Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Yes, this is a growing stage. In one or two years LLMs will have Wikipedia quality or even research paper quality. The spam they will produce might be better than most human written stuff.


At which point does high quality spam cease to be spam?


Might refer you to XKCD 810.

https://xkcd.com/810/


There is a XKCD for everything.

hmm, is there XKCD for "might refer you to XKCD $number" ?


The point where it is just misinformation?


Misinformation is false information. Spam can be facts.


Theoretically, yes. But better treat it as misinformation.


If the spam is better quality than the human written stuff, who's to say we aren't better off?


Quality in this case doesn't necessarily mean ground truth accuracy - it just means ability to look accurate to humans.


I agree, that's the problem, but I think it's still somewhat complicated.

Imagine someone posting an extremely well written and insightful postmortem of an outage. It would show advanced and accurate usage of all kinds of tools to get to the bottom of the outage. It would be extremely useful reading for anyone investigating a similar outage, but the outage never actually occurred.

Now you have both ground truth accuracy and misleading fiction at the same time. Whether or not that makes the post useful depends entirely on the conclusions you're drawing from it.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: