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One pattern I've noticed recently is sort of formulaic comments that look okish on their own, maybe a bit abstract/vague/bland, and not taking a particular side on good/bad in the way people like to do, but really obviously AI when you look at the account history and they're all the same formula: >this is [summary] >not just x, it's y >punchy ending, maybe question Once you know it's AI it's very obvious they told it…
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It's wierd because the barrier to not have that in is so low, you can just tack on 'talk like me not AI, dont use em dashes, don't use formulaic structures, be concice' and itll get rid of half of those signals.
This is how you get precious takes like this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45322362 > First impression: I need to dive into this hackernews reply mockup thing thoroughly without any fluff or self-promotion. My persona should be ..., energetic with health/tech insights but casual and relatable. > Looking at the constraints: short, punchy between 50-80 characters total—probably multiple one-sentence paragra…
One pattern I've noticed recently is sort of formulaic comments that look okish on their own, maybe a bit abstract/vague/bland, and not taking a particular side on good/bad in the way people like to do, but really obviously AI when you look at the account history and they're all the same formula: >this is [summary] >not just x, it's y >punchy ending, maybe question Once you know it's AI it's very obvious they told it…
"is real" is another big red flag, go search this in comments. There appear to be at least three accounts posting direct LLM outputs. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
The data is available in a SQLite database on GitHub: https://github.com/vlofgren/hn-green-clankers You can explore the underlying data using SQL queries in your browser here: https://lite.datasette.io/?url=https%253A%252F%252Fraw.githu... (that's Datasette Lite, my build of the Datasette Python web app that runs in Pyodide in WebAssembly) Here's a SQL query that shows the users in that data that posted the most comm…
I still call voodoo on this. I use an iPhone, iPad, Mac to comment here—all of them autocorrect to em dashes at one point or another. Same goes for ellipsis.
Ellipses were never part of the analysis.
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In some cases, it's probably to establish aged accounts that are more trusted by users and spam algorithms. There's a market for old Reddit accounts, for example.
Interesting. Incidentally, how much do they pay for a HN account that is a few years old and accumulated a few thousand Internet points? Asking for a friend.
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What motivation is there to use AI to astroturf (if that's what this is) like this? Is it ideological? Is it product marketing in those relevant threads where someone is showcasing? Or is it pure technical testing, playing around?
Same as Reddit. Accumulate enough points via posting shallow and uninteresting—yet popular—dialogue to earn down voting and flagging abilities, which can be used (via automation) to manipulate discussions and suppress viewpoints. Slashdot's system was superior because mod points were finite and randomly dispensed. This entropy discouraged abuse by design—as opposed to making it a key feature of the site. It's the Ach…
I've been advocating for a while now that HN could use meta-moderation at least on flagging activity, so it can stop giving flagging powers to users who are using it for reasons other than flagging rulebreaking.
Shoutout to my English Major comrades who have been using em-dashes forever, and have had to stop so we don't sound like AI. If AI starts use the New Yorker style diaeresis (umlaut-looking thing when there are two vowels in words like coöperate) I swear I'm gonna lose it.
Agreed. Join me in double-dash em proximates. Shows you manually typed it out with total disregard token count and technical correctness.
I'm still salty that I can't use em-dashes anymore for fear of my writing being flagged as AI generated. Been using them for years—it's just `alt+shift+-` on a Mac keyboard and I find them more legible in many fonts compared to the simple dash on the typical numpad. It's so sad to me that good typographical conventions have been co-opted by the zeitgeist of LLMs.
Just do it anyway—I always have, and always will. Well, I haven't always —just for maybe 20 years.
I'm still salty that I can't use em-dashes anymore for fear of my writing being flagged as AI generated. Been using them for years—it's just `alt+shift+-` on a Mac keyboard and I find them more legible in many fonts compared to the simple dash on the typical numpad. It's so sad to me that good typographical conventions have been co-opted by the zeitgeist of LLMs.
Just do it anyway—I always have, and always will. Well, I haven't always —just for maybe 20 years.
so now, i just use double dashes for everything.
(shit, i wonder when llms will start doing this instead of normal em)