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HN is drowning in AI comments

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51–60 of 74 posts

Re: HN is drowning in AI comments

#51

I wonder what the breakdown is between AI-generated comments and AI-assisted comments. If I write anything substantial, I run it through the following prompt: "Please rewrite the following message for clarity, spelling, and grammar, but only return the revised text without any additional commentary."

I understand this if you’re not a native speaker. But if you are, I think this will generally make you sound wooden.

To be fair, comments here are graded on kindness, civility, curiosity, intellectual gravity, technical merit, novelty, thoughtfulness, substantiveness, objective fact, not fulminating, not cross examining, steelmanning vs strawmanning, not containing memes, not containing humor, not expressing positive emotion, not expressing negative emotion, not being snarky, sneering, overly cynical, not cynical enough, being "curmudgeonly", class bias, political bias, religious bias, cultural bias, not using "flamewar style" and many other heuristics.

If you followed all of the guidelines for comments to the letter, you would wind up sounding wooden, if not entirely like an AI.

Re: HN is drowning in AI comments

#52
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The public facing internet is done. HN has been fairly resilient (I think) but even it is beginning to buckle. It’s been sliding for a while but LLMs are the death knell. It was a fun 2 decades. Time to stick to private discords and real life friends from here on out, though.

I don’t think HN is any more resilient. The new account captcha is fairly tame and, while I’m sure they have proxy detectors and other things in place, it doesn’t stop new accounts from posting and getting traction. Someone suggested earlier this week that an invite system should be implemented (I think lobsters has it?) I doubt it would fly here, but yeah.

It's the community moderation that keeps HN resilient, i.e. many-humans-in-the-loop

Re: HN is drowning in AI comments

#54

I feel like to notice something is botslop you have to look at every comment with suspicion first. I don't think I can notice if something was written by an LLM off the bat unless I'm actively looking very hard at it.

When you see multiple → or •, that is a good sign, especially because they appear with poor formatting on HN. Many more signs exist. They are either direct posts or copy-paste without thinking.

I've seen some where they have hallucinated the github account or project name, often matching the hn handle or project name which is slightly different.

Re: HN is drowning in AI comments

#55
post #5
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get the joke and I myself called it awhile back, I just thought we had a bit more time.

We need more jokes on HN. It's the only good way to prove you're human these days.

I don't know. Most of my attempts at humor here seem to attract the moderation PETN.

Re: HN is drowning in AI comments

#56
post #21
post #14

Rocket League and HN were probably 90% of my free time until this year. Destroyed by AI. HN doubly so, since every post is about it too. The addictions are still there, but it's decreasing really fast.

Wait, how is Rocket League affected by AI? I play infrequently these days, but I hadn't noticed anything :(

AI good enough to consistently beat the best players in the world is now common and wreaking havoc on the upper ranks. GC up is now a bot wasteland.

Re: HN is drowning in AI comments

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using HN since 2008 when I created my first account[1] and I use HN differently than most people. I have a group of bookmarked searches that I visit almost daily that relate to technologies that interest me, such as Emacs. In the past year, the searches I perform that relate to web development show a horrifying increase in the amount of Show HN posts that are posted by new accounts, include AI generated des…

The fact that this discussion was flagged might be the final nail in the coffin for me. The huge increase in AI generated comments and posts at HN is a topic that has been discussed on other forums for months now. Complaints include "Orange Reddit", "Orange LinkedIn", etc. But when the topic comes up at HN, it gets flagged. Fuck this.

I don’t care for the karma, but I wish dang would intentionally unflag this and have it on front page so people can voice their concerns.

Re: HN is drowning in AI comments

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think HN is any more resilient. The new account captcha is fairly tame and, while I’m sure they have proxy detectors and other things in place, it doesn’t stop new accounts from posting and getting traction. Someone suggested earlier this week that an invite system should be implemented (I think lobsters has it?) I doubt it would fly here, but yeah.

It's the community moderation that keeps HN resilient, i.e. many-humans-in-the-loop

That fell apart quickly due to sheer scale that AI operates at. Elsewhere in the thread a commenter mentioned a significant increase in Show HN. It is impossible to keep up. I wonder when HN will go down due to scaling issues.
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