I remember back in 2012 or so someone made a really clever karma-farming bot on Reddit. Here’s how I (foggily) remember it working:

- It subscribed to subreddits like /r/pics and /r/funny that largely consisted of posting links (not text posts)

- When it calculated that a post was rocketing toward the front page, it would look at all the past times the URL had been submitted.

- If none of those had made it to the front page, it would find the most upvoted top-level comment, copy the text verbatim, and make the same comment on the post that would end up on the front page.

For the longest time, everyone just thought that this account was some super-interesting, super-funny person who always had the perfect joke or perfect comment for any given situation. Sure it was a bit odd that they never replied to anyone, but that also just felt like part of their mystique.

Then someone got the receipts and outed the account as a bot and the show was all over. I wouldn’t be shocked to see someone on HN do the same thing, but I also think HN isn’t big enough for a grift like that to pass by unnoticed.

There was a blog post that reached first page here on HN a few months ago. IIRC, only one commentator alluded that "the post is so nonsensical as if it was written by GPT-3, no solid arguments just mishmash of phrases"...surprise, it was written by GPT-3.

(BTW, I'm not suggesting anyone here is a bot, obviously)

I used GPT-3 to generate responses to someone who argued a post is GPT-3 generated on an old account. It was pretty funny - it fooled them, but smaller text is usually harder to detect as bot-generated.

Not just HN comments.

We are all sets of the same memes, recurring over and over.

(A cool and weird experiment: try playing several shows all at the same time. There'll be eerie moments when the audio syncs up, or one show surreally reacts to another.)

That just seems like the birthday paradox rather than anything truly eerie: as you add more shows, the odds that two won’t have something going on at the same second decreases.

(Also, ad breaks represent somewhat standard points at which shows would break up programming.)

I'd be very surprised if there wasn't at least one GPT bot practicing in the comments through a series of accounts being trained on upvotes.

The HN NPC.