who says what to validate the opinion.
We need to switch our brains to focus on what is being said instead and a lot of people have a problem with this.
When there's no way to define the authority of who is saying it, the authority is transferred to the subject instead, in this case "Hacker News".
People will have a tendency to flock on the authority represented now by the subject.
(BTW, in my experience HN is the best place i know where "whats being said" is more important and have an authority on its own, and the reason why i keep coming back here)
>(BTW, in my experience HN is the best place i know where "whats being said" is more important and have an authority on its own, and the reason why i keep coming back here)
I agree. Still, even though it is the "best" it is still quite bad and this very article proves the point.
It should be scary, because since internet discussions often become less than argumentative. Instead of even lack of arguments, it becomes combative. People need some guiding principles, but with different streams of information and manipulators willingly misleading people, you end up with lowest common denominators setting untrue agendas. I guess this is what they mean by "digitalization", just that nobody know the consequences of what they say.
And no, I don't "fear" or am "frightened", as some using dominating speech would have it. There are real concerns in the world that need to be openly addressed, and people need to demand accountability and fairness for those issues.
> People value opinions they agree with, not opinions that are new, different or insightful.
> It shows that people in general don't just respectfully disagree with differing opinions. People attack all opinions that aren't inline with theirs.
It's not just that. The achilles heel of HN's readership/voting behavior is its bias towards positivity and validation, and against criticism and sarcasm. I've got tons of fake internet points here, so I often do some experiments to test this out. As a general rule, with some exceptions: No matter what the topic is, if your comment is positive, shows approval or otherwise supportive of the topic, you'll tend to get upvotes. If you raise concerns, point out flaws, or express cynicism, you're going to get downvoted.
So when something comes up that's actually false or suspect, the correct skeptics get downvoted, and the incorrect people praising the article are promoted to the top. I wish I had access to the raw data to do a sentiment analysis on the comments and compare it to voting trends. I guarantee they are correlated!
Ironically, the first vote on this comment was down.
Yeah it is ironic. You didn't say or do anything out of line. Yet people are voting you down simply because they disagree. Imagine what happens in the real world let alone on the internet.
This is why I believe there should be no downvote at all. Or there should be a way to see which posts are the most controversial instead of hiding them. When someone disagrees with an opinion and downvotes it - they bury it and in a way hide it from the world. This behaviour is what creates echo chambers where only the popular opinions are amplified even if they are wrong.
It’s too easy to get enough upvotes to be able to downvote anything you want.
Downvoting prevents others from seeing a comment and there are no safeguards to ensure that facts don’t get buried by bandwagons.
HN clearly means to control downvoting because it requires a minimum karma, but it’s no longer effective. Perhaps also limit the number of upvotes an account can dole out and a comment can receive...
HN is very tone-sensitive; I pretty frequently see comments that are correct (sometimes even by people who are extremely expert in the topic) that get downvoted because they're stated in a blunt or impolite way.
IMO it's more nuanced. If you're endorsing something the majority here likes you don't really have to care about tone as long as you're not being totally crazy. If you're trying to go against the grain then you need to chose your words very carefully.
Edit: Of course the real world is like this too but I think there's a meaningful difference in the degree.
Except it's not that simple - - the difference is that, in the real world, there are no scores associated with your negativity or 'going against the grain'.
You can disagree in whatever manner you want, as long as you are oblivious to the obvious social cues of the people around you.
Whereas on HN, there is a score to tell you that you've committed a social faux pas. It's more immediate, so it's a little easier to figure out.
I've often thought about ways to integrate the scoring feature into real life to help folks on the spectrum learn to communicate with neurotypicals. Haven't squirreled that one out yet.
What's worse, with visual cues that you've commited a faux pas (the graying out), people are inclined to jump on the bandwagon. There is a subconscious temptation to pile on.
In real life, you're not grayed-out for being contrary.
I'm not sure if the graying out is the best approach. However, in real life, people may look at you funny, and if they do, others will notice this.
Tangentially, the lack of body language feedback is a major reason people are such assholes online. It doesn't exactly feel like you are talking to a real person and you aren't getting realtime feedback, so it is harder to adjust to the other person or even just treat them reasonably.
I find downvote visual cues such as the graying out a bit like laugh tracks in sitcoms. On their own, some people will find the jokes funny, some find them distasteful or unfunny -- add a laugh track and you're telling people how they must feel. Downvotes are a lot like that: "people find this comment distasteful, what are you going to do about that?".
Frankly, I consider us lucky to have a place where it's only as bad as you've described, since at this point you're getting down to borderline unavoidable qualities of human communication. In most other communities, there are no carefully chosen words, and downvotes/disagreements are primarily petty, rather than attempts to address pettiness.
There is nothing wrong with the tone of Person1. Every aspect of their statement is true and correct, not exaggerated, and gives due respect to both the OP and the reader of the comment.
But if they had said something like, "I suspect this post is written by GPT-3. Consider X, Y, Z sentence -- these are typical constructions of GPT-3 because of A," it probably would not have been down-voted.
I guess. That an asymmetrical expectation, though. If we require a great effort to politely point out that a blog is devoid of substance, the spammers win. It's also a very important skill these days to understand when you are being manipulated by the tone police into supporting an extreme position, or at least not denouncing it. It's super easy to lure some HNer into espousing an essentially eugenicist position on race and IQ, which weirdly is a topic that always makes it to the front page on HN, but then if you go on to denounce their position as eugenicist, you'll be flagged. I think that inevitably leads to decline in the quality of a community because if you don't have shorthand for "this is autogenerated spam", "this is climate denial", "this is a conspiracy theory", or "this is racist" then you'll instead waste all of your time trying to politely refute the bullshit point by point.
This is factually untrue. Hacker News is orders of magnitude more diverse than reddit. Discussion about Trump or US politics in general, for example, tends to be fairly level-headed on HN. Need I even link you to /r/politics?
>Hacker News is orders of magnitude more diverse than reddit.
MORE DIVERSE THAN REDDIT?! lol. hacker news is generally upper middle class white people. I don't think the same goes for reddit. All anecdotal of course, but I think that's close enough to correct.
Eh, depends on how you carve things up. There is a subreddit for just about anything, so you can find diverse opinions there. But you will not find reasonable disagreement on hot-button topics where one side doesn't get downvoted into oblivion. If you want genuine engagement on sensitive topics, HN is better than reddit.
more diverse than reddit? it's pretty much just coders, IT guys and geeks, most of them white right wingers, libertarians. nothing wrong with that, that's why I come here, but I am aware I am going into local bubble and I know what to expect when presenting opinions unable to respect different opinions out of their echo chamber
the sheer size of reddit already makes it much more diverse, you will find subs for any niche unlike HN, I can imagine local ratio between men : females already, diverse HN, that was good one
> Discussion about Trump or US politics in general
What HN do you visit? Any time anything remotely touching politics shows up here it gets immediately flagged, removed from the front page, and the level-headed comments you speak of get downvoted into oblivion.
I disagree - I frequently see comments about politics that are reasonable and not downvoted to death. There are also many comments/articles that do get flagged/killed, and a few of those seem like they were trying to speak in good faith, but the proportion of rational, surviving political content is far higher than in other places that are not explicitly devoted to political discussions.
Your comment is similar to the one in the article where he attacked and accused someone who is right. Biased people can never recognize their own bias.
First off what he said was not factually untrue. This very article proves his point.
Fact: There was an entire thread responding positively to fake content while voting down the few people who were able to see that the content was fake. The one man with a substantive reply was literally accused of not being "civil" when he did no such thing. This is 100% toxicity laced with false etiquette.
If you want to be unbiased you can't say things like something was factually untrue if there is a fact in the main article literally proving his point.
Really whether reddit is more toxic or HN is more toxic is up for debate. It's just different types of toxicity and there's evidence going in both directions. Don't be like that fool who in the main article.... every story and statement has multiple angles.
it's same here, I corrected poster and was downvoted to hell while stating the facts - popular apps are blocked in China, unpopular fly under radar and can be used or you can use illegal VPN if you insist on using popular app, perfectly civil comment consisting only of facts downvoted to hell, I don't even know why. also pretty sure unlike those downvoters I actually lived in China for years dealing with these issues
if anything this validates all the shitty feedback i get when i post something that goes against the hackernews norm. It also proves that this social community is not immune to all the shitty things that happen in much less moderated spaces like reddit. Social media is broken (or working as intended depending on your metrics) across the board.
Meh, HN already has hidden functionality that they don't tell users about, and honestly it feels like psychological torture. For example, all of my posts lose points after posting. For a long time, I thought a bot was following me and downvoting me. No, I was just being tortured by dang, feeling like I was crazy for all of my posts receiving down votes. Unless I consistently only post things that subscribe to the norm, I will be in a points deficit. I will never be able to downvote posts and participate in the community at large. I've effectively been cancelled, mostly for having different opinions and partly for responding to trolls in an unhelpful way. I'm working on the second part, but I don't think that's the problem.
I'm not interested in trying to psychologically harm people, especially in a time when social activities only really exist on the internet.
> Person2: "Your comment punches below the belt and isn't welcome in a community like this. Maybe you're new here."
> YIKES.
This.
These condescending comments is what makes the community aspect of any kind of website terrible. I've felt for a long time that using the net without joining a community and leaving comments is the healthiest way to go about it. I'm not trying to take up the moral highground, I'm guilty of behaving as a douche, but ever since I started refraining myself from commenting - my internet experience and mental health has been way better and even the douche aspect started to tone down.
These both look like reasonable thoughts. Person 1 either sincerely believes it was written by GPT-3, or they are simply using the comparison as a sarcastic remark (they should have made it more clear). Person 2 reasonably took the latter meaning.
Edit: I should say mostly reasonable. Person 2 ended with uncalled-for snark, and as I said, person 1 potentially was being unnecessarily sarcastic. But I don't think this interaction is a good example of "bullshit".
It brings up an interesting HN moderation problem: can someone bash a post/article by implying that it was written by GPT-3? The community then has to determine if the comment is snark or a reasonable conclusion.
There's a lot going on in these comments, but it's worth noticing the breach of trust which occurred. Person 2 is trying to uphold the tradition of trust and charity which is a large part of what makes HN as successful as it is. Person 1 can "see the pixels" and wants to call it out. Person 1 was correct and Person 2 was charitable but wrong, and of course that counts for something. But if you look beyond that fact for a moment, I think there was real damage to the community of trust within HN. The OP acted irresponsibly by posting the article at all. That he used the trust of the HN users to prove his point doesn't matter at all.
> I had a lot of fun doing this experiment. Some people will probably get mad at me for tricking people, but whatever.
OP even recognizes the externalized cost of their actions, "but whatever", as they say. What they did by posting fake content to prove a point was wrong, betrayed everyone's trust, and was completely against the spirit here. And as a community we could say that we don't support this behavior. I think that's a good idea.
This is a _very_ charitable interpretation of Person2's motivations. Person1 correctly called out something fairly bluntly, and the call out had (in hindsight, I didn't see the comment before this) a pretty good basis for the comment.
Person2 was very dismissive without even addressing the comment. That to me seems antithetical to "trying to uphold the tradition of trust and charity," though I'm pretty new here. I personally don't think a dismissive attitude and a snarky quip for no good reason is worth anything.
The point of my comment was to focus on the harm which the OP did by posting the faked content in the first place. And my comment explicitly says to forget about Person 1 and Person 2.
@dang: The title of this article is "My GPT-3 Blog Got 26 Thousand Visitors in 2 Weeks", but the title of this post is...not that. Is that intentional?
EDIT: Confirmed by the OP (wporr) in a dead reply to this comment (which he just deleted), who is indeed shadowbanned from HN. Which makes this submission blatant ban evasion.
Isn't that mostly because of the potential for autogenerated text to contain racist, offensive or hateful content? That's why they also mention the content filter.
I thought this particular experiment was funny, (mostly) non-offensive and insightful.
The impression I formed is that the author has an agenda to troll HN or game its automations to get their content to the top of the first page. In any case the above article seems to me to be entirely about bragging that they punked HN. I don't find it funny, just boring, trolly and childish (and not in the good kind of "childish", a-la Calvin and Hobbes, more like Cartman nasty childish).
They've been trying to manipulate HN with multiple accounts and voting rings—which hasn't worked—and baity titles, which unfortunately has. Note how they're doing the exact same thing with this one.
GPT-3 is a red herring; the issue was the generic, baity title on a popular theme. Those routinely get upvotes because people see words like 'procrastination' or 'overthinking' and instantly think of their own experiences and ideas and want to talk about them. Such threads are not about the article, they're about the title, which the author admits writing ("I would write the title and introduction, add a photo"). Title plus introduction is already more than most people read, so this case is not what they say it is—which is consistent with their other misrepresentations, including the false claim "only one person noticed it was written by GPT-3".
Edit: as YeGoblynQueenne and minimaxir point out, given the other misrepresentations I'm not sure why we should believe that the article body was exactly "written by GPT-3" either, especially because the author describes it this way: "as unedited as possible"—in other words, edited. That doesn't much matter, though, because the salient inputs for the HN thread were the parts they wrote themselves.
We usually downweight such submissions, but occasionally we let one through because it seems healthy and interesting to have such discussions in the mix—just not too many. If there was a failure here it was that the moderators didn't look at the article. Or maybe we did; on my computer the title, photo, and introduction cover the entire first screen. Maybe that seemed good enough to let the discussion run.
Given this new information about the author's practices I'm inclined to think that everything they say in the above article should be treated with suspicion, especially since they accept that a) they do not have ready access to GPT-3 and b) they edited the "GPT-3" article to some extent. For example I would not be surprised to learn that, unable to use GPT-3 for a significant amount of time, they genereated some of the text of the article and then created the rest by hand, or similar. Not because I don't believe that readers on the internet can mistake GPT-3 as something written by a human, but because the author's ethics sound just... dodgy.
> they edited the "GPT-3" article to some extent. For example I would not be surprised to learn that, unable to use GPT-3 for a significant amount of time, they genereated some of the text of the article and then created the rest by hand, or similar.
You should assume all GPT-3 related text (including app demos and screenshots) is cherry-picked unless you can see the text generated in real time for yourself.
Cherry picked, yes, but the author says they also edited the "GPT-3" article to some extent. The extent to which this was done is what I'm wondering about.
Given the algorithm; generate text, cherry pick, edit. We could make a random number generator pass the turing test. It is just a mater of processing power and time.
That's also my take. Anyo can say anything about GPT-3, and it's impossible to negate, because (1) most people don't have access, (2) the authors rarely provide complete input data, so even those who have access can't verify these claims.
Really, this whole "OpenAI" is an oxymoron and I hope a truly open alternative will appear.
These are perennial issues. We've worked hard on anti-voting-ring measures. The voting rings in their case didn't work. Baity titles are a harder issue and require moderation. If you want more information about this, I'd need to see specific links. Most of the things people say about these matters aren't true; they're overgeneralizations at best, and often just imagination.
As for downvoting, people have been saying all the same things for well over a decade. The discussion circulates endlessly. Does downvoting get abused? Sure, but evaluating the system by specific examples is like evaluating an immune system by looking at what a couple of white blood cells did. You don't reprogram your immune system based on that—especially because the examples that stand out are always the cases that the system didn't handle perfectly.
> You don't reprogram your immune system based on that
Yet HN clearly did reprogram their system, by requiring a minimum karma before an account is able to use the downvote button, and not allowing users to downvote replies to their comments, instead of just working like Reddit.
What was the reason for that?
Someone seems to have recognized the downsides of allowing everyone to bury comments, and made an attempt to limit that.
That limit is no longer effective, as often seen in the drive-by downvoting on divisive topics and the burial of facts if somebody doesn’t like them.
As the total number of HN users increases it becomes easier for all accounts to reach that minimum karma, e.g. by posting funny comments (HN is not immune to memes) and riding on bandwagons.
That karma limit has been in place for 10 years or more.
As I said, this discussion circulates endlessly; if you use HN Search you will find that all of these concerns/complaints go back to the beginning of the site. People have passionate, conflicting views about how downvoting should work, and commonly feel like the site is deteriorating because it doesn't work the way they would design it.
Good moderation is inherently tolerant of some friction and seeming imperfections. Trying to craft some Perfect social climate leads to horrifyingly draconian and oppressive stuff.
I'm here for the life-giving, messy breath of fresh air not found in most online spaces.
The reality is that moderation is about helping people tolerate people unlike themselves and about buffering the worst communication gaffs. But beneath it all, sometimes people are just grumpy or mean and there is no fixing that. You can only mitigate the worst expressions of it, not stamp it out.
Right now, there's a Pandemic on. The world generally is pretty cranky and wanting to insist on someone fixing Something so they can feel like their world isn't spinning out of control.
Members successfully bullying mods into fiddling with voting rules in a short-sighted manner to get some momentary sense of control in life isn't going to fix the pandemic. It's just going to undermine long-standing best practices for a well-run forum.
You're assuming that it's possible to satisfy everybody. It isn't. For one thing the different requests are contradictory amongst themselves.
One must make design choices. I think HN's design choices in this area are good and I've not heard sufficiently good reasons to change them. Not everyone agrees, but everybody will never agree.
> I think HN's design choices in this area are good and I've not heard sufficiently good reasons to change them.
I find it hard to believe that in a discussion which supposedly “goes back to the beginning of the site” you haven’t heard sufficient reasons yet.
I’ve often thought about gathering a collection of comments that were perfectly reasonable, well-behaved and factual, but still grayed out because somebody didn’t like them. (It takes, what, just 2 or 3 downvotes to make a comment practically invisible.)
Perhaps enough such examples would be sufficient to recognize that there is a problem.
Sure, if you make such a list I'd be interested to see it.
Btw, if a comment is faded and you're having trouble reading it, you can click on its timestamp to go to its page, and in that case it should be rendered normally.
I started reading the original GPT-3 generated blogpost [1] . The first 10 paragraphs or so appear really written by a human. Not a brilliant one, but a human nonetheless. After that, it became a bit incoherent, and it gave me a headache, so I stopped reading, but it's perfectly plausible that a human could have written that as well. In fact I often get headaches reading human-generated prose too.
This got me wondering. Just like many GAN-generated human faces are actually very similar to actual faces in the training set, is it possible that this blogpost is quite similar to something someone actually wrote and was part of the GPT-3 training set?
You could put a little bit of effort into showing why it reads like regurgitated nonsense, for example.
It's your choice if you want to invest that time and effort, of course. But you can also choose not to leave low-effort comments. Brandolini's law comes to mind.
This case is slightly weird. Without evidence, there's no real way to call it out without sounding hostile, which is something you've also discouraged on Hacker News.
It's also why adequate disclosure of AI-generated text is important and it's good OpenAI is advocating that.
I agree that it's an edge case. I don't think moderators would have replied to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23894742 as a guidelines violation, but the user who did meant well and all this stuff is pattern-matching anyhow. For example "this sounds like GPT-3" can just as easily be an internet insult (e.g. "sounds like GPT-3 regurgitated a sociology textbook" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23687199), in the same way that "this sounds like a Markov chain" used to be. The fact that that comment added "or the human equivalent" kind of made it lean that way. Perhaps that's why it provoked an immune response from a community member while the more neutral "I think this was written by GPT-3" comment did not.
To be fair, it's pretty easy to get top-10 on HN. Heck, I "gamed" the system myself a few times. In other words, yeah, I think a lot of Hacker News is bullshit.
Clever "retro" hacks will always gain traction (building a widget out of old vacuum cleaners), anything socio-psychological will usually get traction (dating apps, blog posts about loneliness), anything on advanced math/physics/logic will usually get traction (probably because it makes people feel smart, even though it's not accessible to like 99%), anything tangential to philosophy will get traction (again, makes people feel smart).
I really do miss when HN was a bunch of scrappy entrepreneurs that tried to build stuff. With all that said, it's still the best community left on the internet. At least it tries to abide by the principle of charity, and flame wars/trolling is highly frowned upon. Dang and everyone else does a very admirable job of keeping everyone in line.
No, but I think they're examples of things that automatically pass through the "HN filter" -- a lot of times they aren't BS, but it's certainly fishy (and, incidentally, that's how the GPT-3 blog made it through).
> anything on advanced math/physics/logic will usually get traction (probably because it makes people feel smart, even though it's not accessible to like 99%)
I think these posts are popular because they generate meaningful discussion. More often than not, I learn more from the comments than I do from the article itself, because people will talk about their own experiences, point to resources that helped them, etc.. I don't see this as a bad thing at all--it's one of the primary reasons I visit HN.
Personally, I couldn't care less about the entrepreneurship side of HN. But that's the beauty of sites like this--everyone upvotes what they're interested, and more than one topic can occupy the front page at once. You click on what you like to read, I'll click on what I like to read. It's great!
Also, how long was it #1, and how much meaning should be ascribed to that? I visit HN typically several times a day, and haven't seen that blog before.
Anecdata caveat and all that, I agree with your views. If I think about how I've used HN in 2020, it is primarily the Octal iphone app and I default to the "Show HN" filter as a workaround.
Plus anyone first with The News. Any latest Elon Musk achievement, latest Apple announcement, or death of a famous person. Any of these will be 1000-2000 points.
Don't forget anything bashing Apple, MS, Uber, or any of the startup unicorns. Haters love to hate.
Alternative, charitable interpretation: their big stumbles offer the best, clearest lessons for technical owners and managers; stands to reason they get a lot of attention.
Perhaps there is a better voting model for content/comments than the purely democratic method (one account, one vote). It would be interesting to see an expert weighted HN homepage/comment stream.
(punting on how "expertise" is measured or assigned)
Of course there are. Slashdot had better voting models 20+ years ago. You should only have a limited number of votes per day, you shouldn't be able to comment and vote on the same article, votes can be subject to "meta-moderation", you don't have simple up/down votes but instead you categorise (informative, unhelpful, spam, etc), and for quick viewing you can show only (eg) informative +2 comments.
Hah, I called it but decided not to reply in the end, damn etiquette.
I suspected GPT-3, but the lingering throught that it was written by a real person made me back down.
Well, at least I feel a little validated. And also concerned about the absolutely nonsense that gets promoted or upvoted by people that either don't read the articles, or just don't pay attention.
I've noticed the same issue around calling out “this person does not exist” faces. 99% chance your right, but 1% chance you leave some innocent person wondering what's so wrong about their earlobe that you were certain it couldn't be real.
Depends on what you expect. I've gotten priceless, career/life-changing help and advice from HN because I come here to expose myself to conversations from people with more or just different experience in something I'm interested in.
In addition, it's also a big deal to me how rational and objective commenters on this site are in comparison to most other websites these days. As a hardcore free-speech fan and proponent of objectivity, it's a nice a breath of fresh air.
I don't find discussions here more rational or objective, to be fair. In comparison with most tech-related forums or communities, HN seems to have a similar level of quality, with stricter moderation to try to cut flamewars short... which is a good thing. But rational? I find people here run the whole gamut of emotional, reasonable, irrational, rational, confrontational, open-minded, biased (it has been mentioned multiple times there are certain topics here on HN where going against the grain will get you downvoted to hell, no rational discussion possible). It's just that flamewars here are nipped in the bud, whereas in other forums they are either ignored or moderated arbitrarily.
I respect your difference in opinion. Note I never said HN is purely rational, just that I find it much more rational than almost every other online platorm I've seen lately. If you have recommendations for other discussion sites that have similar or more objective and impartial discussion than what we have here, I think a lot of us would be happy to try them.
To be honest, minus the flamewar moderation (which I like), I find HN about the same as other tech/hacker minded forums. Note that the moderation is no small issue, however!
I've found that communities tend to develop a sense of self-importance and overrate their own "good" qualities. I remember when I used to read Slashdot, more than a decade ago, many users would write things like "of course, all of us who read Slashdot are above average users and $PROBLEM does not affect us, but consider a typical Joe User". When I read facebook groups about niche topics I find interesting, inevitably a member will claim "don't you find this is the best facebook group about $TOPIC? We don't argue, we have nice reasonable conversations about $TOPIC, and the mods are top-notch!" (similar groups about the same topic will of course each claim to be the most reasonable, well-moderated, argument-free group). And the list goes on.
Unsurprisingly, many HN regulars tend to hold the same views about HN ("the most rational, less biased, most diverse ideas"), possibly unaware that most communities tend to develop the same feelings about themselves. Human nature, I guess :)
Almost every one. Many subreddits on programming/hacking. Many closed facebook groups (though in that case I find the UX terrible). Many stackexchange sites. Slashdot used to be very similar to HN (though I haven't read it in ages).
Do note in practice I've settled on HN for tech news, for good or bad. My time is finite, I cannot check a thousand sites :)
I often find the value of HN is less in the links and more in the comments. I went to check the article mentioned [1] and many of the higher ranked comments are simply using the article as a jumping off point. The top comments starts out with "A little tangential, but..." which is pretty common to see on HN. The quality of the writing of an article is mostly irrelevant in that instance because the value being generated is from the topic itself evoking conversation and the topic was provided by the human prompt.
Also 2 of the 22 top level comments mentioned GPT-3 and several others are clearly just riffing off the headline. I think the percentage of people who actually read the article and realized something was off about it was higher than the author is implying.
I agree with you. I mostly just read the title and then the comments, especially if I know a thing or two about the subject.
Partially off topic but I personally use the FOSS android app "Materialistic" to access HN. It offers a much better comment navigation experience than ynewscombinator.
> several others are clearly just riffing off the headline
I don't blame them, the language is not pleasant to read, the ideas superficial and a cursory glance is enough to give a general idea of the content.
That said, the article was still surprisingly coherent for being auto-generated. I wonder how much was edited to make it so. If no or minimal editing was applied then this is darn impressive, and we just might indeed start seeing more texts like this. Or miss them, as it were.
Same for me, I enjoy a lot of the anecdotes and personal experiences that everyone shares. Definitely gives me a frame of reference when reading an article.
The natural follow up question is "Are Hacker News Comments Bullshit?". It seems easier to post GPT-3 comments than create a blog, so I wonder now if it exists, but what percentage it's at.
I have noticed that the downvoting seems to be getting more pronounced and often what I would consider to be uneducated opinions are gaining strength on HN. (IE people who don't agree with me.) :)
I'm a newbie, but the reason I came here was for more signal than noise and several times in the last months I've considered looking for new places because the comment quality is slipping.
The discussion here is focusing on the highly editorialized made up title, but as a writer I am concerned at the attitude here:
The biggest benefit of GPT-3 is efficiency. All I need to write is a good title and intro. I could write five of them in an hour and publish them all in one day if I wanted to.
The author admits that fact checked stuff can't be written this way. So you can't really produce solid writing this way. Yet it is being proposed as the future of content creation.
As someone who does some content creation, I really dislike this idea that this is "efficient" and "can save money." Good writing is increasingly hard to find as is, in part because we don't pay writers what we used to pay them. Good writing involves research and understanding the topic. It's not just about putting pretty words together.
I disagree, in part. As a (wannabe-science-fiction) writer, I think GPT-3 has potential to be useful.
In my case, I have plenty of stories I want to write, lots of ideas that I want to play with. The thing I struggle with is writing the first draft of a story - it turns out that I find writing the first draft of a story to be really, really boring work (even with the help of NaNoWriMo). My fingers are typing out the words for chapter 3 but my brain is already grappling with the obvious plot holes in chapter 28.
This is where GPT-3 could really help: churning out words to fill the page with crap first draft copy. Feed the existing copy into the GPT-3 engine, alongside some prompts about the directions I want the story to go, themes I want it to tackle, etc. Receive back 2-3 drafts of the next thousand-15 hundred words. Then edit the heck out of those suggested words to bring the crap copy into line with my vision for the chapter.
I like this idea because most of my storytelling work happens in the first and second revisions, not the initial draft. I'd be happy to call the results my work, not the work of some mindless ML bot. Proper writers will probably feel differently about the process.
That's a different use case than the one I'm criticizing. The use case I'm objecting to is "You, as a writer, are no longer relevant. We are replacing you with a bot to save money."
I can see your point. And my initial reaction to the whole ML-as-writer thing was hands-up horror. Like everything, I think this new tech is going to impact in both good, and bad, ways.
In my scenario, I expect there will be a lot of books written by ML algorithms, then published/sold to readers with inadequate (or no) additional author/editor input. My bet for the first fiction genre to take this approach is Romance Pulp - particularly Mills&Boon-style novels which have been written in line with a tight template for decades. And ML 'authors' in the literary fiction genre - it wouldn't surprise me if these already exist!
I bet people were upvoting the title - "Feeling unproductive? Maybe you should stop overthinking" because they agree with it, and a lot of the discussion on that article had little to do with specific points in the actual content. You can see that on most articles here - including this one! Still interesting, especially if the title was also GPT generated (kinda doubt that though).
168 comments
[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 214 ms ] threadI am actually proud that the community stood up for the ideals of trusting others (even if the trust was misplaced). I am also pleasantly surprised at how well GPT can mass produce such articles.
I'm not sure this is a bad thing. I tend to read just the comments because they're ultimately more interesting. Blogs/articles are all fighting for attention in the world and they tend to be bombastic or just so explanations or other simplistic interpretations. HN comments tend to have the "real story". You get anecdotes and different perspectives and more nuanced opinions.
this is pretty hilarious. Although the genre has probably much to do with it, virtually all business/productivity/ lifestyle/self-help stuff has the same sort of generic tone and is full of crap
Articles are also upvoted because of the discussions in the threads so I'm not that surprised a lot of "warm body" type threads make it to the top.
The comment in question was insightful and displayed intuition and judgement a level up beyond other people. Really every other comment was a load of crap, and the one comment of actual substance was buried. Many comments like this are voted down on HN. These are the comments that should in a perfect world be the top voted comment under any topic.
The fact that this is common shows that there is a huge difference between what people actually value and what they think they value.
People value opinions they agree with, not opinions that are new, different or insightful.
What's even more scary is the fact that the comment wasn't insulting. It was factual and to the point, yet the replier accused the original commenter of punching below the belt and not being civil. Accusations that originated completely from his imagination.
It shows that people in general don't just respectfully disagree with differing opinions. People attack all opinions that aren't inline with theirs.
And what's even more crazy is no one is aware of this. That responder thinks he's being civil and logical when in reality he's being stupid, illogical and biased.
I know the policies of HN are done for the purpose of preventing HN from becoming like 4chan or reddit. BUt where do I find a community where that guy who made the insightful GPT-3 comment will get voted up?
Somewhere buried in every HN topic is a comment that is ahead of it's time but you won't see it because it's been buried to oblivion by the mob.
We need to switch our brains to focus on what is being said instead and a lot of people have a problem with this.
When there's no way to define the authority of who is saying it, the authority is transferred to the subject instead, in this case "Hacker News".
People will have a tendency to flock on the authority represented now by the subject.
(BTW, in my experience HN is the best place i know where "whats being said" is more important and have an authority on its own, and the reason why i keep coming back here)
I agree. Still, even though it is the "best" it is still quite bad and this very article proves the point.
And no, I don't "fear" or am "frightened", as some using dominating speech would have it. There are real concerns in the world that need to be openly addressed, and people need to demand accountability and fairness for those issues.
> It shows that people in general don't just respectfully disagree with differing opinions. People attack all opinions that aren't inline with theirs.
It's not just that. The achilles heel of HN's readership/voting behavior is its bias towards positivity and validation, and against criticism and sarcasm. I've got tons of fake internet points here, so I often do some experiments to test this out. As a general rule, with some exceptions: No matter what the topic is, if your comment is positive, shows approval or otherwise supportive of the topic, you'll tend to get upvotes. If you raise concerns, point out flaws, or express cynicism, you're going to get downvoted.
So when something comes up that's actually false or suspect, the correct skeptics get downvoted, and the incorrect people praising the article are promoted to the top. I wish I had access to the raw data to do a sentiment analysis on the comments and compare it to voting trends. I guarantee they are correlated!
Ironically, the first vote on this comment was down.
Downvoting prevents others from seeing a comment and there are no safeguards to ensure that facts don’t get buried by bandwagons.
HN clearly means to control downvoting because it requires a minimum karma, but it’s no longer effective. Perhaps also limit the number of upvotes an account can dole out and a comment can receive...
Person1: "The posted has no substance and is pure regurgitation, it was probably written by GPT-3"
Person2: "Your comment punches below the belt and isn't welcome in a community like this. Maybe you're new here."
YIKES.
Edit: Of course the real world is like this too but I think there's a meaningful difference in the degree.
You can disagree in whatever manner you want, as long as you are oblivious to the obvious social cues of the people around you.
Whereas on HN, there is a score to tell you that you've committed a social faux pas. It's more immediate, so it's a little easier to figure out.
I've often thought about ways to integrate the scoring feature into real life to help folks on the spectrum learn to communicate with neurotypicals. Haven't squirreled that one out yet.
In real life, you're not grayed-out for being contrary.
Tangentially, the lack of body language feedback is a major reason people are such assholes online. It doesn't exactly feel like you are talking to a real person and you aren't getting realtime feedback, so it is harder to adjust to the other person or even just treat them reasonably.
I find downvote visual cues such as the graying out a bit like laugh tracks in sitcoms. On their own, some people will find the jokes funny, some find them distasteful or unfunny -- add a laugh track and you're telling people how they must feel. Downvotes are a lot like that: "people find this comment distasteful, what are you going to do about that?".
But if they had said something like, "I suspect this post is written by GPT-3. Consider X, Y, Z sentence -- these are typical constructions of GPT-3 because of A," it probably would not have been down-voted.
But until spam becomes a problem on this site, it is premature to alter norms to protect against a non-issue.
Honestly, that's what keeps the quality of the site high. Compare that to reddit, where I've seen multiple responses that were literally just "bruh"
This is factually untrue. Hacker News is orders of magnitude more diverse than reddit. Discussion about Trump or US politics in general, for example, tends to be fairly level-headed on HN. Need I even link you to /r/politics?
MORE DIVERSE THAN REDDIT?! lol. hacker news is generally upper middle class white people. I don't think the same goes for reddit. All anecdotal of course, but I think that's close enough to correct.
more diverse than reddit? it's pretty much just coders, IT guys and geeks, most of them white right wingers, libertarians. nothing wrong with that, that's why I come here, but I am aware I am going into local bubble and I know what to expect when presenting opinions unable to respect different opinions out of their echo chamber
the sheer size of reddit already makes it much more diverse, you will find subs for any niche unlike HN, I can imagine local ratio between men : females already, diverse HN, that was good one
What HN do you visit? Any time anything remotely touching politics shows up here it gets immediately flagged, removed from the front page, and the level-headed comments you speak of get downvoted into oblivion.
First off what he said was not factually untrue. This very article proves his point.
Fact: There was an entire thread responding positively to fake content while voting down the few people who were able to see that the content was fake. The one man with a substantive reply was literally accused of not being "civil" when he did no such thing. This is 100% toxicity laced with false etiquette.
If you want to be unbiased you can't say things like something was factually untrue if there is a fact in the main article literally proving his point.
Really whether reddit is more toxic or HN is more toxic is up for debate. It's just different types of toxicity and there's evidence going in both directions. Don't be like that fool who in the main article.... every story and statement has multiple angles.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24017479
Knowledge about this has to be hidden from everyone, though and I don't know how long it can be kept hidden.
I'd actually like to see HN try this for a day. Some of the most substantive content is also the most voted down content.
Meh, HN already has hidden functionality that they don't tell users about, and honestly it feels like psychological torture. For example, all of my posts lose points after posting. For a long time, I thought a bot was following me and downvoting me. No, I was just being tortured by dang, feeling like I was crazy for all of my posts receiving down votes. Unless I consistently only post things that subscribe to the norm, I will be in a points deficit. I will never be able to downvote posts and participate in the community at large. I've effectively been cancelled, mostly for having different opinions and partly for responding to trolls in an unhelpful way. I'm working on the second part, but I don't think that's the problem.
I'm not interested in trying to psychologically harm people, especially in a time when social activities only really exist on the internet.
> YIKES.
This.
These condescending comments is what makes the community aspect of any kind of website terrible. I've felt for a long time that using the net without joining a community and leaving comments is the healthiest way to go about it. I'm not trying to take up the moral highground, I'm guilty of behaving as a douche, but ever since I started refraining myself from commenting - my internet experience and mental health has been way better and even the douche aspect started to tone down.
Edit: I should say mostly reasonable. Person 2 ended with uncalled-for snark, and as I said, person 1 potentially was being unnecessarily sarcastic. But I don't think this interaction is a good example of "bullshit".
> I had a lot of fun doing this experiment. Some people will probably get mad at me for tricking people, but whatever.
OP even recognizes the externalized cost of their actions, "but whatever", as they say. What they did by posting fake content to prove a point was wrong, betrayed everyone's trust, and was completely against the spirit here. And as a community we could say that we don't support this behavior. I think that's a good idea.
Person2 was very dismissive without even addressing the comment. That to me seems antithetical to "trying to uphold the tradition of trust and charity," though I'm pretty new here. I personally don't think a dismissive attitude and a snarky quip for no good reason is worth anything.
EDIT: Confirmed by the OP (wporr) in a dead reply to this comment (which he just deleted), who is indeed shadowbanned from HN. Which makes this submission blatant ban evasion.
I thought this particular experiment was funny, (mostly) non-offensive and insightful.
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24040450
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24054863
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24049094
I guess there's a reason for it
GPT-3 is a red herring; the issue was the generic, baity title on a popular theme. Those routinely get upvotes because people see words like 'procrastination' or 'overthinking' and instantly think of their own experiences and ideas and want to talk about them. Such threads are not about the article, they're about the title, which the author admits writing ("I would write the title and introduction, add a photo"). Title plus introduction is already more than most people read, so this case is not what they say it is—which is consistent with their other misrepresentations, including the false claim "only one person noticed it was written by GPT-3".
Edit: as YeGoblynQueenne and minimaxir point out, given the other misrepresentations I'm not sure why we should believe that the article body was exactly "written by GPT-3" either, especially because the author describes it this way: "as unedited as possible"—in other words, edited. That doesn't much matter, though, because the salient inputs for the HN thread were the parts they wrote themselves.
We usually downweight such submissions, but occasionally we let one through because it seems healthy and interesting to have such discussions in the mix—just not too many. If there was a failure here it was that the moderators didn't look at the article. Or maybe we did; on my computer the title, photo, and introduction cover the entire first screen. Maybe that seemed good enough to let the discussion run.
You should assume all GPT-3 related text (including app demos and screenshots) is cherry-picked unless you can see the text generated in real time for yourself.
Really, this whole "OpenAI" is an oxymoron and I hope a truly open alternative will appear.
___________
[1] https://youtu.be/rMz7JBRbmNo
There have certainly been signs of “voting rings” (or something else that causes similar end results) for over a year now.
It has long been obvious that downvoting gets abused, as mentioned in other comments here.
Does HN ever mean to acknowledge and address that?
As for downvoting, people have been saying all the same things for well over a decade. The discussion circulates endlessly. Does downvoting get abused? Sure, but evaluating the system by specific examples is like evaluating an immune system by looking at what a couple of white blood cells did. You don't reprogram your immune system based on that—especially because the examples that stand out are always the cases that the system didn't handle perfectly.
Yet HN clearly did reprogram their system, by requiring a minimum karma before an account is able to use the downvote button, and not allowing users to downvote replies to their comments, instead of just working like Reddit.
What was the reason for that?
Someone seems to have recognized the downsides of allowing everyone to bury comments, and made an attempt to limit that.
That limit is no longer effective, as often seen in the drive-by downvoting on divisive topics and the burial of facts if somebody doesn’t like them.
As the total number of HN users increases it becomes easier for all accounts to reach that minimum karma, e.g. by posting funny comments (HN is not immune to memes) and riding on bandwagons.
As I said, this discussion circulates endlessly; if you use HN Search you will find that all of these concerns/complaints go back to the beginning of the site. People have passionate, conflicting views about how downvoting should work, and commonly feel like the site is deteriorating because it doesn't work the way they would design it.
But what was the reason? What is it supposed to achieve or prevent?
> As I said, this discussion circulates endlessly
That sounds like a reason to address this, instead of ignoring it.
“People keep talking about it so let’s leave it the way it is”?
I'm here for the life-giving, messy breath of fresh air not found in most online spaces.
The reality is that moderation is about helping people tolerate people unlike themselves and about buffering the worst communication gaffs. But beneath it all, sometimes people are just grumpy or mean and there is no fixing that. You can only mitigate the worst expressions of it, not stamp it out.
Right now, there's a Pandemic on. The world generally is pretty cranky and wanting to insist on someone fixing Something so they can feel like their world isn't spinning out of control.
Members successfully bullying mods into fiddling with voting rules in a short-sighted manner to get some momentary sense of control in life isn't going to fix the pandemic. It's just going to undermine long-standing best practices for a well-run forum.
One must make design choices. I think HN's design choices in this area are good and I've not heard sufficiently good reasons to change them. Not everyone agrees, but everybody will never agree.
I find it hard to believe that in a discussion which supposedly “goes back to the beginning of the site” you haven’t heard sufficient reasons yet.
I’ve often thought about gathering a collection of comments that were perfectly reasonable, well-behaved and factual, but still grayed out because somebody didn’t like them. (It takes, what, just 2 or 3 downvotes to make a comment practically invisible.)
Perhaps enough such examples would be sufficient to recognize that there is a problem.
Btw, if a comment is faded and you're having trouble reading it, you can click on its timestamp to go to its page, and in that case it should be rendered normally.
This got me wondering. Just like many GAN-generated human faces are actually very similar to actual faces in the training set, is it possible that this blogpost is quite similar to something someone actually wrote and was part of the GPT-3 training set?
[1]https://adolos.substack.com/p/feeling-unproductive-maybe-you...
How else are you supposed to respond to nonsense other than saying "This is nonsense"?
It's your choice if you want to invest that time and effort, of course. But you can also choose not to leave low-effort comments. Brandolini's law comes to mind.
It's also why adequate disclosure of AI-generated text is important and it's good OpenAI is advocating that.
I agree that it's an edge case. I don't think moderators would have replied to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23894742 as a guidelines violation, but the user who did meant well and all this stuff is pattern-matching anyhow. For example "this sounds like GPT-3" can just as easily be an internet insult (e.g. "sounds like GPT-3 regurgitated a sociology textbook" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23687199), in the same way that "this sounds like a Markov chain" used to be. The fact that that comment added "or the human equivalent" kind of made it lean that way. Perhaps that's why it provoked an immune response from a community member while the more neutral "I think this was written by GPT-3" comment did not.
Clever "retro" hacks will always gain traction (building a widget out of old vacuum cleaners), anything socio-psychological will usually get traction (dating apps, blog posts about loneliness), anything on advanced math/physics/logic will usually get traction (probably because it makes people feel smart, even though it's not accessible to like 99%), anything tangential to philosophy will get traction (again, makes people feel smart).
I really do miss when HN was a bunch of scrappy entrepreneurs that tried to build stuff. With all that said, it's still the best community left on the internet. At least it tries to abide by the principle of charity, and flame wars/trolling is highly frowned upon. Dang and everyone else does a very admirable job of keeping everyone in line.
These are all examples of bullshit?
I think these posts are popular because they generate meaningful discussion. More often than not, I learn more from the comments than I do from the article itself, because people will talk about their own experiences, point to resources that helped them, etc.. I don't see this as a bad thing at all--it's one of the primary reasons I visit HN.
Personally, I couldn't care less about the entrepreneurship side of HN. But that's the beauty of sites like this--everyone upvotes what they're interested, and more than one topic can occupy the front page at once. You click on what you like to read, I'll click on what I like to read. It's great!
Yup, count me as one of them. Hask me anything.
Alternative, charitable interpretation: their big stumbles offer the best, clearest lessons for technical owners and managers; stands to reason they get a lot of attention.
It's 'easy' if you know how to do it. Many people actively try to figure it out and can't readily pull it off.
It's a system. If you know how the system works, you can get somewhat reliable results. That's not necessarily the same as "gaming" the system.
(punting on how "expertise" is measured or assigned)
I suspected GPT-3, but the lingering throught that it was written by a real person made me back down.
Well, at least I feel a little validated. And also concerned about the absolutely nonsense that gets promoted or upvoted by people that either don't read the articles, or just don't pay attention.
In addition, it's also a big deal to me how rational and objective commenters on this site are in comparison to most other websites these days. As a hardcore free-speech fan and proponent of objectivity, it's a nice a breath of fresh air.
I've found that communities tend to develop a sense of self-importance and overrate their own "good" qualities. I remember when I used to read Slashdot, more than a decade ago, many users would write things like "of course, all of us who read Slashdot are above average users and $PROBLEM does not affect us, but consider a typical Joe User". When I read facebook groups about niche topics I find interesting, inevitably a member will claim "don't you find this is the best facebook group about $TOPIC? We don't argue, we have nice reasonable conversations about $TOPIC, and the mods are top-notch!" (similar groups about the same topic will of course each claim to be the most reasonable, well-moderated, argument-free group). And the list goes on.
Unsurprisingly, many HN regulars tend to hold the same views about HN ("the most rational, less biased, most diverse ideas"), possibly unaware that most communities tend to develop the same feelings about themselves. Human nature, I guess :)
Do note in practice I've settled on HN for tech news, for good or bad. My time is finite, I cannot check a thousand sites :)
Also 2 of the 22 top level comments mentioned GPT-3 and several others are clearly just riffing off the headline. I think the percentage of people who actually read the article and realized something was off about it was higher than the author is implying.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23893817
Partially off topic but I personally use the FOSS android app "Materialistic" to access HN. It offers a much better comment navigation experience than ynewscombinator.
I don't blame them, the language is not pleasant to read, the ideas superficial and a cursory glance is enough to give a general idea of the content.
That said, the article was still surprisingly coherent for being auto-generated. I wonder how much was edited to make it so. If no or minimal editing was applied then this is darn impressive, and we just might indeed start seeing more texts like this. Or miss them, as it were.
I'm a newbie, but the reason I came here was for more signal than noise and several times in the last months I've considered looking for new places because the comment quality is slipping.
The biggest benefit of GPT-3 is efficiency. All I need to write is a good title and intro. I could write five of them in an hour and publish them all in one day if I wanted to.
The author admits that fact checked stuff can't be written this way. So you can't really produce solid writing this way. Yet it is being proposed as the future of content creation.
As someone who does some content creation, I really dislike this idea that this is "efficient" and "can save money." Good writing is increasingly hard to find as is, in part because we don't pay writers what we used to pay them. Good writing involves research and understanding the topic. It's not just about putting pretty words together.
I don't think this is a good trend.
In my case, I have plenty of stories I want to write, lots of ideas that I want to play with. The thing I struggle with is writing the first draft of a story - it turns out that I find writing the first draft of a story to be really, really boring work (even with the help of NaNoWriMo). My fingers are typing out the words for chapter 3 but my brain is already grappling with the obvious plot holes in chapter 28.
This is where GPT-3 could really help: churning out words to fill the page with crap first draft copy. Feed the existing copy into the GPT-3 engine, alongside some prompts about the directions I want the story to go, themes I want it to tackle, etc. Receive back 2-3 drafts of the next thousand-15 hundred words. Then edit the heck out of those suggested words to bring the crap copy into line with my vision for the chapter.
I like this idea because most of my storytelling work happens in the first and second revisions, not the initial draft. I'd be happy to call the results my work, not the work of some mindless ML bot. Proper writers will probably feel differently about the process.
In my scenario, I expect there will be a lot of books written by ML algorithms, then published/sold to readers with inadequate (or no) additional author/editor input. My bet for the first fiction genre to take this approach is Romance Pulp - particularly Mills&Boon-style novels which have been written in line with a tight template for decades. And ML 'authors' in the literary fiction genre - it wouldn't surprise me if these already exist!
(Shrug)