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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

#271

Post by dang »

rsoto2 wrote: post #169
xdennis wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Considering YC invests in AI I doubt you’ll get anything of the sort. Conspiracy minded responses are low value, and yours is especially so considering HN bans AI comments.

Investors want to see their investment grow. What is the conspiracy? HN also hosted a likely war criminal to talk about his experiencing killing children in gaza. You think these people have morals or ideals?

> HN also hosted a likely war criminal to talk about his experiencing killing children in gaza.

WTF? What do you mean by "hosted"?

I know it's the internet's happy place to blithely accuse others of monstrosity and then derive from that how nobody other then themselves has any "morals or ideals", but this one sticks in my craw.

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

#272

Post by mh- »

archagon wrote: post #267
defrost wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Personally, I've never seen a dead comment come back to life. I'm not sure using the vouch button does anything. (It does for submissions, though.)

I have, but it's definitely very rare. And might have been manual intervention as described above.

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

#273

Post by throwaway219450 »

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…

> Oh and of course the $64k question is this: if an AI generated article is indistinguishable from a human written article and it is accurate and interesting, do you care who wrote it? We want to avoid low quality, not AI generation, right?

Right now, in mid 2026, many of believe that LLM prose is not as good as human output.

The deception is one aspect. AI for spellcheck and proofreading is one thing; AI writing the content wholesale in the first person, which you pass off as your own, is another. I also don’t care for the Tailwind-styled demo sites that have flooded Show HN.

The sort of content that people react viscerally to (as slop) is rarely that subtle. Again, no problem with careful and subtle use (see CGI in movies), but when I see Claude-isms and snappy section headings that nobody used to use, I close the page.

You can/should write for you, to get experience writing, to present a portfolio, to share things you find interesting, a photo a day, whatever. Why does that have to die?

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

#274

Post by hamandcheese »

asdff wrote: post #94
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…

Put it this way, if the ai article is indeed so good, why store the article in a dusty long form output mode from a soon to be obsolete model? Just give us the prompt, and in 6 months with some newer, bigger, better model, we can feed that prompt and get an even better article out of it.

A lot of my PRs are the result of hours of back and forth between an AI and myself. In many cases the sum total of my prompts is much larger than the final output.

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

#275

Post by defrost »

archagon wrote: post #267
defrost wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Personally, I've never seen a dead comment come back to life. I'm not sure using the vouch button does anything. (It does for submissions, though.)

Personally, I've seen two - both ones that I emailed about (and I really disliked the stance taken on one of those, but they were debating at a level that was polite, addressed objections raised, acknowledged other PoVs etc.)

Vouch, I've perhaps seen reverse things several times (more of a background observation not pursued, so, you know, fuzzy anecdata at best), I did get feedback from @dang that one comment I vouched for was, in fact, a legitimate AI gen comment .. so clearly I'm human enough to fall for the occasional clanker.

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

#277

Post by throwaway219450 »

maxaw wrote: post #125
asdff wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put it this way, if the ai article is indeed so good, why store the article in a dusty long form output mode from a soon to be obsolete model? Just give us the prompt, and in 6 months with some newer, bigger, better model, we can feed that prompt and get an even better article out of it.

to play devils advocate - i doubt the articles that end up on the front page are one shotted (theres probably a sequence of back and forward refinement). and in any case, i feel the avg reader would actually not prefer to read the prompt, which would be very information dense having said that, i'd still much prefer a norm of including prompt history with the article, or the codebase for that matter, so people can cho…

This is a fascinating thought problem.

On the extreme end you have recipe blogspam, with the tropey life stories and Amazon affiliate spam that precede the meat (pardon the pun). If that pre-filler is inconsequential, why not have an LLM parse the semantic markup - which 99% of recipe sites use for Google SEO - to produce custom content for you? Like a history of the ingredients, or better instructions with an equipment list tailored to your kitchen and timings/temps for your specific oven?

I can see there being a middle ground where you publish some sort of context that a user’s LLM can generate the content from. Is it fundamentally any different from dramatized non-fiction? Think of books like Operation Mincemeat where the facts are thoroughly researched, but the author uses a lot of artistic license to tell the story.

But to your point, if there is back-and-forth, I wish people would pay more attention to the obvious traits of LLM writing. Not everything needs to read like it’s a snappy editorial, but I sense we’re still in the early days where people have been handed this technology and are simply excited that they can pump out 1000 words in a coherent narrative.

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

#278

Post by j4k0bfr »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #196
abnercoimbre wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This has the happy flipside that anyone who would like readers to classify their article as high-status rather than low-status can apply the judo move of simply writing it themselves. I really really hope more people take up pen and paper! My last blog post [0] came with proof-of-work attached. [0] https://abner.page/post/are-we-harold-bloom/

I was just thinking about this, the proof of work angle. Maybe written blogs need to come with recordings of the process now too, otherwise they will be suspicious. What a goofy situation to imagine. I hope we can figure out a way though. I personally have no interest in reading anything spat out by an LLM, so if anything can be used to prove that an author wrote something themselves, I'm interested

It's a tough problem, since I assume any common proof-of-work standard will inevitably generate a big enough dataset to train on.

But nonetheless a problem in desperate need of solving!

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

#279

Post by Leynos »

asdff wrote: post #94
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…

Put it this way, if the ai article is indeed so good, why store the article in a dusty long form output mode from a soon to be obsolete model? Just give us the prompt, and in 6 months with some newer, bigger, better model, we can feed that prompt and get an even better article out of it.

You'd need the whole edit tree along with all the prompts used along the way, which most people are not yet set up to capture.

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

#280

Post by freehorse »

avaer wrote: post #53
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 hope HN doesn't get into moderating the politics of articles. 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 hu…

AI has a distinct, low-quality and unnecessarily sensational writing style, which signals low effort post first of all. If you use AI and you put the effort to make it not look like AI it means that at least you put some effort into it.

I am not sure how the future may be, but the direction of AIs has been to solidify their distinct writing style rather than assimilate to humans. So we can start addressing what we are dealing with now. I doubt HN tagging/flagging can put enough pressure to affect how llms will evolve anyway in the future, while the llm speech becomes more and more ubiquitous and unhinged.

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