51–60 of 500 posts
Maybe just adding down-vote to submissions would do?
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
Regarding 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.
agreed.
For me, the issue I have is that a vocal group seems to despise AI-edited content and they can't manage to take their disgust eleswhere.
AI-editing is another tool, just like spellcheck.
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 can see a grim future (present?) where "AI generated" turns into a slur, warranted or otherwise, in a world where the difference between human trained to talk like an AI and AI masquerading as human becomes increasingly difficult to discern, and some hidden cabal passes judgement.
That is wholly different from taking a stance on HN being a place for humans to comment on articles.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Not posting for self promotion is in the guidelines. I have to assume anyone pushing out AI articles is primarily looking for traffic and self promotion, as they didn’t care enough about the topic to write their own opinion.
> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.
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uBlock Origin users already filter a large portion of "AI" slop sites. Saves a lot of time when searching for something specific. =3 https://github.com/alvi-se/ai-ublock-blacklist https://github.com/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist https://github.com/Stevoisiak/Stevos-AI-Blocklist/
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.
Depends on your use-case, but most people don't need content used in network nuisances like YC AstroTurf posts. =3
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…
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 that. Either generated or assisted. For older accounts you can see the steep increase of it around 2025ish.
Seems like the HN crowd absolutely adores AI comments and the rule banning them is (sadly) unnecessary. Or at least not what 'the people' want.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Not posting for self promotion is in the guidelines. I have to assume anyone pushing out AI articles is primarily looking for traffic and self promotion, as they didn’t care enough about the topic to write their own opinion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Different people weight the slop factor differently, which is the main source of pain at the moment. (For example, another top-level comment in this thread suggests banning AI-generated content outright)
What’s different between “slop” and “bad”
The regular voting system is not enough because posts can't be downvoted and for some reason many people are not bothered by the notion of reading something no one bothered to write. The issue is complicated by the fact that there can be substantial effort invested in a process outside of the writing itself - and so AI written does not guarantee that the content will not valuable. But I'm inclined to punish it anyway…
I get annoyed when I see AI telltale signs too, but for example in my case I type 10x more than the final piece, is it really AI generated or just reworded? I don't use AI to fix my comments, just when I want to format article size pieces I post on my blog.
My entire position: I'm not interested in reading text that sounds like it was written by AI.
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[flagged]
I don't think that's a very good comparison. People can drive a car without an expert but they can't build a car. People can use software without being an expert but still require an expert to build software. AI could provided assistance with building both cars and software, but you still need a decent level of knowledge in either field to get a good result.
Not every person can drive a car.
> but they can't build a car.
Not every person is unable to build a car.
Eg: my father, born 1935, still alive, has built double axle trailers, cars and vehicles that work, medical caravans for St Johns Ambulance, ...
His education was six years of primary school and these were all "side projects" for himself or for his community.
> you still need a decent level of knowledge in either field
and the barrier to picking up sufficient knowledge to safely create software, cars, even ground effect flying boats isn't that high for normal human beings .. although it does require a certain can do attitude.