
Is Hacker News Bullshit? - igotbanned
https://liamp.substack.com/p/my-gpt-3-blog-got-26-thousand-visitors
======
Naac
@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?

~~~
dang
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.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
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.

~~~
minimaxir
> 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.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
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.

~~~
acje
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.

------
slg
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.

[1] -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23893817](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23893817)

~~~
stareatgoats
> 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.

------
briankelly
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).

------
Barrin92
> _" 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

~~~
leafboi
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.

~~~
ryandrake
> 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.

~~~
leafboi
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.

------
dvt
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.

~~~
happytoexplain
>"retro" hacks, socio-psychological, advanced math/physics/logic, anything
tangential to philosophy

These are all examples of bullshit?

~~~
dvt
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).

------
site-packages1
The most striking one:

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.

~~~
dilap
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.

~~~
jeffbee
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.

~~~
dilap
I agree, it's simply blunt.

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.

~~~
jeffbee
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.

~~~
hackinthebochs
>If we require a great effort to politely point out that a blog is devoid of
substance, the spammers win.

But until spam becomes a problem on this site, it is premature to alter norms
to protect against a non-issue.

------
valbaca
I absolutely love that the one person who called it out was shutdown and told
to "be civil and give reasons"

How else are you supposed to respond to nonsense other than saying "This is
nonsense"?

~~~
dang
More than one person called it out (e.g.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23894000](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23894000)).
You guys are making the same mistake that the upvoters did, of not looking at
the details.

~~~
minimaxir
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.

~~~
dang
I don't think
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23894000](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23894000)
sounded hostile.

I agree that it's an edge case. I don't think moderators would have replied to
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23894742](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](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.

------
credit_guy
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?

[1][https://adolos.substack.com/p/feeling-unproductive-maybe-
you...](https://adolos.substack.com/p/feeling-unproductive-maybe-you-should)

------
DoreenMichele
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 don't think this is a good trend.

~~~
rikroots
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.

~~~
DoreenMichele
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."

~~~
rikroots
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!

~~~
DoreenMichele
TBF, the part I quoted is in line with your remarks. Perhaps quoting a
different part of the article would have worked better.

(Shrug)

------
sdflhasjd
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.

~~~
paulgb
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.

------
agrajag24
I do research in Machine Learning and Robotics and I can say that HN is
bullshit most of the time when it is related to these issues. Also the tech-
bro vibes are really annoying. Made this account just to say this.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
If you have some knowledge on the subject why not contribute to the
discussions and improve their overall quality, rather than just complain about
how low it is? I appreciate that not everyone has the time to do that of
course.

Edit: I recognise what you are complaining about but that low quality is not
entirely the fault of the people who leave those low quality comments. They
are encouraged to leave poorly researched comments on subjects they don't
understand very well exactly because the average quality of comments on the
subject of machine learning and AI is so low. People can see that almost
everyone else is making it up as they go along or just trying to show off
knowledge they don't have, so they think, "that's the done thing, I should do
the same". If more knowledgeable users commented more often, the overall
quality of the discussions would improve and less experienced users would be
encouraged to think more about the quality of their own comments. And of
course, if more knowledgeable uses commented more often, the average user
would also learn more about machine learning and AI than they are likely to
learn from the articles that are typically posted on HN about those subjects
(and the discussions of them). Everyone would benefit from that, not least
knowledgeable users who would have an opportunity to discuss these subjects at
a higher level than they can now.

Generally my opinion is: if you have specialised knowledge that people are
interested in, spread it around. Only good things can come from that.

------
SergeAx
The domain chosen by author, inspirational writing, is a great application for
GPT-3: one can really write texts with zero meaning and still deliver for the
audience.

About a year ago some international business trainer made a splash in Moscow,
Russia, selling out the whole stadium of quite expensive tickets. His show was
an utter bullshit, people made memes with his quotes like "Do right things,
and don't do wrong things" or "Ask with question, but answer with answers" and
so on. But people who bought tickets to the show were still satisfied, because
people in need of business trainer's advice are obviously in a very vulnerable
position and will take any shoulder pat as a sign of support.

Next time that life coach should put a GPT-3 on stage.

------
mikeg8
> Its true value lies as a writing tool.

I think the author is not making a clear enough distinction between writing
and generating "content". Content has become a hollow commodity in the new
media landscape. It's purpose it to generate clicks, not inspire on a deeper
level. GPT-3 seems much more geared towards the content side vs the expressive
side that defines great written pieces.

Writing is so much more about the mental process of refining ones thoughts,
rather than the act of scribbling lines onto a page. Writing is hard because
it forces clarity in order to be effective. I don't see how using an AI tool
to outsource the heavy lifting of reflection and rumination can be considered
a true "writing" tool.

------
silicon2401
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.

~~~
the_af
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.

~~~
silicon2401
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.

~~~
the_af
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 :)

------
tsherr
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.

------
ianhorn
Take a look at the original discussion.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23893817](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23893817)

None of it is discussing the content, which makes sense given that it was
nonsense.

It just makes me further believe a very small minority read the article before
jumping into discussion. Like that other GPT-3 post where a ton of the
commenters didn't make it to the punchline in the article.

I guess that points to the value of a clickbait headline too.

I remember skimming the article and thinking it was nonsense, but downvoting
the "this is GPT-3 nonsense, or the human equivalent," comment. I don't see a
contradiction there.

Last, I totally disagree with the author's premise quite strongly. Maybe if
you're trying to just pump out clickbait where the whole point is the
headline, it'll make a difference in your ability to churn out content.

> However, with very minor editing, you could make these decent. Cut out
> irrelevant stuff, write a conclusion, and boom - people don't stand a chance
> of telling the difference.

You can give it a nice form, sure. People might believe it, too, but it'll
still be crap.

> The difference is, this is one of the first times technology has the
> potential to affect jobs in the creative sector.

This is really wrong. MS word, spell check, printers, photoshop, grammar
check, the ipad, digital cameras, practically everything in movies and
animation these days. Technology has been helping creatives be more efficient
for ages. One person with photoshop can do work in a day that would have taken
ages not long ago. You can hire Eddie Murphy once instead of a full cast. You
can film the mandalorian with massive LED monitor backgrounds instead of a
greenscreen, which itself replaced other work.

I guess if your goal is to churn out thought pieces with a nice headline, but
zero research and little critical thought, it's going to change the game. All
you need to do is say whatever you need to fit your narrative, like the fact
that computer technology and automation is just finally starting to affect
creative jobs. It'll flow perfectly and people won't be able to tell it's all
made up. Maybe the author's right and it's the sad reality that this is what
most of the content we read is and what most of the internet content writing
jobs consist of.

------
kanobo
Yes, most of the internet is bullshit. It's up to each person to find and
verify their own nuggets of gold.

------
aerojoe23
I hangout on hackernews and think I remember "reading" all 3 of GPT-3
articles. I used a screen reader, it makes it fast for me to "read" while I do
other things. I generally enjoy the content hackernews links to and often read
it before I evaluate the source, because really I'm just looking for something
to listen to while I make my tea or something. I noted that they didn't seem
to reference anything and decided I would try not to heed the advice they
contained.

I did think it was a human. I just thought it was low quality selfhelp stuff
that you see out there. The "...too productive" one was more convincing
because it felt like more of a personal story that didn't need to have
references.

------
dentalperson
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.

------
tyingq
You could launch an SEO content farm and see how well Google does vs GPT-3.

~~~
rwmj
This is the relevant xkcd: [https://xkcd.com/810/](https://xkcd.com/810/)

------
chris_va
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)

~~~
rwmj
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.

------
cbsmith
This is where we find out that _this_ article was also generated by GPT-3. ;-)

------
Guest42
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

------
kangnkodos
It's possible that half the articles in today's New York Times are already
being written by GPT-3. 600 words that rattle on and add no information beyond
what is stated in the article's title.

------
pictur
Yes

------
smitty1e
> However, there were a few commenters on hacker news who also guessed it.
> Funny enough, nobody took notice because the community downvoted the
> comments.

HN does seem to fetish certain orthodoxies.

------
vaidhy
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.

~~~
pankajdoharey
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.

~~~
dfxm12
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.

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ccroft
Can't help but wonder if GPT-3 is trolling us...

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igotbanned
The thread about the post that was written by GPT-3:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23893817](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23893817)

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OJFord
Very funny to read through now, comments like 'good points'!

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bravoetch
The answer to all clickbait titles that are questions is no.

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s9w
As increasingly often, the flagged and downvoted comments were right.

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cjbenedikt
Not necessarily. But the way some of the mods act is.

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TimTheTinker
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.

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myst
What definition of “interesting” are you using?

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TimTheTinker
I won’t define the word “interesting” here, but I’ll clarify that I mean it in
the intellectual sense.

