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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

#311

Post by derdi »

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…

> Nobody wants to label their stuff as AI generated because they removed credibility.

I don't think this is true. I think most of the people who post LLM content without editing and without even style guidelines are simply of the opinion that the resulting text is genuinely of an acceptable quality.

Agreed with the rest of your post. We should think of this in terms of quality of the result, not the process.

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

#312

Post by ed_elliott_asc »

archagon wrote: post #72
matheusmoreira wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've accurately described the current state of Lobsters.

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

It is understandable why so much content is ai-related, so many people are using it

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

#313

Post by behindsight »

defrost wrote: post #236
mh- wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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…

> comments that don't violate any guidelines, but are flagged to dead. Vouch them and/or email to hn@ycombinator.com and say why you think they deserve to be [undead]. I see that a lot, some have been erroneously caught by the real time AI detect filter (which actually isn't too bad at slicing out the actual AI gen comments) others have gone hard against the zeitgeist. I've had the mods reinstate comments that I've t…

I have vouched a couple (~3-5) benign comments a while back and now I no longer have a vouch button for comments.

I don't know if the vouch threshold has increased or if the mods have removed my ability to vouch for other comments entirely.

Wondering if it was my good faith attempt to inform a user of their comments being auto-flagged [1] before I had any context that they were supposed to be persona non grata.

I can still vouch submissions though

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46381180

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

#314

Post by atahanacar »

danieltanfh95 wrote: post #154

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.

>judge content not by its cover and think

If we are supposed to not judge the content by its cover, then don't put a cover on it. It's that simple. AI adds no value to the content, just some noise that makes it harder to reach the actual information/emotion.

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

#315

Post by shantnutiwari »

NO.

Quoting myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48063759

>> Every post that reaches the top of HN will have at least a few comments saying "This is LLM!"

It has become a proxy for "I don't like this article, so it must be a LLM"

To me, it feels like lazy karma farming, as these comments often do get a few upvotes.

And of course, accuse a 100 posts if being LLM, you are guaranteed to be right at least once, then like astrologers you can claim success.

Is there anything we can do to discourage this type of lazy and low effort posting?

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

#316

Post by jagged-chisel »

bakugo wrote: post #14
jagged-chisel wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have “flag”

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 interes…

Consensus ultimately determines what the guidelines are. There’s no one enforcing how “flag” is being used (i.e. you are not asked why you want to flag something.) Guideline or not, I’m using “flag” on content that I feel absolutely does not belong on HN. If enough people hold the same sentiment and flag a particular post for being AI-generated, then it falls off the home page because it was AI-generated.

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

#317

Post by tripzilch »

grayclhn wrote: post #202
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…

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…

This exactly. Whenever someone shows me their (or someone else's) AI-assisted-coded (vibe coded) thing, I can only ever engage with it on a very superficial level, saying "oh cool".

You can't have a discussion about it, how it was done, because for 80% of cases it's "the AI did it".

I don't think this is that interesting or useful for HN, because indeed it's a discussion site.

It would be different if the vibe coded thing didn't come as a "look what it made and its vibe written README" but instead as a human written blog article about "how I made this thing using AI, what models, prompts and harnesses, how the experience was etc etc etc" --- again that would be something interesting to have a discussion about.

But otherwise what is there to say except "yeah cool that's cool that the AI made you that thing"

> 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?

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

#318

Post by nearlyepic »

agnishom wrote: post #251
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…

> it is accurate and interesting, do you care who wrote it? Yes, because I have an interest in traces and mechanisms of human connections being preserved.

Thank you. I swear to god, it’s like half of the people on this site are fucked in the head socially.

Like, of course it matters who wrote it - an author imparts parts of themself onto their work. That’s what makes writing that’s worth reading.

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

#319

Post by tom_ »

deadbabe wrote: post #36

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?

A problem for us to deal with when we encounter it.

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

#320

Post by tripzilch »

dang wrote: post #208
grayclhn wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

But you wouldn't have called it "allergy" or a "status" problem when considering the audience's response to human written posts of a similar low quality level.

It's always been the case that the HN audience has been "allergic" to low effort slop (including human generated).

The OP (and my) point was trying to point out how the AI generated stuff might masquerade as something "interesting" if it had been human written, but actually is much of a nothing burger when there's no human behind it:

if a human made a strange, weird, or even sub-optimal design decision, that's something to possibly have an interesting discussion about.

if an AI does the same, first of, I don't care and don't wanna guess why its weights did the thing it did, it's just not as interesting as human motivations, UNLESS the main meat of the article/link is in fact about (again the human experience of) "how I made this thing, using AI, what prompts, harness, models, etc".

I hope it makes sense and allows you to no longer dismiss this as an "allergy" (aka the audience's problem), but as something that is actually a quality problem with the post.

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