Thread

ChatGPT now knows what you do on other websites via ad collector

764 points · 395 comments · lmbbuchodi

duhhhhh1212 · 1789937289 · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://www.pangram.com/history/c3ad864f-2a50-4785-a0ef-71f289ec003f?ucc=t8c6BkzVOh8" rel="nofollow">https://www.pangram.com/history/c3ad864f-2a50-4785-a0ef-71f2...
why not use your own words? If you are gonna ai generate this blog, just post the prompts instead.
1. ljm · 1789939436 · focus · HN ↗
  Why would you want n people to compute an AI prompt independently instead of reading the output once? And why would that be better?
  At least criticise the article on merit and not some 'let me google that for you' high horse. If it's slop it's slop, but let the votes speak for that.
  1. xmprt · 1789939954 · focus · HN ↗
    > OpenAI's ad collector at bzr.openai.com sets a cookie called __obi, scoped to .openai.com
    This sentence is way too much detail and it's literally the first thing you read. I can pick apart most of the sentences in the article. Another one:
    > Across 932 decoded sync tokens, 736 carried subject_type: account_user and 196 carried anonymous
    This sentence is pointless. What matters to proving that "It works when you are logged out" is to show that the identifier is stable. Why does the reader care about the actual counts.
    AI has a tendency to do this which makes AI generated text a lot harder to read. The raw prompts likely don't have the specific websites and cookie names because that's not relevant to the reader or writer for that matter - it's a footnote at best.
    ljm · 1789942823 · focus · HN ↗
    I understand this, I just think that 'share the prompt' will never get a result. Either the prompt is total dogshit or you learn that it was written in a certain way to create a narrative. That's information the author will never reveal.
    Like I say, slop is slop. It's easy to detect. This post and the OP's actual website is basically just a few AI blog posts. I would just treat it as spam and disengage.
  2. scared_together · 1789940517 · focus · HN ↗
    Not everyone would actually send the prompt to an LLM. Some would have the opportunity to see the prompt as its own artifact, devoid of LLM-generated “hallucinations”.
    > let the votes speak for that.
    The comment you are replying to got a fair number of votes too… Having somebody run a Pangram check saves n people the trouble of doing the same.
    ljm · 1789943152 · focus · HN ↗
    I said this in another comment, but an AI blog author is never going to reveal their 'source' that way. Mostly because it'd be a rubbish prompt or one that is loaded with a predetermined conclusion.
    I think you have to take the output as read and decide accordingly. If it looks like low effort AI writing then it's not much better than spam.
    I think the the top-voted post being all about the provenance of the article says something about where HN's voting mentality lies - we are not prioritising the substance of the post but how it was produced.

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