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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

#831

Post by ngruhn »

throw10920 wrote: post #688
schopra909 wrote: post #548

Honest question, why were folks posting AI generated comments in the first place? There's such a high inertia to comment. I only comment when I have something to contribute OR find something incredibly interesting. So I'm just baffled, why anyone was using AI to generate comments. Like what was the incentive driving the behavior?

In addition to "Internet points" mentioned above - influence operations, both from nation states (e.g. the PRC 50 Cent Party, and probably the dozen most powerful nations in general), and from gray/black-market marketing companies. Influence is valuable, and HN is a place that people who are aware of it trust highly. (AI generation of random comments helps build "trustworthy" accounts that can then be activated when…

Ok, those are probably not deterred by guidelines though.

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

#832

Post by shevy-java »

I've seen AI-generated comments be used quite a lot, even by real people. When asked why they did so, they could not explain it, or claimed "to reduce spelling mistakes". Which makes no sense; real people make spelling mistakes and typos all the time. Why would that warrant the use of AI? To me it seems as if some people are just mega-lazy, so they use AI; and for testing, too. When they do so, though, they waste the time of other humans, as these other humans suddenly have to "interact" with AI, without this being announced. It is a form of cheating, IMO. On youtube you now find many fake-videos created by AI, without announcement - I don't watch these as I consider it cheating too, when not labeled as such. Admittedly it is getting very hard to distinguish what is real and what is fake. There are some ways to find out, but it is getting really hard to distinguish accurately. Sometimes you see e. g. 10 funny animal videos and only 2 are fake-AI, so these people combine cheating with non-cheating. Very annoying - it degrades youtube, which isn't so bad actually since that is owned by evil Google.

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

#833

Post by brabel »

cobbzilla wrote: post #802
uni_baconcat wrote: post #754

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.

You write well enough to use your own voice. I don’t think it is so binary black/white though. I don’t mind if someone who has no command of English uses a translator. But there is a difference between a translator and an AI/LLM.

LLMs work better as translators than any non-AI translators though. Because they are able to translate not just words, but also capture the context of what's being said. If you translate a common phrase like "home, sweet home" to another language, it may or may not make any sense if you translate it word-by-word, like traditional translators would normally do... but LLMs know "what you mean" and will use the equivalent saying in the target language, even if that use entirely different words.

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

#834

Post by aicoldtrail »

I don't think I'm going to spend the time to paraphrase my worthwhile AI-applied work for such hypocritical rules.

So develop and fund and use AI but manually paraphrase things and don't cite AI?

It is best to cite a source and/or a method.

Do you think it is better to paraphrase and not cite AI?

I don't recall encountering posts on HN that I've wanted to flag as AI.

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

#835

Post by aaron695 »

uni_baconcat wrote: post #754

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.

[dead]

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

#836

Post by yavor-atanasov »

This thread made me think of education (as in schools). To paraphrase:

“Don’t post generated/AI-edited assignments. School is for conversation between humans”

AI can be a great tool for learning, but also can pollute or completely hijack the medium for human interaction and learning.

Having HN flooded with AI generated content will be sad as I like reading it, but losing that same fight at schools will be detrimental.

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

#837

Post by baxtr »

caditinpiscinam wrote: post #745

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.

Yes, it’s the "sum" of which you extract an average.

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

#838

Post by chid »

yavor-atanasov wrote: post #836

This thread made me think of education (as in schools). To paraphrase: “Don’t post generated/AI-edited assignments. School is for conversation between humans” AI can be a great tool for learning, but also can pollute or completely hijack the medium for human interaction and learning. Having HN flooded with AI generated content will be sad as I like reading it, but losing that same fight at schools will be detrimental…

I haven't heard of any recent discussion on the impact of AI on schooling. I agree with you entirely but curious to read any recent thinking on this.

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

#839

Post by txrx0000 »

This seems fine as a short-term solution, but human-only is no good as a long-term rule. The AIs will soon surpass human capability. Even in the present, I think some AI comments are already decent quality. It's just most of them aren't high quality yet.

And I'm worried banning AIs altogether will eventually lead to some form of prove-you-are-human verification to use the site, which will reduce anonymity. Even something seemingly benign like verifying email would mean many unverified accounts like my own will disappear.

And there is a legitimate use for LLM rewrite to counter identification by stylometry, so rewrite shouldn't be banned. I think we'll have to allow the AI stuff at some point, and make a system that incentivizes quality posts regardless of where they come from or how they're written.

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

#840

Post by eptcyka »

chid wrote: post #838
yavor-atanasov wrote: post #836

This thread made me think of education (as in schools). To paraphrase: “Don’t post generated/AI-edited assignments. School is for conversation between humans” AI can be a great tool for learning, but also can pollute or completely hijack the medium for human interaction and learning. Having HN flooded with AI generated content will be sad as I like reading it, but losing that same fight at schools will be detrimental…

I haven't heard of any recent discussion on the impact of AI on schooling. I agree with you entirely but curious to read any recent thinking on this.

It is horrendous - it seems that oral verification is required to test pupils skills - this does not scale. People not using LLMs to finish assignments are getting penalized by lower grades, people using llms to finish assignmnets learn nothing.
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