People are posting on this very website and commenting on Reddit using AI. I can't get myself into the headspace that would enable this behaviour. What exactly is the point of not engaging in conversation yourself and getting a bot to post it for you on an free platform. Crazy.
I get the sense that people who spend all day interacting with software can start to see every interaction, especially in online text platforms, as a kind of API or user interface. You might learn to instrumentalize your interactions and relationships with people. Chatbots, including coding agents, only reinforce this kind of behavior, as they don't have the kind of limits of patience or of bodily or emotional needs that humans have.
What drives people to cheat at competitive games? I imagine it’s the same genes.
I've seen it used as a newer evolution of trolling on Reddit. A user hops in to a somewhat nuanced discussion and gives a very curt and rude contradiction, and then just uses an LLM to generate walls of argumentative text after you respond with "What are you talking about and why are you being such a dick?"
Very low effort the ensnare someone and waste their time for a bit, even though it is pretty quickly obvious what they are doing.
Attention is all they need. It's ego-tripping, whoring for social status.
Everyone can use the Internet. Some people are just crazy, neurodivergent or whatever.
The HN Guidelines explicitly forbid posting AI-generated comments; they will be deleted if detected or reported.
I'd like them to go further and delete links to AI-generated content, but I haven't been able to persuade management to do that yet.