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How much of HN is AI?

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Re: How much of HN is AI?

#211

Post by threethirtytwo »

goalieca wrote: post #64
cubefox wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say, AI is probably the biggest thing to happen in tech, full stop. LLMs went from a toy to highly capable (along many dimensions) in just a few years. Which makes it very likely that in a few years more, we will be seeing crazy capabilities that leave us humans increasingly behind.

I think microprocessors were the biggest thing, until the internet, then the web, open source, system on a chip, virtualization, cloud, .. When each of those things came in, there was definitely some stumbling but I remember things being less ambiguous about being good than LLMs.

The ambiguity partly comes from denial. LLMs in the end, to be brutally honest, replace us. That is the direction it's headed and some people can't face the cold hard truth.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#212

Post by threethirtytwo »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #109
yndoendo wrote: post #81

AI has turned me away from HN more and more. Most of the content is about using some data center based ML provider. My view is how so many ignore the environmental harm these constructs are doing; increasing ambient temperatures, inducing heavy metals into the water table, decreasing the access to water for human consumption in numerous drought areas, hostel ambient noise ... The wealth who are the majority finical b…

I really wish there was a way to filter out discussions about AI on HN. It feels like lately they take up a good 1/3 of posts on the front page. I don't want to hear about some new AI startup.

There is a really easy way to do this. Ask an AI to write a browser plugin to filter out the AI discussions.

Ask AI to save you from AI.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#213

Post by cljacoby »

dang wrote: post #205
my-next-account wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I aint got none.

That's fine, but it would be helpful to see examples. People often make generic claims about astroturfing, bots, etc. that don't hold up in practice when we look at the data. Bots and genai comments also exist, of course, and are not allowed here ( https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated ).

Does HN do proactive detection and/or flagging of comments determined to be AI generated?

I understand if information publicized on how this process might work is intentionally restricted, so as not to be easily circumvented. I'm also not asking this in a pointed or judgmental way with respect to HN, I'm mostly just curious how various social platforms are approaching this problem.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#214

Post by falcor84 »

mrweasel wrote: post #203
anthonypasq wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i just gotta say that i find it hard to believe that this comment is true for you but you hang out on hackernews. almost everyone here is a software engineer or works in tech, they all use ai all day to do their entire jobs. > even thought the benefits aren't all that clear yet it isnt 2023 anymore. wtf are you talking about. >he hype will die down, especially once we start to see the actual costs, e.g. ChatGPT doesn…

> they all use ai all day to do their entire jobs I assure you they do not, many truly do not care and don't want to. That's just what the hype and the article and the stories tell you. The HN bubble tells you that's true, but 90% of my co-workers don't even want to touch Claude, despite being given a license. And again, if e.g. ChatGPT is providing so much value, why aren't people buying?

> why aren't people buying?

They have "more than 50 million consumer subscribers" and "More than 9 million paying business users" [0]. That's for example more subscribers than for Adobe Creative Cloud.

[0] https://openai.com/index/scaling-ai-for-everyone/

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#216

Post by ktm5j »

seizethecheese wrote: post #112

This is categorizing with a pretty broad brush, it seems. I took a look at a random day, and the articles that are claimed to be AI are Waymo publishing a model for self driving cars and a post about scams in Apple News ads. Sure, Waymo’s model is AI and the scams in Apple News are often AI generated, but this isn't some sort of monoculture of LLM articles. Ironically, this article could have been improved by using a…

You took a look at 5 posts made on one single day and then categorized all of the other days.. seems like you're good at categorizing with a broad brush yourself. Based on my experience as a pretty heavy HN consumer, I'm with the article author.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#217

Post by mrweasel »

dang wrote: post #207
mrweasel wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems a bit self-reinforcing. AI makes almost zero (positive) impact on my day to day life and isn't actually something I interact with directly and the same holds true for most people I talk to. There's a few of my friends in tech for whom AI has obviously massively changed how they work, but again not in a clear positive direction. To me there seems to be a push to heavily prompte LLMs, even thought the benefits…

LLMs have helped us keep HN up and still (relatively) fast amid a huge onslaught of new traffic over the last year or so. We've been able to solve problems and find opportunities for optimization that we'd never have gotten to without the help of Claude or ChatGPT. Although this is one of those threads where people love to report how much they dislike HN, how it's a poor shadow of its former self, and how they barely…

Hopefully HN is just getting more popular, but isn't a large part of the "huge onslaught of new traffic" driven by AI companies scraping the site for content or writing comments for various reasons?

Fixing the problems created by LLMs using LLMs seems like a bit like hiring a bully for security to prevent that same bully from beating you up.

But yes, there's plenty of positive things that are now possible. See as a combined net-positive vs net-negative, I'm still leaning towards the net-negative.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#218

Post by mring33621 »

This is a new question that is well worth sitting with!

The shape of the current Hacker News experience certainly implies an abundance of AI generated content.

A quiet approach to testing this insight is to ask the HN community itself, then assess the resulting replies for the load-bearing surface features.

But at the end of the day, aren't we all waiting to unpack our throughlines?

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#219

Post by skydhash »

altcognito wrote: post #56
cubefox wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say, AI is probably the biggest thing to happen in tech, full stop. LLMs went from a toy to highly capable (along many dimensions) in just a few years. Which makes it very likely that in a few years more, we will be seeing crazy capabilities that leave us humans increasingly behind.

You really have to expand the list to ridiculous levels before you get to something as big. We've already left humans behind in many ways (but in others we've failed to build LLMs that know how to find the gaps in implementation that humans are leaving out) Cynics really say stuff like "but it's been 3 years and all they can claim is that it's changed text to speech, speech to text, photos to text, text to photos, pr…

> You really have to expand the list to ridiculous levels before you get to something as big

Instead of expanding the list, it would be better to widen your vision. Email was more transformative than AI is right now. Unix, then Linux was more transformative. If you have a magic wand and remove AI, I think barely anyone would be impacted, but removing something like windows would be like erasing computers. And removing Linux would wipe most of the internet services.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#220

Post by shwaj »

seizethecheese wrote: post #202
dgellow wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article already states that distinction. It doesn’t say that everything is written by AI, the heatmap even has a legend with different colors for “article about ai” and “written by ai”

The articles I cite were in the “about ai” category not “written by ai”.

I don't know about the article about Apple News scams, but how is an article about Waymo publishing a model for self driving cars not about AI?
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