Personally I just use Pangram's chrome extension, which is amazing for spotting AI generated text.
Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
111–120 of 500 posts
Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 thin…
Sounds like the point is getting across to you a little bit.
The prejudice? You bet.
Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
#113Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
#114We 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 s…
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 hu…
'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.
Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
#115We 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 s…
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.
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.
Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 :)
It breaks a central goal of HN, which is a non-siloed experience where the entire community is exposed to the same feed.
> is a non-siloed experience where the entire community is exposed to the same feed
Slashdot is still around
Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Being carelessly overzealous with flags/blocking is a reliable way to kill a community by making it overly toxic, speaking from experience.
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
Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
#118We 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 s…
Great response. Thanks for weighing in and all the moderation you do!
Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
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…
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.
Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
#120The 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 ar…
[flagged]
The fact that you made a new account to write says it all.