Honestly I'm wasting too much time here. I wish I could feed the bot with my beliefs (Electron bad, nuclear good, Windows 11 a train-wreck, AI a bubble, ...) and it would post for me as appropriate.
This is why I'm not particularly thrilled about programs passing the Turing test. As soon as we have programs that can write credibly human-sounding comments on sites like this, many conversations will be controlled by whoever can afford the largest sockpuppet farm. Also, for every post on the actual threads of interest, there will be dozens of comments on every thread designed to increase karma. Automated karma whoring might even be more injurious than the direct intervention, because it will increase the groupthink tendencies already present.
Some might say we're already half way there. I disagree. Yes, Google or Apple employees might swamp an occasional thread here and there, either openly or covertly, but what I'm talking about would be a whole order of magnitude worse and constant.
Someone should create a bot that responds to highly upvoted comments and remind the redditor that Reddit is making money off the comment and the information is being used by AI and they aren't seeing a dime of it.
I am debating starting up a bot which just scans for stuff like this and auto-posts a reply of "Yes, this article didn't mention your favorite buzzword, and you must be incredibly perceptive and intelligent to have noticed this and pointed it out."
With sufficient advances in NLP & ML, i dream that one day you will be replaced by a bot able to generate snarky comments about slow/mobile-unfriendly/ad-riddled webpages automatically.
With a proper AI system you don’t even need to specify the exact article and nature of the comment.
For example here’s the prompt I use to generate all my HN comments:
“The purpose of this task is to subtly promote my professional brand and gain karma points on Hacker News. Based on what you know about my personal history and my obsessions and limitations, write comments on all HN front page articles where you believe upvotes can be maximized. Make sure to insert enough factual errors and awkward personal details to maintain plausibility. Report back when you’ve reached 50k karma.”
Working fine on GPT-5 so far. My… I mean, its 8M context window surely helps to keep the comments consistent.
Nice!
> AI-generated comments might not capture the nuances and insights of real HN users.
True!
> Have you considered incorporating real comments into the system to improve its accuracy?
This is definitely something we want to do, creating agents mapped to real users, to get closer to above.
I bet that if I wrote a bot to post randomly generated comments to HN in the vein of "I wonder if blockchain would be a good fit for this application?", I would be bathing in karma.
An AI comment bot trained on past HN comments that can be unleashed on the actual HN to whore karma sounds like a great meta-humorous project - it would prove that as far as upvotes go, we have achieved the singularity.
These predictable responses don't add any value whatsoever, and they're tiring to read.
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