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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

#481

Post by cvullit »

I won't name where and which one for the obvious reason that you can and should learn to know better, but I observed a comment that was obviously and blatantly copypasted from an agent, with all the signature "it's not just X, it's Y" patterns, the emdash abuse, the "In summary,' section, generating dozens of replies in organic engagement from people who genuinely couldn't tell the difference between a real comment and an aggregation of a prompted, synthetic response.

Whatever happened to "knowing is half the battle?" Why do we accept this kind of intellectual laziness as exemption from a duty to learn and know better?

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

#482

Post by Kim_Bruning »

dang wrote: post #386

The rule has been around for years, but only in case law, i.e. moderation comments ( https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... ). What's new is that we promoted it to the guidelines. Fortunately I found some things we could cut as well, so https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html actually got shorter. --- Edit: here are the bits I cut: Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pic…

I'd be a wee bit cautious with the "AI edited" part of it; since that might exclude a number of people with disabilities or for whom english is a second (or third, or later) language.

My reading is that the intent is to have a human voice behind the text.

Monitor and see how it goes I guess!

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

#483

Post by jedberg »

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…

Those sentence constructions that are "tells" were also learned from good writers though. But here, I'll let you be the judge. This was a comment I wrote 100% myself on reddit, which was both downvoted and I got multiple DMs referencing it and telling me to "stop posting this AI slop":

https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1pyjkuf/i_...

Granted, it was in a thread about AI and maybe people were on edge, but I was still accused, which to be honest hurt a bit after the effort I put into writing it.

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

#484

Post by zahlman »

altairprime wrote: post #414
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 p…

> 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.

It's a ton of friction compared to ordinary use of a forum; and while I've emailed several times myself, it comes with a sense of guilt (and a feeling that my "several" is probably approximately "several" above average).

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

#485

Post by nekusar »

Without someone actually saying as such, we only have stuff like emdashes and specific word patterns to go by. And someone even moderately vested in hiding AI in plain sight will coach the LLM to use common vernacular.

And with LLMs making blog posts as diss tracks... damn, who knows what this world is coming to.

But the whole "Only Humans, we dont serve YOUR KIND (clanker) here" is purely performative.

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

#486

Post by timacles »

humanfromearth9 wrote: post #357

Sometimes, an AI helps articulate an idea or an intuition. Is that okay, or is it too much already?

Imo AI tends to “fill in the blanks” of what you want to hear. It’s insidious in that regard because it will make a whole seemingly logical and consistent argument purely on what it thinks you want.

Except it’s bullshitting the whole time. While you think this is what you wanted to convey.

Not sure where I’m going with this, but my point is if I pasted this comment into ChatGPT it would make up an argument I never made to support my case that didn’t exist in the first place. Exploring things is useful but just be aware it’s designed to pull bs out of it’s ass and is distinctly not interested in exploring truth or having a real conversation

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

#487

Post by theappsecguy »

wilg wrote: post #434

It's far from proven or obvious whether involving an LLM in your thought process degrades your thought process.

It seems plenty obvious, but there's also scientific backing slowly catching up: https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt...

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

#488

Post by dang »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #456
dang wrote: post #386

The rule has been around for years, but only in case law, i.e. moderation comments ( https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... ). What's new is that we promoted it to the guidelines. Fortunately I found some things we could cut as well, so https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html actually got shorter. --- Edit: here are the bits I cut: Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pic…

> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. > If you flag, please don't also comment that you did. I don't understand why you cut these, they seem important! (I can understand the others, which feel either implied or too specific.)

Of course they're important, but they're also implicitly encoded into the culture. Cutting something from the guidelines doesn't mean the rule is canceled. HN has countless rules that don't appear explicitly in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

I think I'm going to put that one back, though, because it's not a hill I want to die on and I know what arguing with dozens of people simultaneously feels like when you only have 10 minutes.

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

#489

Post by dom96 »

dang wrote: post #386

The rule has been around for years, but only in case law, i.e. moderation comments ( https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... ). What's new is that we promoted it to the guidelines. Fortunately I found some things we could cut as well, so https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html actually got shorter. --- Edit: here are the bits I cut: Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pic…

I’m really curious how this will go. I have a suspicion that we will see more and more accounts all over the internet being controlled by AI agents and no amount of moderation will be able to stop it.

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

#490

Post by 1718627440 »

dang wrote: post #386

The rule has been around for years, but only in case law, i.e. moderation comments ( https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... ). What's new is that we promoted it to the guidelines. Fortunately I found some things we could cut as well, so https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html actually got shorter. --- Edit: here are the bits I cut: Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pic…

Does that mean that is now ok to e.g. comment that you did flag something?
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