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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

#411

Post by nvme0n1p1 »

kordlessagain wrote: post #365
nvme0n1p1 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > I don't want to deal with AI or AI slop > You should add more AI to your life I hope you can see how this is not a useful suggestion.

I'm suggesting using AI to combat the AI issue, not complaining endlessly with pointless points that do nothing to solve the very real problem that is not going away by being stubborn or rude. My suggestion, which I use myself, helps limit the blast radius. Doesn't mean I have to get involved with it while it's doing what it does. Do you also question email filters and argue that sending spam is wrong and suggesting…

GP proposed the site should solve the problem once at the source, and everyone benefits. You counter-proposed that every individual reader should take manual action on every headline they see. That's a lot of redundant wasted effort across the userbase.

To continue your analogy, that would be like if Gmail got rid of spam filters, and then told people to stop complaining endlessly and manually copy every email they get into SpamGPT to ask if it's spam or not.

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

#412

Post by minimaxir »

jorvi wrote: post #383
dang wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your post ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47493096 ) might also have been downvoted for saying "Be better", which is an internet putdown trope.

[flagged]

I didn't respond to your argument because I didn't want to escalate, but since you insist on personally attacking me and breaking the HN guidelines far more explicitly than what you're accusing the OP of doing...

No LLM has responded like your quote of OP that you assert is LLM generated. Dense verbose writing is not something LLMs do without very specific prompt engineering that no one would do rationally. The tropes of LLM writing are more highly sporadic verbose writing (e.g. "delve") with highly atypical grammatical constructions, it's more precise than "it's sounds like a MBA" like you are asserting. Look at Wikipedia's list and try to figure out which item the OP falls under: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

Yes, OP has a verbose way with words and grammar. On a site like Hacker News that shouldn't be that weird, and accusing people of using AI without a smoking gun hurts culture and discourse far more than doing nothing at all, which is why I'm passionate about baseless AI use accusations. There are more than enough smoking-gun AI-written comments you can flag/downvote respectfully.

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

#413

Post by djeastm »

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.

They should refrain from using AI if it turns more people off to their ideas than it turns people on to them. There's no need to invent "AI police" as a big baddie here.

A strategy for people who feel they can't write is to just keep it short and sweet. Intelligence is such a potent force. It shines through.

What humans want most is to hear the voices of other humans.

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

#414

Post by johnfn »

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 of LLM tells like grammatical issues. If you read an essay full of grammatical mistakes you’d immediately start thinking less of the author, even if the essay isn’t about grammar. You wonder if someone who doesn’t pay close enough attention to catch a mistake “their” from “they’re” took attention to the rest of their work. This isn’t necessarily fair because the content of the essay might still be good. But on the internet I don’t have the time to evaluate the quality of every piece of writing I come across. It is very much the burden of the author to, as fast as possible, prove to me that the rest of the article will not waste my time. There is already so much content to read, and in some sense the amount of time to evaluate if an article is well-founded can be unbounded (imagine how long it would take to tell if an article about why a programming language is thoughtful without going out and also learning that language).

I find LLM-isms to be exactly the same as grammatical errors, but worse. At least when writing before you had to take the effort to type every word, so there was a minimum amount of effort you’d need to expend. If you aren’t catching obvious things like “the honest part” then that likely says bad things about your attention to detail elsewhere.

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

#416

Post by erikerikson »

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…

https://xkcd.com/810/

I can't believe no one had posted this yet.

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

#417

Post by grayclhn »

westurner wrote: post #397
tripzilch wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This exactly. Whenever someone shows me their (or someone else's) AI-assisted-coded (vibe coded) thing, I can only ever engage with it on a very superficial level, saying "oh cool". You can't have a discussion about it, how it was done, because for 80% of cases it's "the AI did it". I don't think this is that interesting or useful for HN, because indeed it's a discussion site. It would be different if the vibe coded…

> what is there to say Ways to contribute: Peer review, human code review, money for tokens for code and code review, configure SAST and DAST tools to make it DevSecOps instead of DevOpsSec, configure AGENTS.md and an /upgrade-dependencies-and-run-tests skill, Compare "It's inadequate because it's AI" with "it looks like this generation of agents doesn't yet handle this quality aspect with or without explicit prompts…

Just skimmed your resume and, assuming it’s up to date, it looks like you mostly work independently. If that’s the case, I can totally see why my argument doesn’t resonate.

“The author doesn’t understand the material” isn’t an ad hominem — most of my work involves working with other people, usually less experienced, to help them deliver reasonably complex econometric or ML models. Sometimes I’m hands on, usually not. Knowing if it’s “the author not understanding the material” is important because my job is to help them understand it so that they can deliver something that 1) works and 2) does what it’s supposed to. AI written docs are at best a mixed blessing.

Or maybe it’s me not understanding! Either way, if something looks wrong, I want to discuss it with people who know the subject matter and can talk me through the parts that look off so that I can learn from it.

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

#418

Post by dgellow »

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…

> if an AI generated article is indistinguishable from a human written article and it is accurate and interesting, do you care who wrote it?

I care about the fact that I’m interacting with a human. If an LLM generates content that reads like a human and it isn’t disclosed it is deceptive by nature. It doesn’t matter to me that a human typed the words on their keyboard, they could use text to speech or whatever. But I care that a human crafted the content. A LLM doesn’t just type the words, it takes style, tone, voice decisions, in addition to the choice of framing. That’s everything that matters about human to human communication

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

#419

Post by derdi »

IgorPartola wrote: post #398
derdi wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, I wasn't saying that there was an upside. Sorry if my post was unclear. My "I don't think this is true" was in response to the assertion that people who use AI would be afraid of losing credibility from labeling.

My thesis on that is just that AI generated content is generally viewed as worse than human-generated content, but it is a lot cheaper. There is a lot of (financial) incentive to create and post a lot of cheap AI generated content and trying to pass it as higher quality human-generated content than to be honest about it. It’s the same reason recipe websites don’t honestly label that they ripped off other recipe websi…

OK, I see your point. I think there are (at least!) two categories of content creators here: On the one hand, those that consciously want to generate content spam. On the other hand, those that actually want to do "cool technical stuff" that was previously impossible for most people working alone with limited time on their hands (develop your own programming language etc.). As I argue at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48892642, I think there is really a part of the latter group that are simply unable to recognize LLM-speak as bad style. It's how the LLM speaks to them, it doesn't bother them; since the all-knowing LLM does it, it must be fine. I don't know. I don't understand these people, but I believe they exist.

For example, consider this project where I also complained about atrocious writing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48876506. I think this is really just someone who wanted to "create" something, I don't think this is in the same category as recipe/blog spam. I don't think the person who put this online thinks that this landing page is worse than any other programming language website.

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

#420

Post by dgellow »

Leynos wrote: post #279
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.

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.

You could also just type the article with your human hands, using your human voice, after having done your LLM interactions. That’s really the best minimum to show that you respect your human audience, use your own voice
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