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Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles

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Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles

#121

Post by mmastrac »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #86
archagon wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As opposed to wonderful old HN, where about 95% of the front page is now AI, AI-related, or AI-generated.

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…

There's a bot user that seems to crosspost every lobsters story here if it isn't already.

Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles

#122

Post by awllau »

smallerfish wrote: post #66

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 ar…

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.

Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles

#123

Post by minimaxir »

nojs wrote: post #119
minimaxir wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

HN guidelines are to flag/downvote and move on anyways.

Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles

#124

Post by dang »

satisfice wrote: post #92
avaer wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

“AI generated” is already a slur.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles

#125

Post by maxaw »

asdff wrote: post #94
IgorPartola wrote: post #48

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 cou…

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.

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 :)

Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles

#126

Post by dang »

jorvi wrote: post #83
minimaxir wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 r…

Your post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47493096) might also have been downvoted for saying "Be better", which is an internet putdown trope.

Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles

#127

Post by 152334H »

dang wrote: post #42

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 s…

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...

Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles

#128

Post by simonreiff »

fuckaiwriter wrote: post #74
IgorPartola wrote: post #48

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 cou…

[flagged]

Why don't you say how you really feel instead of being so wishy-washy?

Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles

#130

Post by dang »

152334H wrote: post #127
dang wrote: post #42

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 s…

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…

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. Again, if it's not uncommon, those should be easy to find.

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