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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#411

Post by gabriel666smith »

HelloUsername wrote: post #358

[flagged]

Inconsistent capitalisation ('Twitter' vs 'reddit'); subtly using the outdated name for 'Twitter' as most humans do; the genuinely hard-to-parse final clause of the comment.

Though I note it didn't say "read comments by other humans", only "read comments by humans", so confirmed AI.

I think the guidelines here work quite well, and expect a good-faith interpretation, which they mostly receive.

I think you're asking for some sort of empirical verification of "this is / is not LLM text" (which seems impossible), but there's no real reason to expect the existence of LLMs to change that this website is, generally, interacted with in a good-faith way. People are really good at calling others out on here -- I doubt that will change.

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

#412

Post by TacticalCoder »

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 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

On a site like HN it's kinda easy to vet for at least those that already had thousands of karma before ChatGPT had its breakthrough moment a few years ago.

Now an AI could be asked to "Use my HN account and only write in my style" and probably fool people but I take it old-timers (HN account wise) wouldn't, for the most part, bother doing something that low. Especially not if the community says it's against the guidelines.

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

#413

Post by salicaster »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #335

I wish more people would filter their comments through AI. It has so many benefits. If you're being emotional, it can detect that and rewrite your comment to be less confrontational and more constructive. If you're positing a position out of ignorance or as an armchair expert, it can verify your claims before posting. Most of the mod's problems would be solved if every comment were filtered through the HN guidelines…

> If you're being emotional, it can...

It can't. It will rewrite anything you give it.

> it can verify your claims before posting

It can't.

> You don't need to be afraid of it

Nobody is afraid of it. It's annoying. General population cannot be trusted to use it in whatever idealistic way you are imagining.

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

#414

Post by altairprime »

arrsingh wrote: post #381

There should be a "flag as AI" link in addition to "flag" and then a setting for people to show flagged as AI. Once the flagged as AI reaches a certain threshold then it disappears unless you enable "Show AI". Maybe once enough posts have been flagged like that then that corpus could be used to train an AI to automatically detect content generated by AI. That would be cool. Maybe the HN site wouldn't add this feature…

‘Flag’ is an algorithmic flag only, and there are no humans in the flag algorithm’s processing loop. They may monitor and react to the ‘queue’ of flagged articles, and they can do special mod things with flagged posts. But if you want to report a guidelines violation for AI-assisted writing to the mods, just email the mods (contact link in the footer) subject “AI-assisted writing flag” or similar with a link to the post/comment. It works, I know, I’ve done it before. It takes maybe 60 seconds and there is no other way on the site (seemingly by OG design!) to guarantee human review but that email.

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

#418

Post by xboxnolifes »

tyg13 wrote: post #409
jedberg wrote: post #359

I'm absolutely 100% for this policy. My only caution is that good writers and LLMs look very similar, because LLMs were trained on a corpus of good writers. Good writers use semicolons and em-dashes. Sometimes we used bulleted lists or Oxford commas. So we should make sure to follow that other HN rule, and assume the person on the other end is a good faith actor, and be cautious about accusing someone of using AI. (I…

I don't really think that good writing and LLM writing looks all that similar. It's not always easy to spot (and maybe HN users aren't always doing a great job at it), but even the best LLM output tends to have an "LLM smell" to it that's hard to avoid. Like, sure, LLM writing is almost always grammatically correct, spelled correctly, formatted correctly, etc., which tends to be true of good writing. But there's a ce…

LLMs have good writing in the same way that technical manuals can have good writing. It might all be correct, but it's usually not a good read.

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

#420

Post by Someone1234 »

jacquesm wrote: post #193
Someone1234 wrote: post #84

"AI-edited comments" is a very interesting one. Where is the line between a spelling/grammar/tone checker like Grammarly, that at minimum use N-Grams behind the scenes, and something that is "AI" edited? What I am asking is, is "AI" in this context fully featured LLMs, or anything that improves communication via an automated system. I think many people have used these "advanced" spellcheckers for years before Chatgpt…

Trying to lawyer this is the wrong approach. When in doubt: don't.

That feels very uncharitable.

When a policy is introduced to seemingly guard against new problems, but happens to be inadvertently targeting preexisting and common technology, I don't feel like it is "lawyering" it to want clarity on that line.

For example, it could be argued this forbids all spellcheckers. I don't think that is the implied intent, but the spectrum is huge in the spellchecker space. From simple substitutions + rule-based grammar engines through to n-grams, edit-distance algorithms, statistical machine translation, and transformer-based NLP models.

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