Ask HN: add a flag for articles about AI?
Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
281–290 of 500 posts
Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
#282We 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'd prefer a tag to the mounds of "this looks like it is AI generated, I can tell from the pixels and from having seen quite a few AIs in my time" comments. That way the people who reject AI content can filter it out rather than having to argue about it in the comments.
Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
Community generated tags seems like the obvious solution to all of this. You could easily give a setting to turn them off, breaks no existing systems, and allows for a broad emergent taxonomy. Only surface tags above X community upvotes except to superusers who are allowed to propose tags. But then again, there’s always reddit :)
It breaks a central goal of HN, which is a non-siloed experience where the entire community is exposed to the same feed.
The "show [dead]" setting already exists, so it is not 100% "exposed to the same feed".
Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
#284We 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 the problem space needs to be divided into two - AI generated articles (which the OP's question is about) and AI generated content/comments. The articles - honestly, normal flagging just works. If the content and the information in it is worthwhile, I don't think people would flag it. Isn't this the whole point of flagging?
However, the second part of the problem - the AI comments, that's really what kills the discussion and eventually the community. If I have trust issues that I'm talking to a bot but not a real user, I am not going to engage further. I might or might not flag the account, but at some point, I'm going to be tired of reporting if everywhere around me it's just bots pretending to be humans. I think this is the more serious problem that needs focus.
In my experience, sloppy AI content almost always, sometime instantly even gets flagged out.
Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
#285We 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 find PG's article so dismissive. I know several people that have difficulty writing but are still f*cking smart. So what, they should refrain from using AI to help them because the AI police says so? But yeah, let's continue classifying people based on their outer qualities and habits... History showed us were this leads us to. And here an em dash -- to freak out the AI police.
A judgement on the content (product of writing) is not a judgement on people. I dont care if a person uses LLMs in their life – heck, I myself do. But I care if I want to spend my time reading an LLM-written/assisted article or not.
PS that's not an em-dash – this is.
Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
#286It's a tough one because some ideas may not exist without AI help.
Personally I recently published a white paper on an idea for democracy that has been bouncing around in my head for decades. AI helped flesh out the idea and write the pages of text and structure the whitepaper.
I'm not an academic so I probably would never have fleshed out this idea without AI but I think it's better to have the idea published so it can be seen than to have remained bouncing around in my head until I passed away.
I'd agree that an academic version of my idea written by hand would be better. But a mostly AI written version is better than the knowledge never being published and I still spent a good two days on it making sure I agreed with every paragraph and fixed every issue I could find.
Considering this in general I think the amount of human effort that goes into creating something is probably the right measure of it's quality over if AI was used to assist in it's creation.
Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
#287This makes sense if AI articles are bad or low quality, but what if one day, the AI generated content is actually good? As good or even better than what any human creates? Is it purely just a "human supremacist" desire that fuels the motivation to ban or block such articles?
Imagine you writing in your style. Now imagine 1000s of you writing. That's LLM. Just like you don't like eating the same thing everyday, it gets boring very easy. It irritates even more easily.
It's not about the end output. End output is already good IMO. Now, the sentiment is "if you don't give a damn about writing what's on your mind, why should we give a damn about reading it?"
It doesn't matter how bad your writing is. You have a flavour to it. You write and make it better.
Not to mention, everytime I write something, my thoughts get clearer and clearer. Vibing an article kills this process. It's about the unknown unknowns. You don't even know what you don't know until you start writing. LLM doesn't help you here. It might help you get some likes.
Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
#288Nobody likes reading straight unfiltered chatbot output, but it's also impossible to detect
Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
#289Earlier 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.
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.
I store all prompts as docs, but I doubt I can rerun the whole prompt history with a better model and get sizable return for the cost, personally.
EDIT: I'm referring to a small codebase not articles tho
Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, quoting select passages over multiple emails with you personally. > I'm afraid we took vouching privileges away from your account because you vouched for too many comments that were unsubstantive and/or flamebait and/or otherwise broke the site guidelines > If you want to build up a track record for a while of vouching for good comments only, and then email so we can look at the recent vouches Wondering how doe…
Kudos to you for responding exactly as I asked! That is rare to begin with, and more so when I'm being irritable. Big respect. I can see how using the word "good" was confusing, but I just meant the opposite of "comments that were unsubstantive and/or flamebait and/or otherwise broke the site guidelines". It just boils down to: what fits the guidelines or not. > Wondering how does one tell what is ‘good’ in your mind…
Completely meta and possibly out-of-place, but this thread was I think my first encounter with dang (the human), and, based on it, I'm filled with respect for him.
Good job being you. Please continue doing so.