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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

#781
post #755

For quite a while, I like use LLM to refine and fix my grammar issue, but my colleagues and professors reminds me that it was way too obvious. They said they can tolerate some mistakes in my words, but no tolerance for AI generated content.

Thanks for putting this so nicely! We'd much rather hear you in your own voice, and the cost of a few mistakes is far less than the cost of losing that. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

I routinely call out people of writing in an LLM assisted fashion that clearly shows they have just been "vibe commenting". You know, just paste it in and copy the output without even thinking. The people who for some insane reason think they are making a genuine conversation with their copy pasting skills and $20/mo subscription. As if they are like the archive.whatever of the AI era. Because those comments are objectively terrible and contribute little. The ones with all the consultant sycophant speak and distracting prose that comes off the default prompt and RLHF.

But that's really what you're now enforcing: writing in an easily detectable LLM prose and voice. LLM detection is very difficult especially at small comment scale texts. There is never proof, only telltale phrases. How will this be enforced? What the heck even is "AI"?

The thing that really frustrates me is that I can't put tokens through a transformer in any way in editing my post? I can't have an LLM turn a bare link after a sentence into a [1]? I can't have it literally do nothing more than spell check in an LLM, but could with a rule based model? Or what about other LLMs or SLMs or classic NLP chained together? Or is it just the transformer?

And it is officially sanctioned that people ought to be keeping in the back of their mind "does this feel LLMish?" instead of "is this a good comment that contributes to the discussion?" Maybe LLM prose is so annoying and insufferably sycophantic that even if all the content and logic was sound, it still should be moderated completely out. But the entire technological form is profane and unclean?

I am 100% not interested in participating in a community that seeks to profile and police the technological infrastructure that its members use. I want my comments judged by the contributions they make and do not make to the discussion. If the LLM makes the comment better, it is good. If it makes it worse, it is bad.

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

#782

For quite a while, I like use LLM to refine and fix my grammar issue, but my colleagues and professors reminds me that it was way too obvious. They said they can tolerate some mistakes in my words, but no tolerance for AI generated content.

If you're referring to speaking in English - in general I think there is a huge amount of flexibility for making mistakes in English. I'm a native speaker, I am so used to hearing various levels of English from different nationalities that i'm almost blind to it. I much prefer to hear someones true voice even if there are a few inaccuracies, so much of a person's personality is conveyed through their quirks and mistakes.

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

#785

Lot of folks on here saying they only want to converse with other humans, for various reasons. But here's the funny thing. I'm pretty sure the frontier models are now smarter than I am, more eloquent, and definitely more knowledgeable, especially the paid versions with built-in search/research capability. I'm also fairly certain that the number of original thoughts in a given discourse on the Internet is fairly small…

> If I'm looking for human engagement, forums make sense. But for an informed discussion, I'm less certain that it's wise to be exclusionary. There is a case to be made that lower quality comments should be hidden or higher quality comments should be surfaced, but that's true regardless of the source, innit?

Good news then, you're currently on a forum! So we all agree that humans > AI, regardless of your thought on the intelligence behind it.

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

#787

We've all heard the phrase "the sum of all human knowledge". I've been feeling more and more that generative AI represents the average of all human knowledge. Which has its place. But a future in which all thought and creativity is averaged away is a bleak one. It's the heat death of thought.

> I've been feeling more and more that generative AI represents the average of all human knowledge. Have you tried the paid versions of frontier models? They certainly do not feel like they spew the average of all human knowledge. It's not uncommon for them to find and interpret the cutting edge of papers in any of the domains that I've asked them questions about.

Yup. And they all sound like slop. Read the papers, comprehend the papers, don't make someone else's computer do it for you.

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

#788
Since we now face a threat of large-scale de-anonymization, a reasonable countermeasure might be using AI to make one's writing style less personally identifying, in order to try and retain some pseudonymity.

    https://simonlermen.substack.com/p/large-scale-online-deanonymization
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47139716
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