Such reductivism in AI has been going on since Turing. The linguistic outputs that the test is measured in are a small subset of what human beings do, and a more recent subset at that, in evolutionary terms. Much of our intersubjective attunement to one another happens below the level of language (i.e. you know when your wife is cross or in a bad mood...). What's worse, is that we only have language, in the form of computer languages, with which to capture and describe the full extent of the mindedness of a human being in order to create an AI, yet language is a higher order phenomenon than the complete mind that we're looking to replicate.
On the Internet, all the output we have is text on a page. We may be quickly approaching a world where it is impossible to distinguish a human on the Internet from a bot on the Internet. If the output cannot be used to distinguish bot vs. human, does it really matter who created that output?
A hn populated by chatgpt bots would be close to valueless, even if they produced output indistinguishable from the median commentor.
It matters because talking to a human is a worthwhile thing to do, but talking with a probalistic robot commentor is not, beyond some level of diminishing novelty.
> A hn populated by chatgpt bots would be close to valueless, even if they produced output indistinguishable from the median commentor.
Instead of median, what if the produced output is indistinguishable from the 99th percentile commentor (meaning, "genius" level commentor)? Would it still be valueless? In what sense?
I'm pretty confident that the probalistic conversational AIs lack what I'd call 'synthesis'.
But at a higher level, talking with a bug or robot or rubber duck, no matter how smart it sounds, isn't very valuable. There is no mind to change on the other side of the conversation. There is no life that is being lived on the other side of the screen, the experience is entirely one sided.
The max possible value, imo, is at the level of playing a video game vs a bot. It could be fun, you'll probably improve at the game, and maybe you'll learn something, but more than that? I am deeply skeptical.
>A hn populated by chatgpt bots would be close to valueless, even if they produced output indistinguishable from the median commentor.
False, it would be even more valuable to the typical HN user. (You and I are not typical users.) The typical user lurks and reads comments only. If there were more discussions on more topics for the typical user to read and learn and make up their mind about things; then that would be valuable, even if those discussions were algorithmically generated.
