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Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans

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Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans

#361

Post by adeptima »

My expectations to dear fellow humans - more sophisticated personal insults (ex. give me your cute comments), a freudian slips, hidden messages and motives, first viewer experience with the next cool toy from the hype train, sharing all kind of insecurities, heavy f.. word if very dramatic first person experience happened, border line exposure to the insider info, sharing something your corporate HR gestapo wont appreciate but might help another guy on the line, "i knew the guy who actually did it" stories, motivational statement toward my non-native english, etc

->> ◕ ‿ ◕ <<--

Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans

#362

Post by wvenable »

iammjm wrote: post #15

I believe the issue of proving who is and who isn't really human on the Internet will be a really important issue in the coming years, especially without sacrificing people's right to privacy and anonymity in the process.

I don't think the real issue is LLM posts. The issue with low quality on the Internet has always been quantity. The problem always has been humans who post too much, humans that use software to post too much, and now it's humans who use LLMs to post too much.

The problem with a medium that is completely free and unrestricted is that whomever posts the most sort of wins. I could post this opinion 30-40 times in this thread, using bots and alternative accounts, and completely move the discussion to be only this.

Someone using an LLM is craft a reply is not a problem on it's own. Using it craft a low-effort reply in 3 seconds just to get out is the problem.

Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans

#363

Post by gr8tyeah »

abtinf wrote: post #67

Good. This helps establish it in the HN culture. That’s the purpose of guidelines. 99% of rule enforcement, both IRL and online, comes down to individuals accepting the culture. Rules aren’t really for adversaries, they are for ordinary situations. Adversaries are dealt with differently.

This is only meaningful if enough people read it and agree

Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans

#364

Post by altairprime »

GMoromisato wrote: post #272

I'm here to read what actual humans think. If I wanted to read what an LLM thinks, I could just ask it. But here's where it gets tricky: Do I prefer low-effort, off-the-top-of-my-head reactions, as long as it is human? Or do I want an insightful, well-thought-out response, even if it is LLM-enhanced? Am I here to read authentic humans because I value authenticity for its own sake (like preferring Champagne instead of…

> Do I prefer low-effort, off-the-top-of-my-head reactions, as long as it is human? Or do I want an insightful, well-thought-out response, even if it is LLM-enhanced?

This is an artificial dichotomy. HN’s guidelines specify thoughtful, curious discussion as a specific goal. One-off / pithy / sarcastic throwaway comments are generally unwelcome, however popular they are. Insightful responses can be three words, ten seconds to write and submit, and still be absolutely invaluable. Well-thought-out responses are also always appreciated, even if they tend to attract fewer upvotes than a generic rabble-rousing sentiment about DRM or GPL or Apple that’s been copy-pasted to the past hundred posts about that topic. But LLM-enhanced responses are not only unwelcome but now outright prohibited.

Better an HN with fewer words than an HN with more AI writing words. We’ve been drowned in Show HN by quantity as proof of why already.

Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans

#365

Post by OkayPhysicist »

aprentic wrote: post #287
iammjm wrote: post #15

I believe the issue of proving who is and who isn't really human on the Internet will be a really important issue in the coming years, especially without sacrificing people's right to privacy and anonymity in the process.

I think we're going to have to make some choices. A completely anonymous stranger has no way to prove that they're human that can't be imitated by an AI. We've even seen that, in some cases, AIs can look more human to humans than real humans do. The only solution I can think of to that problem is some sort of provenance system. Even before AI, if some random person told me a thing, I'd ignore them; If my most trusted…

Reputation tracking is the key. The most simple option is open-invite invite-only spaces: Any user can invite more users, but only users with an invite can participate. Most Discord servers work like this, secret societies like the Oddfellows do, as does the other site.

If you keep track of the invite tree, you can "prune" it as needed to reduce moderation load: low quality users don't tend to be the source of high-quality users, and in the cases where they are, those high quality users tend find other people willing to vouch for them faster than their inviter catches a ban.

Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans

#366

Post by tomhow »

Sajarin wrote: post #336

People aren't good at detecting AI generated/edited comments, so unsure how effective this policy will be. Though I guess there are still some obvious signs of AI speak like emdashes and sycophantic (it's not X, it's Y!) speech. Bit of a shameless plug but I wrote a HN AI comment detector game[0] with AI and most of my friends and fellow HN users who tried it out couldn't detect them. [0]: https://psychosis.hn/ [1]:…

Something I've noticed through moderation is that people are much more easily duped by generated comments if they like the content and/or agree with the point. We've seen several cases where a bot-generated comment has been heavily upvoted and sits at the top of the thread for hours, and any comments calling it out for being generated languish at the bottom of the subthread below other enthusiastic, heavily upvoted replies. This shouldn't be surprising, given what we've seen of LLM chatbots being tuned to be sycophantic, but it's interesting to see it in effect on HN.

This is another reason why it's good to email us (hn@ycombinator.com) rather than commenting when you see generated comments.

Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans

#367

Post by bonoboTP »

GMoromisato wrote: post #272

I'm here to read what actual humans think. If I wanted to read what an LLM thinks, I could just ask it. But here's where it gets tricky: Do I prefer low-effort, off-the-top-of-my-head reactions, as long as it is human? Or do I want an insightful, well-thought-out response, even if it is LLM-enhanced? Am I here to read authentic humans because I value authenticity for its own sake (like preferring Champagne instead of…

Humans have more variability and "edge". If a person is passionately arguing for some point of view (perhaps somewhat outside the usual), it signals to me that they probably thought about this and it is a distillation of a long thought process and real-life experience. One could say that the logical argument should stand alone, but reality doesn't work that way. There are many things you have to implicitly trust and believe when you read. Of course lying and bullshitting already existed before ("nobody knows you're a dog" etc etc). But LLMs will really eloquently defend X, not X, X*0.5 and anything inbetween. There is no information content in it, it doesn't refer to an actual human life experience and opinion that someone wants to stand behind. It just means that someone made the LLM output a thing.

Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans

#369

Post by phs318u »

What’s interesting to me is the number of commenters here making a case of the form “use your own words; grammar and spelling are not that important; we’ll know what you mean”, and yet it’s often the case that different discussions will often contain pedants going off-topic correcting someone else’s use of language.

Re-reading the HN guidelines, each seems individually reasonable, yet collectively I’m worried that they create an environment where we can take issue with almost anyone’s comments (as per Cardinal Richelieu’s famous quote: “Give me six lines written by the most honorable person alive, and I shall find enough in them to condemn them to the gallows.”)

Really, all the rules can be compressed into one dictum: don’t be an arsehole. And yet the free speech absolutists will rail against the infringement upon their right to be an arsehole. So where does that leave us? Too many rules leads to suppression of even reasonable speech, while too few leads to a “flight” of reasonable speech. End result: enshitification.

Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans

#370

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

smy20011 wrote: post #21

Agree, AI generated articles & comments provide little to none value other than the original prompt. Please just post the original prompt instead.

Disagree. The prompt holds no information at all. The answer actually discovers information, organizes it, presents it in a way that's easy to read.

Example: "write me an article about hidden settings in SSH". You get back more information than most of HN's previous posts about SSH, in a fraction of the text, and more readable.

Actually, screw it, we should just make a new version of HN that has useful articles written by AI. The human written articles are terrible.

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