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[flagged] A ChatGPT-authored article hit the front page of HN this morning (brandur.org)
15 points by sigil on Jan 7, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 8 comments


For those who care: it's https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34287747, and yes users noticed and flagged it.


Per author's comment on the HN thread:

> I am the person that wrote this, and used GPT-3 and a few other writing tools to help me wordsmith it. All the points, however, is original work and not AI generated. I am not a native English speaker, so I have been using these tools to avoid awkward sentences/paragraphs.

How is this qualitatively different from using tools like Grammarly (which in their premium versions suggest style, not just grammar fixes) which themselves brag about being AI powered?

We're not talking about "write me an article about Foo" - the author has provided detailed notes and presumably selected good-sounding output choices (they might be lying but that's another issue).

Are we, software developers, founders and entrepreneurs, in the business of disrupting others and automating away their jobs with computers, now so outraged something like this can be successfully automated?

I have seen human copywriters producing much worse content than what ChatGPT does based on good prompts. Why on Earth should we not automate that?


> I have seen human copywriters producing much worse content than what ChatGPT does based on good prompts. Why on Earth should we not automate that?

Because then it gets even cheaper to spam the general population with advertisements and marketing fluff, and criminals might even be tempted to use GPT to automate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance-fee_scam email exchanges.


It really doesn't matter.

For some threads on HN the article headline works as a seed for discussion where we gain more value, then the content isn't always that valuable human or GPT. For other's where the content is more important, they simply wont get upvoted when it's reconstituted garbage.


When I first read that article, the writing looked dull and unstructured, so I did not read it to the end.

I assumed it was written by a human either lacking the skill or the motivation to create a captivating piece of text.

If in the future AI can write as captivating and as structured as a skilled human, then why should we not enjoy reading it?


> If in the future AI can write as captivating and as structured as a skilled human, then why should we not enjoy reading it?

GPT, stable diffusion etc, all very clever and fun. Still about 3 billion light years away from anything resembling intelligence. What they have on their side is a massive source of pre-existing creativity, so if you are seeing something genuinely deep or artful, it's probably from a human... through ML.


Agree that headlines are sometimes just discussion prompts, and that’s fine. I guess this means ChatGPT is prompting us now!


Not GPT? I'm guessing whoever instigated the generation of the article.

Either that or dev/urandom, so sure GPT is prompting us in as much as a dice roll + finger on a page is.

I think people put too much stock in this stuff, it's not clever, it's just a new kind of automation.




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