Even if you did, how would you even enforce it? Say it was a pure text article, do you count the number of em dashes? Even AI detection scanners purpose built for this are extremely faulty.
Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
61–70 of 500 posts
Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
#62[dead]
Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
#63That will only further increase the stigma surrounding LLMs. On Lobsters it actually got to the point where I no longer felt welcome on the site, even though I don't use LLMs to generate articles. The constant "this is AI slop" commentary is noisy and tiresome as well.
Why would you no longer feel welcome?
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 think the only reason I didn't is enough people messaged me privately to ask me to stay.
It got to the point I'm sitting on reviewed and tested patches for Mesa that I'm too ashamed to submit because of Claude's participation in their making.
Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just from looking at the sites in the BlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist blocklist, it blocks anything tangent to AI such as Hugging Face and other model developers like Mistral/Z.ai, not sites that actually post AI slop. That's a good example of the exact problem with such a broad stroke rule.
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.
Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
#65We 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 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.
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken.
All we really need is to add "Don't complain that an article is AI" to the guidelines.
Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
#66The 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 article is lightweight (it does happen!) This is true both for AI and for human written articles.
On the flip side, somebody could spend an enormous amount of effort creating a masterpiece with AI. Penalizing that because of the tool that was used is arbitrary.
Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
#67Considering YC invests in AI I doubt you’ll get anything of the sort. Too many people here also think you just have to give in and accept (abuser mentality IMO).
I'd be curious if you'd read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48887149 and let me know (once I've finished editing the damn thing) how this changes, or doesn't change, your response.
Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
#68Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
#69We 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 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 like that though :D
Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
#70Regarding 1, I think a) a sizeable fraction of voters are not able to recognize AI-generated text b) many who notice don't care, or are willing to overlook it if the premise is interesting enough. (The latter is true for me, on occasion) Maybe we need a two-dimensional voting system: good/bad, ai/human. I think the second axis could cut down on meta-discussions over how much of the article was AI-generated.
If what people here say is right, and AI usage online is growing and accelerating, then by the end of the year, the vast, vast majority articles posted to the internet (and linked by HN readers) are going to be AI slop, at which point it is not going to matter. "This article is AI" is going to add about as much insight to the conversation as "The author used a spell checker."