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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

#331

Post by dspillett »

derdi wrote: post #311
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.

> 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.

I don't disagree with that assessment, with one extra detail: for many of them their bar of “an acceptable quality” is too low. No higher than “sod it, it'll do” and often lower. To too many, generated content is seen as a gateway to maybe accidentally becoming some sort of influencer, a way to get themselves out there with little or no care about whether their contribution is actually useful overall just as long as it garners a bit of attention.

I don't want to waste time hunting through the extra piles of “it'll do” or worse to find the remaining nuggets of actually good writing, be they entirely human made or created by humans using LLM assistance. There are at lease a few people of agree with me on the matter.

The problem with judging on quality is that you often have to at least start reading the slop to realise and move on to the next thing. Rating systems and flags may help somewhat, but they will all eventually be gamed so it will become yet another battle of attrition: people and systems trying to filter out the crap while other people and their systems finding it more profitable to spend time breaking the filtering mechanisms instead of producing content good enough to not actually be filtered by them.

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

#332

Post by Aachen »

freehorse wrote: post #285
xeyownt wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find PG's article so dismissive. I know several people that have difficulty writing but are still f*cking smart. So what, they should refrain from using AI to help them because the AI police says so? But yeah, let's continue classifying people based on their outer qualities and habits... History showed us were this leads us to. And here an em dash -- to freak out the AI police.

A judgement on the content (product of writing) is not a judgement on people. I dont care if a person uses LLMs in their life – heck, I myself do. But I care if I want to spend my time reading an LLM-written/assisted article or not. PS that's not an em-dash – this is.

re PS: no; unless HN now swallows em dashes, what you posted is https://unicodeplus.com/U+2013, not https://unicodeplus.com/U+2014

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

#333

Post by another-dave »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #187
bellowsgulch wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

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

This post from awhile back suggests it's at 501 karma - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439437

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

#334

Post by Aachen »

Debugreality wrote: post #286

It's a tough one because some ideas may not exist without AI help. Personally I recently published a white paper on an idea for democracy that has been bouncing around in my head for decades. AI helped flesh out the idea and write the pages of text and structure the whitepaper. I'm not an academic so I probably would never have fleshed out this idea without AI but I think it's better to have the idea published so it…

> AI helped flesh out the idea and write the pages of text and structure the whitepaper.

- LLM for helping with structure: sure. feels to me like more of a motivation problem to commit a first version to paper so you can start editing and moving bits around, and the LLM's role is being a conversational partner who cares and talks to you, but whatever works

- LLM for writing the pages of text: I would almost certainly prefer the version where you just write the key aspects (your insights) and not have to wade through pages of prose to find them

- LLM for fleshing out: hell no. if you want to lecture and bore people to death, this is the way to go

Turning insights into elaborate documents is relevant once this makes it to legal codification (compare "tell people how you use their data" with the relevant articles in GDPR)

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

#335

Post by amelius »

Unicode should add a codepage for characters in latin1 but reserved for AI tools. That would allow us to have a sticky bit in AI generated stuff, at least to an approximation.

We can do it already if we ask the AI companies to use one of the special whitespace characters instead of ascii 0x20. It would also help them avoid the problem of feeding their training loop on generated data.

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

#336

Post by krapp »

tptacek wrote: post #89
aabhay wrote: post #88

Earlier 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.

I think that goal only works when the community is small and culturally homogeneous and the velocity of content is relatively slow, but all of those result in implicit silos at scale. People's subjective experience of HN already differs wildly from others based entirely on when they show up, from where and what kind of content they consider on topic, and it already creates a great deal of tension and hostility.

Plus, HN's design makes it easy for a single story or kind of story to appear to overwhelm the forum (I say "appear" because really there's more than what's on the frontpage, but most people never bother to check past the frontpage,) which only results in complaints and threads like this. Another layer of organization to handle HN's increasing scale and complexity might be necessary.

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

#337

Post by Aachen »

minimaxir wrote: post #38

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 adopti…

"bad faith"? As in, that the person posts the accusation while actually believing the opposite? I would think the far, far more common reason for posting that incorrectly is that they legitimately thought it was slop. Of course such low-effort wrongful accusations are bad to post for multiple reasons, but I don't think people frequently post such things falsely

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

#339

Post by freehorse »

Aachen wrote: post #332
freehorse wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A judgement on the content (product of writing) is not a judgement on people. I dont care if a person uses LLMs in their life – heck, I myself do. But I care if I want to spend my time reading an LLM-written/assisted article or not. PS that's not an em-dash – this is.

re PS: no; unless HN now swallows em dashes, what you posted is https://unicodeplus.com/U+2013 , not https://unicodeplus.com/U+2014

Oops — sorry.

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

#340

Post by Aachen »

ranger_danger wrote: post #51
JimsonYang wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

As for the ability to downvote comments, my understanding is that the only requirement is having at least 500 karma.

As of a few years ago I can confirm that. Don't need (as stated by GP) to be active for years, at least, depending on how much and what/where/when you post. Being the first reasonable-sounding or insider-knowledge comment on a new article that then becomes popular gets you ~1/7th of the way with 2 minutes of effort per attempt; being the first to post from an RSS feed of a here-popular blog can get you +500 points in a single go. Just posting regularly, not doing anything special to farm, will get you there in a few months
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