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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

#241

Post by dang »

brudgers wrote: post #161
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…

What I do think we'll (finally) add is a "please give a reason why you flagged this post" step Do you believe adding friction to flagging will reduce the quantity of low quality articles? Or is the flagging of high quality articles a bigger and more pressing problem? Or is the problem simply too-many-damn-flags? Just curious.

Another good question I don't know the answer to! Which is probably why we haven't done it yet.

I guess the idea is that if lots of people flag a comment for the "genai" reason then we can treat that a more precise community signal than "flagged in general". But this argument seems weaker to me as soon as I write it out.

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

#243

Post by hgs3 »

Can we also flag AI generated projects posted on Show HN?

I used to love reading HN for the handwritten articles and handmade projects, but in the LLM era the quality has deteriorated significantly. I find myself flocking to other message boards where LLM content is flagged, discouraged, or banned.

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

#244

Post by mh- »

dang wrote: post #228
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…

I'd need to see specific links, but many of those posts are probably being killed because our software classified them as being genai, which is not allowed on HN (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079 .)

Happy to find and email you some when I'm at my desk.

(I'm well aware of the genAI policy, and very supportive of it.)

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

#245

Post by woolion »

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…

>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 deeply enough or the author does but the AI doesn’t and the author’s not proofreading carefully enough.

FWIW, same problem with PRs or PoC that I have to work on; now my first question is, "did you know about his behaviour?". The first step, getting a decent spec, is delayed to after a first draft implementation is already pushed...

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

#246

Post by dang »

dcow wrote: post #195
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…

My only thought is that "good" genai authors/articles will easily get through the filter while "generic" ones will fail. So the outcome won't be all genai articles getting flagged (unless people self-report), just the low quality ones. I'm guessing that's okay and I'm one of those people who discounts genai writing the second I read one of the tells, so the flag would save me time. Ultimately though this is the same…

There have definitely been cases of "good" genai articles that led to quite good HN threads. (Don't ask me for links - alas but my sandblasted memory doesn't retain anything.)

I guess my response to that is we want the most interesting threads.

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

#247

Post by mh- »

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 always vouch them but have never bothered to email. I figure the mods are seeing the same HN I am. But maybe I spend too much time here some evenings..

But yes, it's the "going against the zeitgeist" ones I have in mind. It feels very damaging to the community.

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

#248

Post by dang »

slg wrote: post #188
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…

>This is why we see so many "just show me the prompt" responses, along with others like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/genai-pushback . This is totally tangential to your point, but what is that page? It's not your usual link to an algolia search. Is this already part of some sort of manual tagging system? Clicking on the first one, these comments don't seem to be moderated. Are you using these complaints to help…

It's just a list of posts that we tagged manually and then defined a URL endpoint for. We do that sometimes, but rarely enough that I can understand the confusion.

Keep in mind that we have a REPL over here and can make any link do anything!

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

#249

Post by insin »

rddbs wrote: post #143

I care more about hiding AI related articles than I do about AI-authored content in articles. Feels like most of the content on HN is now AI related and it’s just exhausting. Anyone have a way they’re correcting this balance of content, like a browser extension maybe?

I have default "AI" keyword and domain filters as a separate toggleable option (so you can keep your personal filters separate) in my HN extension (which I really need to add recent model names to):

https://soitis.dev/comments-owl-for-hacker-news

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

#250

Post by dang »

handfuloflight wrote: post #182
dang wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting points! though I don't follow them all. > 1st: the presumption that AI generated text is actually unsuccessful, rather than proliferating broadly unchallenged today I can only talk about HN. If you think this is proliferating broadly on HN itself, I'd like to see such links. Assuming it's "broadly", they should be easy to find. > 2nd: the disposition that negative attitudes towards AI text are unjustified…

What about people who genuinely write their own articles but due to their time spent with AI, they are sounding like AI? I know people like this. They really are writing like that now. Shouldn't there be fairness to them?

I do hear this sometimes but it's not clear to me how prevalent this is. I'd need to see specific examples.

Edit: these are just gut-feeling numbers but we've had many dozens (perhaps hundreds) of email exchanges with users about this to date. Usually when we ask them if their post was genai, probably 90% say "oh yes, sorry, I didn't realize you had that rule". Of the other 10% or so, when we ask further, it usually turns out that they used some other tool (a grammar checker, a machine translation, some kind of toucher-upper, etc.) which left LLM imprints on their post. It's pretty rare for someone to insist that they wrote the text entirely by themselves with no LLM or similar tool. Of those, I'm sure some are false positives.

There have also been a few instances where I didn't fully believe them, mainly because they'd already posted other things that got classified as genai. Fortunately this is rare. The vast majority of users who we have this sort of conversation with are sincere, legit users who don't know much about HN. Our hope is therefore to convert them into informed community members!

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