Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
389 points
4 hours ago
| 32 comments
| HN
Should HN add the ability to flag articles as AI-generated? This doesn't have to act as a regular flag, i.e., it won't de-rank the article; it could just show up as an indicator, allowing others (like myself) who don't like reading AI-generated text, to skip it.

Open questions:

1. Why is the regular voting system not enough?

2. Should HN change in response to the gen AI era? It has been successful not changing fundamentals.

dang
3 hours ago
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We don't allow genai text on HN itself - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079. How to enforce it is a separate question, of course, but the rule exists.

We don't have a similar rule yet about article content but my sense is that the community mostly doesn't want to read it—or, to put it more conservatively, discounts it. This is why we see so many "just show me the prompt" responses, along with others like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/genai-pushback. I built that list so I have something to send to users who email about why their genai articles got flagged.

It's a fascinating arms race right now: the AIs are training on the humans but the human hivemind is also training on the AIs. Readers are developing allergic sensitivities to language that sounds like an LLM produced it. The AIs will adapt to this, but the humans will adapt in turn. Where it ends up is anyone's guess. I have an optimistic view, but I've already been wrong about this so many times that I have low confidence in it.

The current picture is that there is an emerging class distinction between writing (and writers) that use genai vs. writing that does not. As soon as the "this sounds like an LLM" allergy kicks in, the writing instantly gets relegated to a low-status bucket in the reader's mind. That doesn't mean it won't still get looked at - but it is now under a stigma.

(I was rather pleased with the originality of this until I remembered pg had come up with "writes and write-nots" in https://paulgraham.com/writes.html. Oh well, it's the point that matters.)

This has the happy flipside that anyone who would like readers to classify their article as high-status rather than low-status can apply the judo move of simply writing it themselves.

Now I need to add the disclaimer that none of this is a dismissal of LLM technology per se. We rely on it heavily, and there's no question that it's useful. The question is how to use it (pg again: https://x.com/paulg/status/2058871512451412457) and whether one should use it on writing that one publishes to other humans.

To turn to OP's questions:

> Should HN add the ability to flag articles as AI-generated? [...] it could just show up as an indicator

Flagging-as-just-an-indicator would be tagging, which we've always resisted adding to HN, but I wouldn't rule it out.

What I do think we'll (finally) add is a "please give a reason why you flagged this post" step, and "because I think it's genai" will be one choice among several (spam, offtopic, mean, etc.)

> Why is the regular voting system not enough?

The regular voting system is never enough. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

> Should HN change in response to the gen AI era?

To this I am tempted to reply with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48887149 in an homage to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742902.

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Springtime
3 minutes ago
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> The current picture is that there is an emerging class distinction between writing (and writers) that use genai vs. writing that does not. As soon as the "this sounds like an LLM" allergy kicks in, the writing instantly gets relegated to a low-status bucket in the reader's mind.

It's not a purity test, it's as the author is communicating they don't care whether the reader has any signals of what is accurate vs inaccurate information, which puts the burden of investigating how much is accurate on the reader when there's some minimum expectation that should be an author's role.

When people complain here it's more often than not when an article has no disclaimer about AI use or what has been human-reviewed, so the burden again falls on the reader who is now even more skeptical. That is more to ask of a reader than when it's coming from say a known expert and the reader is receptive to engage and learn.

That's the reason tired cliches and turns of phrase (overused by LLMs) have become a heuristic for whether to pay attention, because it's a sign that there's some unknown quantity of of the article that hasn't had human review and it's easier to put in the bucket of 'maybe worthwhile but would need a fully human analysis of this' or just outright rejection (as we've seen from comments).

Edit: I see a sibling comment has raised the same observation.

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grayclhn
19 minutes ago
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I think classifying it as an allergy or a status thing is a little too glib. I’ve read and reviewed, conservatively, hundreds of AI generated documents for work, and “written”/commissioned a bunch too. My biggest issue is that it’s impossible to engage with and give feedback on an AI written document, because it’s impossible to know whether misconceptions or gaps are because the author doesn’t understand the material deeply enough or the author does but the AI doesn’t and the author’s not proofreading carefully enough. Or if a surprising idea is raised — is it the authors insight, can they elaborate on it, where did it come from, etc?

Hackernews isn’t work, obviously, but “it’s impossible to engage deeper with the material because the author doesn’t really exist” is sort of a problem for a discussion site. If the human coauthor puts in enough work, they can make sure the doc really reflects their views and their understanding, but in my experience that’s much less common.

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dang
13 minutes ago
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That's interesting, thank you! My only pushback is that my bit about "allergy" and "status" is about the audience response here, whereas you seem to be talking on a somewhat different level.
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bhaney
1 hour ago
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> What I do think we'll (finally) add is a "please give a reason why you flagged this post" step, and "because I think it's genai" will be one choice among several

Does that mean that an article being AI-generated is a flaggable offense? Should we be flagging suspected AI-generated articles already, or should we wait for the flagging system to support reasons first?

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dang
1 hour ago
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Damn you people for asking good questions that go straight to the fuzzy areas!

I don't know for sure yet. But you're right that that would follow from what I said.

What I do know is that users should flag articles that they think don't belong on HN. But this should rely on their reading of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not just be based on a like/dislike reaction. That is, users should flag articles that they think break the site guidelines, not just ones they dislike.

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sph
1 hour ago
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I have been discouraging people from flagging ‘articles that they think don't belong on HN’, because you have disabled my ability to do so time and time again. In private conversation with you, you have confirmed that if I flag/vouch stuff you mods don’t agree with, I get the privilege taken away, even if I genuinely believe a post to fall outside of the guidelines.

So either I read your mind, or it is best not to flag unless something is obviously, unequivocally, running afoul of the guidelines.

I keep being annoyed at how arbitrary, and dare I say hypocritical, the entire flagging mechanism and its surrounding politics are.

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dang
1 hour ago
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> In private conversation with you, you have confirmed that if I flag/vouch stuff you mods don’t agree with, I get the privilege taken away, even if I genuinely believe a post to fall outside of the guidelines.

People love to make vague claims like this based on things we supposedly said. How about you quote what exactly what I literally said so readers can make up their own minds?

Sorry if that is testy (well, it is testy), but I can't count the number of times that disgruntled users have posted falsely to HN threads to vent their residual frustrations with the mods.

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sph
49 minutes ago
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Sure, quoting select passages over multiple emails with you personally.

> I'm afraid we took vouching privileges away from your account because you vouched for too many comments that were unsubstantive and/or flamebait and/or otherwise broke the site guidelines

> If you want to build up a track record for a while of vouching for good comments only, and then email so we can look at the recent vouches

Wondering how does one tell what is ‘good’ in your mind:

> Btw if you're unsure about a case you can always check with us about it. I know the borderline cases are not always easy to call.

—-

In other words, do as dang himself would do, or get penalised. I am not in the business of mind reading.

This was years ago. I am pretty sure lately I have been flagging/vouching stuff I genuinely believe were OK, though you have all the data in front to smite me with “ah, but on this day you vouched this bad comment! Gotcha!” so in the end it’s always a losing battle.

In any case, my issue is with you saying, I quote, ”users should flag articles that they think don't belong on HN”. Emphasis mine. No. It is more nuanced than that.

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dang
8 minutes ago
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Kudos to you for responding in kind!

I can see how using the word "good" was confusing, but I just meant the opposite of "comments that were unsubstantive and/or flamebait and/or otherwise broke the site guidelines". It just boils down to: what fits the guidelines or not.

> Wondering how does one tell what is ‘good’ in your mind

Since you can't read my mind (at least I assume you can't, and if you could you wouldn't have this question), that's not doable. What you can do is assess things according to your own reading of the site guidelines. If you assimilate https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and evaluate comments based on that and not just on what you like/dislike, then I imagine you won't end up too far from where the mods are, because that's what we're also trying to do.

Moderators might still override that but that's not because we need people to agree with what we like or dislike - it's just because our job is to

[editing - bear with me...]

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IanCal
4 minutes ago
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How were you penalised? Was it just losing the ability to flag?

If however you see things isn’t lining up well with how they want things flagged, it makes sense to remove that from you. Unless there’s more punishment attached this seems very sensible regardless of how genuinely you believe in things.

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bellowsgulch
1 hour ago
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Dan likes some people and you ain't in the group, buddy.
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dang
1 hour ago
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I like people who follow the site guidelines and want to use HN as intended. That doesn't mean I dislike people who don't, but that side of the moon is more...nuanced.
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Barbing
21 minutes ago
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He has no idea who I am.

Privately, when I was new he was polite and helpful. (Tried to be polite, was returned.)

/singular anecdote for reader reference

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haunter
31 minutes ago
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> users should flag articles that they think break the site guidelines

I'm more and more think that link actually hurts the site more than helps. It's a gotcha against everything, can be used a sword and a shield too.

See the part about politics. There is more and more US domestic politics post here (which I actually flag all the time) yet when the topic comes up people will say: "should hackers turn their back on when the world burns" So basically everything goes as long as it fits the narrative.

And the worst offender imo is the last part about reddit. Because I do _really agree_ that HN is more and more like reddit, if not already is. This very post with the comments where everyone is asking for a downvote button is a perfect example of that.

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causality0
42 minutes ago
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What I do know is that users should flag articles that they think don't belong on HN

If this is true then this statement should be added to the guidelines. Many a time I've seen a submission and thought "My god, this is the most moronic thing I've ever read in my life, nearly every single factual claim in this is wrong" but I don't flag it because "don't post utter drivel" is not in the guidelines.

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bellowsgulch
1 hour ago
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Generally speaking, HN seems to have more of a problem now of people just drive-by downvoting things because they don't like someone's opinion.

I know you hate the supposedly "noob" comment, as you've put it over the years, and as it is written in the guidelines, that HN is or isn't turning into Reddit, but this aspect of HN makes it indistinguishable to me as a long-time reader here whether you accept it from your perspective as a long-time moderator or not.

Because HN moderation allows people to downvote or flag things simply because they don't like something, it will always be like Reddit. There is no distinguishing feature to separate it otherwise.

One thing that would, would be forcing users to say why they downvoted or flagged something.

Edit: If you spend years saying "no, no, it isn't true" to people, you're just sticking your fingers in your ears. Where there's smoke, there's fire.

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DANmode
43 minutes ago
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It’s not necessarily that it isn’t true - the most common problem voters have is that it just isn’t interesting or unique.
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bluefirebrand
36 minutes ago
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Don't you need a certain number of upvotes on your account before you can even use the downvote button? I seem to remember that being a thing, has it changed?

The fact you can't just make an account, log in and start downvoting is already a massive improvement over Reddit

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avaer
3 hours ago
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I hope HN doesn't get into moderating the politics of articles.

I can see a grim future (present?) where "AI generated" turns into a slur, warranted or otherwise, in a world where the difference between human trained to talk like an AI and AI masquerading as human becomes increasingly difficult to discern, and some hidden cabal passes judgement.

That is wholly different from taking a stance on HN being a place for humans to comment on articles.

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matheusmoreira
3 hours ago
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You've accurately described the current state of Lobsters.
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archagon
3 hours ago
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As opposed to wonderful old HN, where about 95% of the front page is now AI, AI-related, or AI-generated.
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matheusmoreira
3 hours ago
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There's significant overlap between the front pages of HN and Lobsters. Almost every time I try to submit the interesting articles I see on Lobsters here, I just get redirected to the existing discussion thread.

The massive 1000+ comments/upvotes AI model release threads only show up on HN. Lobsters doesn't accept "business" articles like that. You're quite likely to find reactionary articles that are critical of AI on the front page though. There are several on the front page right now, in addition to the ones derisively tagged vibecoding.

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mmastrac
2 hours ago
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There's a bot user that seems to crosspost every lobsters story here if it isn't already.
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dang
2 hours ago
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That's a high exaggeration of course, but in the wonderful old HN tradition of perceiving the site as dominated by $badness, where everyone has their own perception of $badness.

I'm not picking on you - it's practically a universal response, so much so that it must be driven by human hard-wiring. I've written about this so many times that for once I don't even know what to link to. Perhaps https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098. Or maybe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48427800

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mh-
4 minutes ago
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(Apologies if you've commented on the following already, but I've not seen it.)

The most concerning growing trend I see is comments that don't violate any guidelines, but are flagged to dead.

I'm not talking about posters that are shadowbanned, but about comments that engaged thoughtfully on a topic but the rest of the thread disagreed emphatically with.

I also don't even mean controversial takes on hot-button issues like vaccines.

Just plain old bucking the trend in a thread about AI, transit, housing, layoffs, etc.

I've been browsing with showdead on for as long as I can remember, and I'm seeing this accelerate. Comments from folks both you and I respect as high quality contributors here.

I don't know what the solution is, but it discourages me (and I'm sure others) from having the kind of thought-provoking dialog I've gotten used to reading here for the last 15 years.

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grahamburger
2 hours ago
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And the remainder is people complaining about all the AI
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dang
2 hours ago
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You posted your comment while I was editing mine so this conversation is in an indeterminate state! (Not a criticism - I take forever to edit these things sometimes.)

For example, I think you said "the politics of articles" before I added the thing about a "class distinction". Intriguing overlap!

I don't quite follow what you mean about grim future but if you wouldn't mind reading the edited version of my post, I can respond to anything that isn't addressed there.

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sph
1 hour ago
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Honest question, why would it be a grim future for people to be allergic to what, in 99% of the cases, is effortless slop?

Personally that is the future I hope to see. Hence my continuous protestations at the lazy excuses for articles that get posted these days, and the lazier excuses given by their authors for avoiding using their brain.

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MisterSandman
1 hour ago
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Hacker News is already in the business of policing articles though. This is a curated list of articles that people share, and a lot of unrelated articles are automatically deleted or just downvoted out of existence. This isnt Reddit.

It’s okay to have an opinionated website. Not every corner of the internet needs to be a bastion of free speech

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satisfice
2 hours ago
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“AI generated” is already a slur.
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dang
2 hours ago
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It's sometimes used that way, sometimes a fact, and sometimes both. It's all unclear because we're still in the early stages of this working itself out.
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minimaxir
2 hours ago
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And then there's clanker (which has fortunately tapered off a bit): https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
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dang
1 hour ago
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This is a nested-enough subthread that I can say whatever I want because no one will ever link to it because if they do no one will care.

The class of comments you're talking about—not just ones that say "clanker" literally but the more general category—is particle-wave undecidable right now.

If the commenter is right—i.e. if the commenter they are castigating actually did post LLM-generated text—then it's a community immune system response.

If the commenter is wrong—i.e. they are castigating a sincere human and hauling them to court on false charges—then it's the kind of attack that we tell people not to post here.

They can't know for sure whether what they're saying is true or false, and we can't know for sure whether (at a moderation level) it's good or bad for HN. Both questions depend on information that is unavailable. This is what I mean when I say that the whole question is in a chaotic state right now, and it's too soon to know which way it will stabilize.

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not-a-llm
31 minutes ago
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and then some articles will have maybe a small section, 10% of it, LLM generated. And the it really is a superposition of LLM/human written, and flaggable/unflaggable
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bluefirebrand
27 minutes ago
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I don't envy the position you're in.

I think the decision to ban AI submissions is a good one, but ultimately it's going to create this conflict for some time, maybe a really long time until things stabilize around AI in the broader culture

I hope eventually AI usage does become a taboo, at least in some fields. Creative fields should be for creative humans, not people who can't even publish an article without the help of an LLM

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minimaxir
1 hour ago
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That's a fair response.
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asdff
3 hours ago
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Why would humans ever be trained to talk like an AI? If they are working in some capacity where there is strong incentive to write llm-slop adjacent content, might as well use the llm slop generator.
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Barbing
2 hours ago
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  "You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with."
Now if one’s a language model…

(Subconscious training like when we pick up an accent, though eventually folks might automatically code switch - so that’s hopeful.)

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unholiness
1 hour ago
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Are you maybe misunderstanding this point?

> It's a fascinating arms race right now: the AIs are training on the humans but the human hivemind is also training on the AIs. Readers are developing allergic sensitivities to language that sounds like an LLM produced it.

Humans are training to detect AI content. Humans writing more like AIs is an unrelated (and slower) phenomenon.

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minimaxir
2 hours ago
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That's just LinkedIn.
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asdff
2 hours ago
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Scrolling the general feed there makes me want to put a pencil in my eye
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genxy
1 hour ago
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Just detox by heading over to youtube logged out.
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fzeroracer
2 hours ago
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'humans trained to talk like an AI' is just LinkedIn and I would hope that the last thing anyone wants is for HN to become the utter void that is LinkedIn posts.
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abnercoimbre
1 hour ago
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> This has the happy flipside that anyone who would like readers to classify their article as high-status rather than low-status can apply the judo move of simply writing it themselves.

I really really hope more people take up pen and paper! My last blog post [0] came with proof-of-work attached.

[0] https://abner.page/post/are-we-harold-bloom/

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bluefirebrand
24 minutes ago
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I was just thinking about this, the proof of work angle. Maybe written blogs need to come with recordings of the process now too, otherwise they will be suspicious.

What a goofy situation to imagine. I hope we can figure out a way though. I personally have no interest in reading anything spat out by an LLM, so if anything can be used to prove that an author wrote something themselves, I'm interested

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bigcityslider
1 hour ago
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If AI-generated comments are disallowed, why are AI-generated articles allowed? Seems like they have the same issues.
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philipswood
54 minutes ago
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I can live with well-composed articles that have a huge chunk of AI in their generation.

Stuff interesting enough to get upvoted (i.e. not slop), but I'm so irritated and triggered by pointless, human, comment threads moaning about "this is AI generated".

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brudgers
1 hour ago
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What I do think we'll (finally) add is a "please give a reason why you flagged this post" step

Do you believe adding friction to flagging will reduce the quantity of low quality articles?

Or is the flagging of high quality articles a bigger and more pressing problem?

Or is the problem simply too-many-damn-flags?

Just curious.

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aabhay
2 hours ago
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Community generated tags seems like the obvious solution to all of this. You could easily give a setting to turn them off, breaks no existing systems, and allows for a broad emergent taxonomy. Only surface tags above X community upvotes except to superusers who are allowed to propose tags.

But then again, there’s always reddit :)

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tptacek
2 hours ago
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It breaks a central goal of HN, which is a non-siloed experience where the entire community is exposed to the same feed.
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DaiPlusPlus
2 hours ago
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> is a non-siloed experience where the entire community is exposed to the same feed

Slashdot is still around

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clickety_clack
2 hours ago
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The tricky thing about tags is that we get a tag for genai this year, what about next year’s thing and the year after that? We’d end up with a list of tags attached haphazardly all over the place. Flagging with a box to add a reason sounds like an excellent idea.
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Terr_
2 hours ago
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I dunno, certainly some tags are justified, such as distinguishing submissions which are publicly-readable versus ones which require an account--or worse, payment.

That's not a value-judgement of the true content of an article or piece of media, but a fairly objective facet which impacts the HN participant's experience.

It's kind of like how, back in the day, people really wanted to know the filesize of something before they clicked, to avoid a blind-investment of their dial-up bandwidth for indeterminate minutes of waiting (and opportunity-cost of other things not downloaded) that might be more than they really wanted for whatever-it-was.

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kruffalon
1 hour ago
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This is, IMO, an excellent analogy.

Then it was to protect our modems bandwidth (cost and time) while now it's more about protecting our own cognitive bandwidth.

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1bpp
59 minutes ago
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I would love to see a 'flag as AI' coupled with a profile setting to hide posts that have had a certain number of AI flags. Allow people who don't want to see likely AI content to filter it silently.
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dcow
24 minutes ago
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My only thought is that "good" genai authors/articles will easily get through the filter while "generic" ones will fail. So the outcome won't be all genai articles getting flagged (unless people self-report), just the low quality ones. I'm guessing that's okay and I'm one of those people who discounts genai writing the second I read one of the tells, so the flag would save me time.

Ultimately though this is the same debate as "should we allow genai code in codebases". High quality code lands naturally while slop is slop. Not much value in banning AI outright--the desire is predominantly to ban the slop.

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cr125rider
2 hours ago
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Great response. Thanks for weighing in and all the moderation you do!
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ryukoposting
22 minutes ago
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> This is why we see so many "just show me the prompt" responses, along with others like this

Many are quite a bit more subtle, like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48844062

The more subversive undercurrent is interesting to me. People intentionally fucking with someone's bot, burning tokens for the lulz.

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Barbing
17 minutes ago
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If someone were so dumb they didn’t understand the method used in the link… mind explaining?
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slg
36 minutes ago
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>This is why we see so many "just show me the prompt" responses, along with others like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/genai-pushback.

This is totally tangential to your point, but what is that page? It's not your usual link to an algolia search. Is this already part of some sort of manual tagging system? Clicking on the first one, these comments don't seem to be moderated. Are you using these complaints to help detect AI generated content? I think the existence of that page just leaves me confused on whether you actually want people to comment like this or not.

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152334H
2 hours ago
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lots of things happening in this post

1st: the presumption that AI generated text is actually unsuccessful, rather than proliferating broadly unchallenged today

2nd: the disposition that negative attitudes towards AI text are unjustified discrirmination, rather than working as a strong latent predictor of low-effort content

3rd: the assumption that human writing is reliably doled benefits, rather than some poor proxy of it (winning the social contest for claiming authenticity)

Operationally, only a very small minority of humans actually successfully identify AI generated text at rates ≥ Pangram. People discriminate against the label of "AI", but mostly fail to vote accurately. It's not uncommon to see bots abusing this gap for their own success -- accusing humans, sympathizing with generated profiles... FUD environment where people routinely get away with dismissing true accusations.

For someone who is mediocre at detection, this would structurally feel like an unhinged, unjustified bias: look at all these good posts, these honest people, getting undermined by discrimination...

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dang
2 hours ago
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Interesting points! though I don't follow them all.

> 1st: the presumption that AI generated text is actually unsuccessful, rather than proliferating broadly unchallenged today

I can only talk about HN. If you think this is proliferating broadly on HN itself, I'd like to see such links. Assuming it's "broadly", they should be easy to find.

> 2nd: the disposition that negative attitudes towards AI text are unjustified discrirmination, rather than working as a strong latent predictor of low-effort content

I don't understand this bit.

> 3rd: the assumption that human writing is reliably doled benefits, rather than some poor proxy of it (winning the social contest for claiming authenticity)

Sorry, but I don't understand this either.

> only a very small minority of humans actually successfully identify AI generated text at rates ≥ Pangram.

That's not what we seem to be seeing. I do agree that there's a wide spectrum and a lot of wrong guesses.

> It's not uncommon to see bots abusing this gap for their own success

I'd like to see specific links of this on HN itself. If it's not uncommon, they should be easy to find.

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handfuloflight
43 minutes ago
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What about people who genuinely write their own articles but due to their time spent with AI, they are sounding like AI? I know people like this. They really are writing like that now. Shouldn't there be fairness to them?
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tptacek
1 hour ago
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A fixed dropdown list of flag reasons would be a very good change, I think, because it would somewhat counteract strategic flagging of stories as a downvote. I think you'd want to keep the list pretty tight, because it seems like a huge source of meta drama.
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brudgers
59 minutes ago
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The problem with fixed lists is that what is in the spirit of HN evolves.

Single page info-graphics and Awesome-Lists come to mind.

Hell, one or more of PG’s books has one or more baysian generated texts presented as poems.

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bakugo
1 hour ago
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> The AIs will adapt to this

I don't think this is true, at least not right now, and in a way I'm actually thankful for it.

The frantic rush to chase the only potentially profitable use case for LLMs found so far (writing code) and the resulting focus on coding RLHF means models are actively becoming worse at sounding like humans.

This is my favorite example, and it's already relatively outdated: https://progress.openai.com/?prompt=10

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ludicrousdispla
19 minutes ago
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I don't rely on LLMs and I don't find them useful, hence I don't use LLMs and everything about them deserves to be questioned.
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dang
15 minutes ago
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LLMs are unquestionably useful. The number of things I've used them to accomplish on HN—things that I've wanted to do for over a decade—is mind-blowing. Performance optimizations, log file anlaysis, tracking down race conditions—it's quite incredible.
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jorvi
3 hours ago
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The times I've pointed point out pretty blatant AI comments, I get nuked with downvotes. So often that I've stopped pointing them out.

Before you say I'm just falsely calling them out, it's typical ChatGPT style of either very amicable or Nobel Laureate tone, lots of formatting, with a couple of paragraphs and then a clever one-line punchline at the end. If you look at those commenters their history, it's all like that. Either generated or assisted. For older accounts you can see the steep increase of it around 2025ish.

Seems like the HN crowd absolutely adores AI comments and the rule banning them is (sadly) unnecessary. Or at least not what 'the people' want.

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minimaxir
3 hours ago
[-]
Out of curiosity I looked through your post history to find an example of a time you got downvoted for calling out AI comments. The first one I could find was 3 months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47493096), where you got downvoted for calling out an AI comment...to a comment that had zero common signs of AI writing.

The OP then replied:

> Not AI. Not sure how I feel getting my writing style called out like that though :D

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nojs
2 hours ago
[-]
Not OP, but I’ve been nuked with downvotes for this several times too and tend to delete the dead comments. The slop is so prevalent that at this point it’s not a particularly interesting thing to say I think.
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minimaxir
2 hours ago
[-]
HN guidelines are to flag/downvote and move on anyways.
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TimorousBestie
1 hour ago
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And if you flag/downvote AI content (or any other class of content) too consistently, you’ll find your flags and downvotes quickly become ineffective.

So the guidelines are in some sense a red herring.

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jorvi
3 hours ago
[-]
OP wrote in the parent:

".. Fault-tolerant and highly available hardware must facilitate low-latency, single-threaded communication with high semantic density in order to achieve multi-dimensional consensus in a safety-critical, heterogeneous, adversarial environment. .."

I am not sure why you think someone saying "not AI trust me bro" carries any merit.

At any rate, like I said, I've given up the war. People enjoy reading that stuff, I'll just be the old man no longer yelling at the clouds.

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dang
2 hours ago
[-]
Your post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47493096) might also have been downvoted for saying "Be better", which is an internet putdown trope.
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minimaxir
2 hours ago
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Also that.
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kordlessagain
2 hours ago
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Just the idea that something is AI is bothersome to some, and some AI content is genuinely useful and gets thrown out with the bathwater. Not saying all of it is useful, but there are shades of grey, not just black and white.
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minimaxir
2 hours ago
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That isn't related to my comment? My comment is more criticizing accusing something of being AI based on vibes, and likely being wrong about it.
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bluefirebrand
13 minutes ago
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I can't speak for everyone, but I've done a lot of reflecting on this so I have something of an explanation for why I feel this way about AI

I think it's because I'm not optimizing my life to get the correct answer as fast as possible, or to build things as fast as possible.

To me, the most important thing about the internet is connecting with other people. If I ask a question on a forum it's because I want to talk to someone about it, maybe make an acquaintance or even a friend. Otherwise I would of course just ask the AI now. Google has been around for a long time, and could already usually find answers for me. I still would rather discuss with a colleague sometimes than Google every single thing.

Human connection. We need more of it, not less. I think heavy AI use and reliance on AI for thinking, research, communication and building... It's going to isolate people even more

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jdw64
11 minutes ago
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o be honest, I hope you'll also recognize that non-native English speakers have limited vocabulary and phrasing when participating in HN.
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ryandrake
3 hours ago
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IMO posting "This article is AI" does not add anything to the conversation.

The HN guidelines[1] include:

    Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage.
and

    Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken.

I'd argue pointing out that you think an article is AI is very similar in value to pointing out any of the above. None of us like AI slop. But I wouldn't be surprised if, by the end of 2026, 90-95% of articles posted online are AI slop. Pointing it out is useless. As useless as pointing out that the article breaks the scrollbar (which happens often) or that the article is formatted badly or has poor text contrast, or that an article is Chinese propaganda. Probably true, but posting about it adds nothing to the discussion, and is not allowed on HN.

All we really need is to add "Don't complain that an article is AI" to the guidelines.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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lelanthran
3 minutes ago
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> But I wouldn't be surprised if, by the end of 2026, 90-95% of articles posted online are AI slop. Pointing it out is useless.

Actually, when 90%-95% of articles posted online are AI slop, it's even more useful to identify those which aren't.

When the signal/noise ratio is too low, having an indicator of signal is tremendously useful.

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WD-42
38 minutes ago
[-]
But it is useful. I can deal with a broken scrollbar if the content is good, but if an article is AI written I don't want to read the content at all. That's a huge difference.

Nowadays I usually check the comments first for the "This is AI" comment, I've left a few of my own and gotten thank yous in reply.

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asdff
3 hours ago
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Flagged as AI is useful as it would mean I skip the article.
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kordlessagain
2 hours ago
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You could just ask your AI to flag it with an extension, or rewrite it in a style you prefer (or just do a good job summarizing the articles core meaning).
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nvme0n1p1
1 hour ago
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> > I don't want to deal with AI or AI slop

> You should add more AI to your life

I hope you can see how this is not a useful suggestion.

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asdff
1 hour ago
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That would be like driving a v12 down my driveway everytime I want to check the mailbox.
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eclipticplane
52 minutes ago
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But what if your v12 was fueling an entire economy based on miles driven?
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asdff
33 minutes ago
[-]
A real v12, vs hypothetical in my example, actually does in the form of gas consumed. Still, doesn't mean it is a good excuse to justify the waste in energy and materials, all to achieve what I already can do. It would be nice to throw that compute towards stuff like curing disease or towards something that might stave off climate change, instead of using it to turn bullet points into an article and me turning that article back into bullet points.
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tayo42
2 hours ago
[-]
I don't think I agree with that. Complaining about AI written articles is more about the quality of the writing. it's on par with a piece of writing that wasn't proof read, well researched or some stream of consciousness rant.

I think the criticism also signals to the submitter or idk co-author? That the article isn't valued

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archagon
3 hours ago
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I am exclusively interested in the remaining 5% that is not AI slop, so yes, I always want to see that information.
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Ferret7446
3 hours ago
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Agreed, I find comments whining about AI slop to be far less valuable than the supposed AI slop, and I wonder if the commenters are aware of the irony, or perhaps those comments are also AI slop themselves.
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IgorPartola
3 hours ago
[-]
Nobody wants to label their stuff as AI generated because they removed credibility. Communities can flag posts as AI generated based on speculation and telltales but it won’t be 100% and will take extra work.

I think the era of the blog is simply dead now and that’s mostly ok. Blogspam and corporate blogs had killed quality bogs ages ago even before AI was a thing. The real question is what replaces it.

Oh and of course the $64k question is this: if an AI generated article is indistinguishable from a human written article and it is accurate and interesting, do you care who wrote it? We want to avoid low quality, not AI generation, right?

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Sateeshm
2 minutes ago
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> I think the era of the blog is simply dead now

The era of people caring about knowledge/learning seems to be dead. At least in the way we used to, because a lot of what we needed that for can now be done by the LLMs.

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asdff
2 hours ago
[-]
Put it this way, if the ai article is indeed so good, why store the article in a dusty long form output mode from a soon to be obsolete model? Just give us the prompt, and in 6 months with some newer, bigger, better model, we can feed that prompt and get an even better article out of it.
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maxaw
2 hours ago
[-]
to play devils advocate - i doubt the articles that end up on the front page are one shotted (theres probably a sequence of back and forward refinement). and in any case, i feel the avg reader would actually not prefer to read the prompt, which would be very information dense

having said that, i'd still much prefer a norm of including prompt history with the article, or the codebase for that matter, so people can choose for themselves :)

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archagon
3 hours ago
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Pretty trivial for a writer to say “no AI used on this blog.”
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minimaxir
2 hours ago
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And what's stopping a AI-written article from also doing that?
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archagon
2 hours ago
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Reputation. If it’s not a one-off, they will eventually get discovered and lose their audience.
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satisfice
2 hours ago
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If counterfeit or stolen cash is indistinguishable from real or honest cash, should you accept it? Should you spend it? No. Why? Because doing so erodes and potentially destroys society.

Whether you agree that a con artist is only a criminal if he gets caught, or you think he’s a criminal the whole time, surely you can see why many people might want to know if they are dealing with a friend and not something simulating a friend.

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not-a-llm
13 minutes ago
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bullshitting has never been a crime

if it were, 90% of startups would be illegal and they founders jailable

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otterley
8 minutes ago
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Fraud is a crime, but admittedly, not all bullshitting is fraud.
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fuckaiwriter
3 hours ago
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No I actually want to avoid AI generated content even when it is gold. I don’t want it. I dislike it. I hate it. Fuck AI.
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simonreiff
2 hours ago
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Why don't you say how you really feel instead of being so wishy-washy?
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el_io
7 minutes ago
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They are pretty clear about how they feel.
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Retr0id
4 hours ago
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Regarding 1, I think a) a sizeable fraction of voters are not able to recognize AI-generated text b) many who notice don't care, or are willing to overlook it if the premise is interesting enough. (The latter is true for me, on occasion)

Maybe we need a two-dimensional voting system: good/bad, ai/human. I think the second axis could cut down on meta-discussions over how much of the article was AI-generated.

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DaiPlusPlus
4 hours ago
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> many who notice don't care, or are willing to overlook it if the premise is interesting enough

I imagine the set of articles that are somehow both interesting-enough-to-read but not interesting-enough-to-write is smaller than you'd think.

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Retr0id
4 hours ago
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In most cases the bar is not "is it worth reading" but "is it worth discussing"
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asdff
3 hours ago
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Why even go to this site then? If it is all llm posts and llm comments, just prompt claude to make you a self hosted truman show esque forum to do your venting and what have you’s with the llm fodder.
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andrewmutz
3 hours ago
[-]
Why do we need anything more than good/bad?

If there is a great post on a topic and the author used AI when generating it, what’s so bad about that?

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Retr0id
3 hours ago
[-]
Different people weight the slop factor differently, which is the main source of pain at the moment. (For example, another top-level comment in this thread suggests banning AI-generated content outright)
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andrewmutz
3 hours ago
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What’s different between “slop” and “bad”
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Retr0id
3 hours ago
[-]
Take any existing article you find insightful and then ask an LLM to "rewrite it, but make better and more engaging". The result is likely "good + slop", assuming the actual content is preserved.
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ryandrake
3 hours ago
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If what people here say is right, and AI usage online is growing and accelerating, then by the end of the year, the vast, vast majority articles posted to the internet (and linked by HN readers) are going to be AI slop, at which point it is not going to matter. "This article is AI" is going to add about as much insight to the conversation as "The author used a spell checker."
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archagon
3 hours ago
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A good link aggregator should strive to select the <1% of articles that are actually high quality. Who cares what “everyone” is doing?
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pixl97
2 hours ago
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Isn't that what the vote system is? If the users are selecting low quality then what exactly?
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sph
1 hour ago
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Then we are fucked. A quality platform must strive for more quality than what the average lurker, likely a bot, decides is worth reading. That’s how you get modern Reddit.

Is the goal of this site to remain high-quality, or to rely on random, anonymous users to discern quality? Consider the possibility that the two options might be incompatible.

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hallman76
3 hours ago
[-]
> a) a sizeable fraction of voters are not able to recognize AI-generated text b) many who notice don't care, or are willing to overlook it if the premise is interesting enough.

agreed.

For me, the issue I have is that a vocal group seems to despise AI-edited content and they can't manage to take their disgust eleswhere.

AI-editing is another tool, just like spellcheck.

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minimaxir
3 hours ago
[-]
This is something that works better on paper in practice. Namely, there are a hell of a lot of false positives of AI use which frequently causes shitstorms on social media where someone says "AI?" in bad faith and now the OP has to defend themselves and in the case of writing a blog post there aren't as concrete ways to defend yourself. (no, demanding the edit history of the post is not reasonable)

Hacker News adopting such a feature would likely do more harm than good.

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Joel_Mckay
3 hours ago
[-]
uBlock Origin users already filter a large portion of "AI" slop sites. Saves a lot of time when searching for something specific. =3

https://github.com/alvi-se/ai-ublock-blacklist

https://github.com/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist

https://github.com/Stevoisiak/Stevos-AI-Blocklist/

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minimaxir
3 hours ago
[-]
Just from looking at the sites in the BlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist blocklist, it blocks anything tangent to AI such as Hugging Face and other model developers like Mistral/Z.ai, not sites that actually post AI slop.

That's a good example of the exact problem with such a broad stroke rule.

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Joel_Mckay
3 hours ago
[-]
In general, each blacklist targets a different facet of slop content farm structures. Some LLM use-cases like search are legitimate, but most traffic volume is spam/slop related.

Depends on your use-case, but most people don't need content used in network nuisances like YC AstroTurf posts. =3

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minimaxir
3 hours ago
[-]
Being carelessly overzealous with flags/blocking is a reliable way to kill a community by making it overly toxic, speaking from experience.
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Joel_Mckay
2 hours ago
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I am skeptical YC frequency of "AI" related content is representative of actual users interest. Yet I agree there are a lot of cultural differences in this world that don't often translate well for some users. Some folks will assume because they disagree about some subject, that it is some sort of personal slight.

Even scoring posts does provably change peoples behavior, and studies showed it tended to make people more punitive in their conduct with strangers.

At bare minimum, YC should have bot CAPTCHA protection on posts. As unleashing chat bots on users is often disrespectful, and just cows people out of participating in conversations in good faith. =3

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minimaxir
2 hours ago
[-]
> I am skeptical YC frequency of "AI" related content is representative of actual users interest.

Are you implying the front page is botted/manipulated?

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Joel_Mckay
1 hour ago
[-]
Not sure why it has gravitated to a narrow scope subject, but compared to the diverse interests most technical people had in the past. LLM weights now seems like an oddly over-represented topic even when its unrelated to actual use-cases.

Throwing up a bot challenge would probably improve signal-to-noise ratios, but who knows for sure. =3

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dawnerd
4 hours ago
[-]
Considering YC invests in AI I doubt you’ll get anything of the sort. Too many people here also think you just have to give in and accept (abuser mentality IMO).
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dang
3 hours ago
[-]
I'd be curious if you'd read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48887149 and let me know (once I've finished editing the damn thing) how this changes, or doesn't change, your response.
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dawnerd
57 minutes ago
[-]
I think that is really reasonable. I’ve always felt weird with flagging too because there’s no reason attached. Even if it’s not displayed in the UI, it would be nice to have something in the html if a link gets enough flags for ai. Would let people css filter them out.
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TimorousBestie
1 hour ago
[-]
It didn’t change my opinion, which matches OP’s.
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xdennis
3 hours ago
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> Considering YC invests in AI I doubt you’ll get anything of the sort.

Conspiracy minded responses are low value, and yours is especially so considering HN bans AI comments.

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rsoto2
1 hour ago
[-]
Investors want to see their investment grow. What is the conspiracy? HN also hosted a likely war criminal to talk about his experiencing killing children in gaza. You think these people have morals or ideals?
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browski
3 hours ago
[-]
Programmers have benefited greatly from asymmetrical power structure before AI

"Submit to my knowledge or else!" is abusive.

People can drive a car without needing an expert copilot. Why should they need a software engineer to use a computer?

Spare the appeals to history as the historical record would show software engineers have unemployed many others. Technology moves on; rotary phone makers and travel agents have a seat for in their support group.

Your self selection and vanity could not be more obvious.

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lkt
3 hours ago
[-]
I don't think that's a very good comparison. People can drive a car without an expert but they can't build a car. People can use software without being an expert but still require an expert to build software.

AI could provided assistance with building both cars and software, but you still need a decent level of knowledge in either field to get a good result.

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defrost
3 hours ago
[-]
> People can drive a car without an expert

Not every person can drive a car.

> but they can't build a car.

Not every person is unable to build a car.

Eg: my father, born 1935, still alive, has built double axle trailers, cars and vehicles that work, medical caravans for St Johns Ambulance, ...

His education was six years of primary school and these were all "side projects" for himself or for his community.

> you still need a decent level of knowledge in either field

and the barrier to picking up sufficient knowledge to safely create software, cars, even ground effect flying boats isn't that high for normal human beings .. although it does require a certain can do attitude.

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browski
1 hour ago
[-]
Programmers do not build a computer. EEs and computer engineers do that.

They are driving (lol) towards the sale of a computer with a model on chip without a programmer salary and benefits adding to cost and resource use (all the tools of the trade need to be stored and copied around).

This is capitalism, not honorific obligationism! Saving your job is no one else's burden! Disrupt! (YC crowd 15 years ago). Oh how the turn tables.

Move the context of the code to the presentation layer and eliminate state by keeping the hardware focused on computing geometric transforms. Biggidy bam label the data on the display and save both geometry and labels

There's no reason for biz logic context to exist in code.

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asdff
2 hours ago
[-]
Anyone could be a programmer before ai too.
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browski
1 hour ago
[-]
Fwiw I find social media scores corny

Just stokes addiction to a false sense of empowerment and social contribution

Downvote away to hide from ideas and opinions you don't like.

Conservative people are the only people so dysregulated by ideas they don't understand or that do not validate prior experience and embedded biases they just try to hide them from view. Not the kind of people whose judgment I concern myself with in any meaningful way

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SilverSlash
1 hour ago
[-]
> Fwiw I find social media scores corny

I agree. We've had large and thriving online forums for at least a decade before upvote systems became ubiquitous and things were just fine.

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rsoto2
53 minutes ago
[-]
"anybody that doesn't agree with me is a cave-dwelling conservative"

yeah keep chatting with the sycophantic psychosis-inducing LLM chatbot, I think you'll have a better time.

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rsoto2
1 hour ago
[-]
"i'm 14 and this is deep"

LLMs are mass theft of intellectual property. I didn't need them to "drive" this computer for the last ten years.

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nunez
34 minutes ago
[-]
I asked for this a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48296731

I'm glad the idea is picking up steam.

IMO, the post title should get "[AI Generated]" at the end if enough people flag the content as AI.

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rddbs
1 hour ago
[-]
I care more about hiding AI related articles than I do about AI-authored content in articles. Feels like most of the content on HN is now AI related and it’s just exhausting. Anyone have a way they’re correcting this balance of content, like a browser extension maybe?
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DevKoala
22 minutes ago
[-]
Only care that an article is informative, grounded in facts, unbiased, etc. How it was composed doesn’t matter to me.
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lazyasciiart
1 hour ago
[-]
What about a title marker similar to [1997]? It’s content that people may or may not be interested in but will react differently if they know this about it’s origin.
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sph
59 minutes ago
[-]
Probably one of the best solutions I have heard. Just add [AI] at the end. Though it should probably be [SLOP] as the term AI has legitimate uses.
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jaredcwhite
4 hours ago
[-]
I'm of the deepest conviction AI-generated text should not show up at all. Proving that however can be difficult (obvious LLM tells aside). Requiring evidence of authentic human authorship is also difficult, though increasingly I lean towards communities where that is a given for any legitimate shares.
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ldoughty
3 hours ago
[-]
What qualifies as AI generated? If a human writes it then has AI improve/fix it, does that count?

How do you tell which is the case?

If we don't allow AI help at all, is that perhaps discriminating against those who don't feel comfortable posting with imperfect English?

I agree in principle, but am concerned in implementation... I'm not sure we can be fair without high risk of discrimination

Edit: typo fix

Edit: or am I AI?! And making edits looks more legit.... (To be clear: I'm not, I play by rules)

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fuckaiwriter
3 hours ago
[-]
Tell them to post in imperfect English. It is much better than AI elephant turd garbage
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minimaxir
2 hours ago
[-]
AI written comments have been more constructive than what you have been commenting thus far in this post.
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stackghost
4 hours ago
[-]
>increasingly I lean towards communities where that is a given for any legitimate shares.

I have a hard time finding these communities

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dawnerd
3 hours ago
[-]
Mastodon, but the hard part is discovery for sure.
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luciana1u
21 minutes ago
[-]
the flag should have a third option: 'human-written but I wish an AI had stopped them'
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nickandbro
3 hours ago
[-]
Even if you did, how would you even enforce it? Say it was a pure text article, do you count the number of em dashes? Even AI detection scanners purpose built for this are extremely faulty.
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mattas
3 hours ago
[-]
Might be more appropriate to add a "not AI" flag at this point.
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jvwww
2 hours ago
[-]
Personally I just use Pangram's chrome extension, which is amazing for spotting AI generated text.
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CqtGLRGcukpy
4 hours ago
[-]
A problem I see is that what someone may consider to be AI-generated actually isn't. And the AI checkers aren't reliable enough to definitely enough say something is AI-generated.
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esjeon
3 hours ago
[-]
Yup, and calling out a human-written article as AI-generated would be a serious insult. AI-flagging would incur bigger damage to the community than just having AI-generated contents around.
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bakugo
3 hours ago
[-]
If something like this was implemented, the benefit of the doubt would have to be given in ambiguous cases, but I don't think it's that hard to tell most of the time.

The latest codemaxxed models all tend to write in very distinct, instantly recognizable ways unless carefully instructed otherwise (honestly a good thing if you want to avoid wasting time reading AI text). A great example is this submission that's currently #1 on the front page (which is also just a thinly veiled advertisement): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48884853

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edoceo
4 hours ago
[-]
Maybe just adding down-vote to submissions would do?
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jagged-chisel
4 hours ago
[-]
We have “flag”
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bakugo
4 hours ago
[-]
As far as I understand, "flagging" is intended for things that break the guidelines. AI-generated content is explicitly banned, but only in comments, not submissions.

I think it would be great if AI-generated submissions were outright banned as they fundamentally break the balance of effort that HN was built upon, but as was already stated by another user, YC is heavily invested in AI so there's a conflict of interest there.

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al_borland
3 hours ago
[-]
Not posting for self promotion is in the guidelines. I have to assume anyone pushing out AI articles is primarily looking for traffic and self promotion, as they didn’t care enough about the topic to write their own opinion.
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minimaxir
3 hours ago
[-]
Self promotion isn't banned, otherwise Show HNs wouldn't exist. The exact guideline, emphasis mine:

> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.

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add-sub-mul-div
3 hours ago
[-]
Do the guidelines even matter if they're not enforced? This place is drowning in AI shovelware submissions from accounts that are only used for self promotion.
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JimsonYang
4 hours ago
[-]
Hn rarely allows people to downvote,only after you become an active member for many years

And im sure this was designed in order to encourage positive discussion

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jagged-chisel
4 hours ago
[-]
There is no longer a downvote on submissions.
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JimsonYang
4 hours ago
[-]
Do you know the reason? Allowing down voting on comments but not on submissions?
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al_borland
3 hours ago
[-]
This could be a false memory, but I think it’s the idea that the submission downvotes should be reserved for things that break the rules, and in that case, the post should be flagged instead.
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what
56 minutes ago
[-]
Shouldn’t that be the case for comments too then?
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ranger_danger
3 hours ago
[-]
As for the ability to downvote comments, my understanding is that the only requirement is having at least 500 karma.
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xeyownt
40 minutes ago
[-]
I find the proposal ridicule.

Would you skip articles because it's written with a text processor? You need to have it written bit by bit by fusing it directly in memory?

AI / LLM is the new word editor. Get over it.

What I find really annoying is all the comments that pretend to see / detect AI slop... with lot of false positives.

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lpribis
25 minutes ago
[-]
False equivalence, text processor leaves the authors intention completely in tact and is deterministically controlled completely by the author. Not true for gen ai
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jeremyjh
3 hours ago
[-]
The regular voting system is not enough because posts can't be downvoted and for some reason many people are not bothered by the notion of reading something no one bothered to write.

The issue is complicated by the fact that there can be substantial effort invested in a process outside of the writing itself - and so AI written does not guarantee that the content will not valuable. But I'm inclined to punish it anyway to establish a norm of valuing genuine human communication. I think this norm has always been present but we didn't know until we'd really explored the alternatives.

I spend a LOT of time reading AI generated content because I use AI a lot for various purposes - maybe I'm more sensitive to its voice than some. AI voice always bothers me and its been getting more annoying the more I notice it, but there is a huge difference in reading responses to my own prompts and in reading the response to a prompt I haven't seen, when I don't know how many revisions there were, when I don't know if a human mind reviewed it at all before clicking send.

It becomes an unacceptable distraction because I don't know if I'm investing more time in the content than the author did, when in normal written communication the author would be putting in at least 5x the work.

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visarga
3 hours ago
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I get annoyed when I see AI telltale signs too, but for example in my case I type 10x more than the final piece, is it really AI generated or just reworded? I don't use AI to fix my comments, just when I want to format article size pieces I post on my blog.
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jeremyjh
3 hours ago
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People keep asking this but I don't see how this is even a consideration - it isn't going to have AI voice if AI didn't write it. To some extent humans have picked up some of these tells but part of the writing process involves reading your own work, noticing things that are awkward, and rewriting them. If you aren't investing in the writing process even that much, I don't really want to read it anyway.

My entire position: I'm not interested in reading text that sounds like it was written by AI.

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simonreiff
4 hours ago
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The recent rule addition to the Guidelines says this: "Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans." And I think that covers comments, but I'd be happy to see it also cover articles that are blatantly and primarily if not exclusively AI-generated. But how much AI is permitted? For instance: I'm writing a blog post now. It's all mine. If I include an AI-generated cartoon at the end, just to illustrate something, but not to be the whole or primary point of the article, is that AI-generated? Would the rule be conservative in nature to the extent that mostly human but clearly also AI-enhanced might get flagged but it's in the discretion of the moderators? How would you propose enforcing as to articles (versus comments which are usually quite obvious and thankfully have pretty much stopped being AI-generated since the rule was implemented, for the most part)?
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matheusmoreira
4 hours ago
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Asking questions like that nearly got me kicked out of Lobsters.
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visarga
3 hours ago
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How about if you did part of your research with AI, then typed the text yourself?
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simonreiff
2 hours ago
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That's a good question. My view is that AI-assisted research is an important and valid use, and getting human-written articles and papers is (I think) the whole point of this thread.

However, a lot of the academic or technical posts on this site have turned out to include AI hallucinations (a problem that is not just on HN, in fairness). If an article or paper contains nonexistent or obviously, blatantly wrong citations, then I feel very strongly that such content is disrespectful to the HN audience, certainly to me, because I've just wasted my time trying to take the author seriously only to discover that the argument was founded on a hallucination. In a sense, it doesn't matter to me whether the hallucination was due to AI or not -- if a person puts in bogus citations, AI-generated or otherwise, my view is that their article or paper fully deserves to be flagged so that we don't waste other people's time.

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smallerfish
3 hours ago
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The voting system could be enough if downvoting was added.

AI writing is not the problem - low effort is the problem. Low effort AI articles are full of tics which are obvious, if you've done a lot of AI writing. To write well with AI you need to spend a good deal of time editing.

If you submit something that's low effort but has a clickbait headline that appeals to HN, you may well make the front page even if the article is lightweight (it does happen!) This is true both for AI and for human written articles.

On the flip side, somebody could spend an enormous amount of effort creating a masterpiece with AI. Penalizing that because of the tool that was used is arbitrary.

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awllau
2 hours ago
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I was thinking the same. A lot of people use AI to refine their writing and make it more concise.

I do think the dead giveaways (em dashes, it's not X it's Y, etc.) are annoying to come across repeatedly. A person not bothering to remove these tells feels 'low effort' to me.

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fuckaiwriter
3 hours ago
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Nope, AI writing itself is the problem for me. I don’t care if it is gold. If it is AI, I don’t want it. Same like kosher or vegetarian labels. Label it.
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awllau
2 hours ago
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The fact that you made a new account to write says it all.
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sjs382
2 hours ago
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It seems like we get a post like this every other day or so...
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matheusmoreira
4 hours ago
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That will only further increase the stigma surrounding LLMs. On Lobsters it actually got to the point where I no longer felt welcome on the site, even though I don't use LLMs to generate articles. The constant "this is AI slop" commentary is noisy and tiresome as well.
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tadfisher
3 hours ago
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Why would you no longer feel welcome?
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matheusmoreira
3 hours ago
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Saw three years worth of my work be classified as "slop" because a few months ago I subscribed to and started using Claude. Had someone describe me as a slop fetishist, as though I was some kind of exhibitionist. Got flagged so much I became the second most flagged user on the site according to their own statistics. Got told to delete my account by the website itself. Got directly told to leave by other users. I think the only reason I didn't is enough people messaged me privately to ask me to stay.

It got to the point I'm sitting on reviewed and tested patches for Mesa that I'm too ashamed to submit because of Claude's participation in their making.

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asdff
2 hours ago
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Sounds like the point is getting across to you a little bit.
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matheusmoreira
2 hours ago
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The prejudice? You bet.
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asdff
1 hour ago
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More that people want to deal with the real you.
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mattoxic
3 hours ago
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There absolutely needs to be stigma surrounding LLM generated work that is masquerading as creativity.

AI slop is AI slop.

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danieltanfh95
1 hour ago
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1. because your belief that AI-generated text is worse than human written text is flat out illogical and wrong.

2. judge content not by its cover and think.

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deadbabe
3 hours ago
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This makes sense if AI articles are bad or low quality, but what if one day, the AI generated content is actually good? As good or even better than what any human creates?

Is it purely just a "human supremacist" desire that fuels the motivation to ban or block such articles?

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fuckaiwriter
3 hours ago
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Yup. Just like vegetarian and kosher and halal. Fuck your meat, I don’t care about how good it is, and fuck your AI, I don’t care how good it is.
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user3939382
3 hours ago
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Great so I can use a CSS rule to hide anything with the flag.
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kgwxd
3 hours ago
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Sounds like a good job for AI. Why should humans have to waste their time on it? Accounts that post any should just get banned and deleted.
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JimsonYang
4 hours ago
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> why is the regular voting system not enough

Voting systems can be gamed and as HN becomes bigger and bigger it'll start to attract unsavory audiences who have an agenda.

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Arubis
4 hours ago
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Setting aside that this is subjective, I think it’s safe to say that from the POV of most of this site’s target audiences, that “start” happened a long time ago. PG’s essay on submarine articles didn’t come out of nowhere, and he hasn’t been active here in…a decade? Ish?
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stackghost
3 hours ago
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My original account dated to 2010 and even then he wasn't very active
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senectus1
3 hours ago
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how are we detecting AI gen text?

Humans? We're not particularly effective at this as a whole...

AI service ? We'd probably have to pay for that AI to detect that AI and well.. Its also not particularly effective

Effectiveness is important, because we dont want real human produced data to be accidentally removed from view, just as much if not more so than having AI gen data being left on the site.

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wxw
3 hours ago
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+1, I would love to stop reading AI slop.
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ranger_danger
4 hours ago
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152334H
3 hours ago
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Most parsimonious explanation IMV: site staff can't see most AI slop. Reasons unimportant, but moderation systems are guaranteed to break down when the moderators themselves have poor classification ability.

A simple beneficial step that would lead to modest improvements and little downside: partner with Pangram. Either adding it as an automated spam filter, or by simply attaching the detection % to all posts.

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feverzsj
2 hours ago
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Just ban anything AI.
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