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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

#211

Post by otterley »

not-a-llm wrote: post #207
satisfice wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 simulati…

bullshitting has never been a crime if it were, 90% of startups would be illegal and they founders jailable

Fraud is a crime, but admittedly, not all bullshitting is fraud.

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

#213

Post by mh- »

dang wrote: post #106
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.

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.co…

(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.

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

#214

Post by IanCal »

sph wrote: post #181
dang wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 doe…

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.

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

#215

Post by lelanthran »

ryandrake wrote: post #65
jorvi wrote: post #56

Earlier 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…

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 thi…

> 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.

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

#216

Post by Springtime »

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…

> 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 at every step when there's some minimum expectation that should be an author's role (outside of topics where there is some expectation of ulterior motives/biases and one would naturally engage more critically minded).

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.

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

#217

Post by Sateeshm »

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…

> 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.

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

#218

Post by mh- »

slg wrote: post #188
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…

>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…

It's just a collection of comments pushing back on LLM-generated prose. 'dang sends it in replies to emails that ask him why their comments were flagged when that's the reason. He's offering examples of the broad community sentiment on the matter, to the commenter who was flagged.

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

#219

Post by Cadabrum »

xeyownt wrote: post #185

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.

You might as well try tagging stupid articles. That would be a useful feature, by the way.

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

#220

Post by dang »

Springtime wrote: post #216
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…

> 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 inac…

I'm afraid I don't understand this - can I ask what was the sibling comment? Maybe that will help me triangulate.
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