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Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles

news.ycombinator.com

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

#351

Post by dijksterhuis »

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?

people have done regex-filtering hn clones, ai to detect the ai, etc. been a few show hns. but threads like this would get caught up in that (no perfect solution).

i just manually hide anything ai related.

first pass: hide anything related to AI on front page.

second pass: is there anything interesting left on the front page?

sadly the answer to the second question is often no nowadays :/

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

#352

Post by wartywhoa23 »

nearlyepic wrote: post #318
agnishom wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is accurate and interesting, do you care who wrote it? Yes, because I have an interest in traces and mechanisms of human connections being preserved.

Thank you. I swear to god, it’s like half of the people on this site are fucked in the head socially. Like, of course it matters who wrote it - an author imparts parts of themself onto their work. That’s what makes writing that’s worth reading.

> I swear to god, it’s like half of the people on this site are fucked in the head socially.

I really hope there's a huge bot army pretending to be those people, but alas, you might be right and the reality is worse than that.

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

#353

Post by maxaw »

throwaway219450 wrote: post #277
maxaw wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 equipm…

Your middle ground idea is interesting. And maybe inevitable in some ways, if the llm becomes even more of a universal interface to the outside world.

Regarding llm writing, it is disappointing. Especially as people could use it in the “opposite” direction, using the tirelessness of the llm to experiment with the communication with the aim to make it as clear as possible for the reader…

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

#354

Post by IgorPartola »

Sateeshm wrote: post #217
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…

> I think the era of the blog is simply dead now The era of people caring about knowledge/learning seems to be dead. At least in the way we used to, because a lot of what we needed that for can now be done by the LLMs.

Similar to the era of when people could calculate logarithms on paper or remember exact years of when each Roman emperor ruled? Or is that different?

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

#355

Post by armanckeser »

Places like r/selfhosted try this and to be completely frank, puts that community into the "naive" side of history. One day not so far in the future AI assisted/generated will mean more reliable, better tested, better documented by default, and do you think AI companies are not focusing on making their LLMs not sound like AI? In 2 generations everything we know about identifying LLM generated content will be obsolete. Only thing that matters is if the content is quality or not.

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

#356

Post by Planktonne »

xeyownt wrote: post #240
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 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.

> 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?

The issue is that AI doesn't actually help them; it corrects grammar and removes voice. If you're trying to sound more professional/convincing/engaging, AI usage undermines that.

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

#357

Post by IgorPartola »

derdi wrote: post #311
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…

> Nobody wants to label their stuff as AI generated because they removed credibility. I don't think this is true. I think most of the people who post LLM content without editing and without even style guidelines are simply of the opinion that the resulting text is genuinely of an acceptable quality. Agreed with the rest of your post. We should think of this in terms of quality of the result, not the process.

What upside is there to labeling your content as AI generated (except when you are showing some novel way to use AI)?

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

#358

Post by PennRobotics »

sph wrote: post #159
dang wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damn you people for asking good questions that go straight to the fuzzy areas! I don't know for sure yet. But you're right that that would follow from what I said. What I do know is that users should flag articles that they think don't belong on HN. But this should rely on their reading of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not just be based on a like/dislike reaction. That is, users should flag art…

I have been discouraging people from flagging ‘articles that they think don't belong on HN’, because you have disabled my ability to do so time and time again. In private conversation with you, you have confirmed that if I flag/vouch stuff you mods don’t agree with, I get the privilege taken away, even if I genuinely believe a post to fall outside of the guidelines. So either I read your mind, or it is best not to fl…

Flagging, to me, seems like pissing in the wind. If I notice serial posters submitting extremely low effort content (a pair of their own posts every waking hour from "6 months and 5 minutes ago", off-topic wikipedia nearly once a day, "I have 60000+ points but only upload from thealtantic/guardian/nytimes") then I go on an irate ten-minute flagging binge.

I've also been aghast at the nerve of those same serial posters applying the letter of the law against other users. I genuinely wouldn't care if Bartosz Ciechanowski only self-promotes every last one of his own posts. Some users are significantly more interesting than others, whether or not they violate the site guidelines marginally on a technicality.

I have suspected it's possible some users flags are worth more than others, and I wouldn't be surprised if my flagging ability was silently removed several years ago.

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

#359

Post by ludicrousdispla »

dang wrote: post #205
ludicrousdispla wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't rely on LLMs and I don't find them useful, hence I don't use LLMs and everything about them deserves to be questioned.

LLMs are unquestionably useful. The number of things I've used them to accomplish on HN—things that I've wanted to do for over a decade—is mind-blowing. Performance optimizations, log file anlaysis, tracking down race conditions—it's quite incredible.

I think you and I have a difference of opinion on what it means to be unquestionably useful, and whether any technology should ever be described as such.

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

#360

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

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 a real conundrum.

For example, if I quote a GenAI response –even in criticism– (See what I did, there?), it can get flagged, and result in a shadowban (has happened to me -lesson learned).

But a good use for LLMs, is as a copyeditor. They do a great job. Some unedited stuff is so bad, I'd rather read slop, any day.

The problem is, what's the threshold? If they just fix a few typos and misspellings, that's fine, but what if they offer more substantial changes? How much text must change, before we can legit dismiss as "slop"?

Also, what if there's a significant GenAI component, but the article really is something that we want on the HN frontpage, because of its content?

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