Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles

they are different systems created for completely different reasons. the idea of calling them all "property" came from lobbyists who wanted to make people think they are natural rights that should be expanded and protected at all costs, instead of tools made for a specific purpose.

thats how we get todays system where publishing anything even without a copyright notice gives you life plus 70 years of total exclusivity, but also if you signed a bad contract with your employer they will act like all your work belongs to them even if you did it on your own time and threaten you with lawsuits if you try and fight. its bad at protecting artists (just look at the music industry) and even worse at protecting the public.

what llm vendors (not the models themselves) are doing is not really theft because you cant steal something if the original owner has it the whole time. the bad thing they actually do is train llms on everyones work and then claim copyright over the result. that is the real injustice. and its why i think open source === ethical when it comes to ai. if you take you have to give back.

the only true permanent solution is a full rebalance. all "ip" rights should be for commercial use only and last 25 years or less. yes that means piracy is legal as long as you dont make money off it. unpaid royalties are a problem for real people but pirates only hurt corporations. i know what side im on.

I think this is a fair position - if the author did not even take the time to read their own article, why should they expect others to read it?

If they did read it, they would have spotted instantly how AI it sounds.

Poor writing is not a new thing, of course. Most of the moderation mechanisms that it uses were perfected a quarter century ago when sites like Slashdot were popular as a defense mechanism against bad user behavior. Bad user behavior impacts commenting, article submissions, and moderating itself. While bad users now have AI to abuse, the problem of a large volume of low quality content is is largely the same. The moderation mechanisms end up targeting the problem at the source: identifying good and bad users. So, the same amount of bad users generating a lot more garbage isn't that big of a deal. Getting good karma still is a lot of work and it makes identifying all the garbage created by users without that relatively straightforward.

Using LLMs to tag, flag and filter content might not be a bad thing to experiment with. There are a lot of low quality AI generated opinion pieces that somehow make it to the front page. Same for political and controversial stuff, which of course is against the HN guidelines for content. Auto flagging things that obviously violate guidelines should not be that hard. It's just a matter of having good guard rails. @dang might actually already be doing that. I know I would be if staying on top of piles of generated garbage was part of my job description. It might also be done to give good content a little boost.

The new articles section has a very low signal to noise ratio currently and the window for good content to make it past that is very short. Often articles on the front page will have many duplicate submissions that never made it past that. IMHO duplicate submissions should just count as upvotes on the original. Auto de-duplicating based on canonical URL should not be that hard.

It'll pass when the next cool tech comes around.