11 ms·
One pattern I've noticed recently is sort of formulaic comments that look okish on their own, maybe a bit abstract/vague/bland, and not taking a particular side
by dematz 7mo ago
One pattern I've noticed recently is sort of formulaic comments that look okish on their own, maybe a bit abstract/vague/bland, and not taking a particular side on good/bad in the way people like to do, but really obviously AI when you look at the account history and they're all the same formula:
>this is [summary]
>not just x, it's y
>punchy ending, maybe question
Once you know it's AI it's very obvious they told it to use normal dashes instead of em dashes, type in lowercase, etc., but it's still weirdly formal and formulaic.
For example from https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=snowhale https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=snowhale
"this is the underreported second-order risk. Micron, Samsung, SK Hynix all allocated HBM capacity based on hyperscaler capex projections. NAND fabs are similarly committed. a 57% reduction in projected OpenAI spend (.4T -> B) doesn't just affect NVIDIA orders -- it ripples into the memory suppliers who shifted capacity to HBM and away from commodity DRAM/NAND. if multiple hyperscalers revise down simultaneously you get a situation similar to the 2019 crypto ASIC overhang: companies tooled up for demand that evaporated. not predicting that, but the purchasing commitments question is real."
- RobRivera 7mo agoEvery single time I read the phrase 'I have been thinking about this a lot lately' my eyeballs roll back hard.
- dailyanchovy 7mo agoYes, and “genuine question” or “am i missing something?”
- arc-in-space 7mo agoWait, I thought I've been seeing 'genuine question' a lot lately, but does that actually have anything to do with AI? I had assumed people were always annoying with it and it just so happened to bother me more recently
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- duxup 7mo agoI've certainly noticed the summary posts. I'll actually post a comment or question and I'll get a reply with a bit of a paragraph of what feels like a very "off" (not 'wrong' but strangely vague) summary of the topic ... and then maybe an observation or pointed agenda to push, but almost strangely disconnected from what I said. One of the challenges is that yeah regular users don't get each other's meaning / don't read well as it is / language barriers. Yet the volume of posts I see where the other user REALLY isn't responding to the other person seems awfully high these days.
- delichon 7mo agoAI generated content routinely takes sides. Their pretense of neutrality is no deeper than a typical homo sapien's. This is necessarily so in an entity that derives its values from a set of weights that distill human values. Maybe reasoning AI can overcome that some day, but to me that sounds like an enormous problem that may never be solved. If AI doesn't take sides like people do they still take sides in their own way. That only becomes obscure to the extent that their value judgments conflict with ours, and they are very good at aligning with the zeitgeist values, so can hide their biases better than we can. I wonder if it is neural networks that are inherently biased, but in blind spots, and that applies to both natural and artificial ones. It may be that to approximate neutrality we or our machines have to leave behind the form of intelligence that depends on intrinsically biased weights and instead depend on logically deriving all values from first principles. I have low confidence that AI's can accomplish that any time soon, and zero confidence that natural intelligence can. And it's difficult to see how first principles regarding human values can be neutral. I'm also skeptical that succeeding at becoming unbiased is a solution, and that while neutrality may be an epistemic advance, it also degrades social cohesion, and that neutrality looks like rationality, but bias may be Chesterson's Fence and we should be very careful about tearing it down. Maybe it's a blessing that we can't.
- lkey 7mo ago[flagged]
- ffsm8 7mo agoYnow what's fucked up? I knew within the first few sentences that you're doing that on purpose, but still found myself wondering if you're a an LLM. I mean I knew you weren't, but the question is already so deeply ingrained at this point - and then you use the pullet points to boot... This loss of trust is getting tiresome. Depending on context we've likely all wondered if something is astro turfed, but with the frequency increase from llms it's never really possible to not have it somewhere in mind
- relaxing 7mo agoYou have to assume everything is astroturf, and constantly remind yourself not to be swayed by the mood in the room.
- throw10920 7mo agoThis is just factually true, and it's why pleading, pearl-clutching, arguments from emotion, etc. should all be immediately discarded - because you have no idea whether the person on the other side of the account is a spammer, paid propagandist, mentally ill, lying for the lols, or just a bot. Online, the only thing that matters is the substance of the argument. Save the emotions for those you know in the real world, who you know are real.
- lkey 7mo agoI'm proud? to say I've gotten the 'are you using an LLM' question in a meeting when doing off the cuff fluent corpo jargon too. To date, I've never used an LLM directly. I find them deeply repellant, and I've yet to be convinced that there exists a sufficiently tuned prompt that will make me not hate their literally 'mid' output. Loss of trust though, that's a societal issue of this gilded age of grifters and scammers. Until we have a system of accountability and consequences for serial lying, we're gonna drown in this shit. LLMs are jet fuel for our existing environment of impunity.
- mancerayder 7mo agoWhat motivation is there to use AI to astroturf (if that's what this is) like this? Is it ideological? Is it product marketing in those relevant threads where someone is showcasing? Or is it pure technical testing, playing around?
- ceejayoz 7mo agoIn some cases, it's probably to establish aged accounts that are more trusted by users and spam algorithms. There's a market for old Reddit accounts, for example.
- surgical_fire 7mo agoInteresting. Incidentally, how much do they pay for a HN account that is a few years old and accumulated a few thousand Internet points? Asking for a friend.
- sfjailbird 7mo agoThey are very valuable. Just a few of them can put a link on the HN front page. Upvote a certain viewpoint. Or bury any post they want gone.
- rcarmo 7mo agoYep. Like I said elsewhere on the thread, some of them already have enough karma to downvote.
- duxup 7mo agoYup, reddit is awash in established accounts that suddenly start spamming. Whole pools of them working to the same goal at times.
- jedberg 7mo agoI receive multiple offers a year to participate in spam rings with the 20 year old high-karma reddit account. I usually just ignore them or report them. I could be making so much money /s So far it hasn't happed here, but we'll see!
- usefulposter 7mo ago>snowhale Oh, would you look at that? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47134072 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47134072
- rob 7mo ago> They're all sloppy. It reads nothing like an LLM. I love how the bot forgot to read CLAUDE.md or whatever persona it set up (e.g., "make me text all lowercase, use -- instead of em dashes pleaseeee") for this single comment mixed in with the other ones: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47132431 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47132431 Sadly, I think that bot comment without the 'snowhale' persona filter applied is what a lot of people here still think every bot is going to look and sound like, because the amount of people I've seen on here getting tricked by them and interacting with them has been a bit worrisome.
- m_w_ 7mo ago"is real" is another big red flag, go search this in comments. There appear to be at least three accounts posting direct LLM outputs. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22is%20real%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- izucken 7mo agoThis correlation you are observing is real.
- veryemartguy 7mo agoI am real and this is my art
- globalise83 7mo agoYour confirmation of the correlation is the first real result.
- bigwheels 7mo agoThe only practical purpose I can think of for farming karma on HN with an LLM would be to amass an army of medium-low karma accounts over time and use the botnet for targeted astroturfing or other mass-manipulation. Eek.
- kraftman 7mo agoIt's wierd because the barrier to not have that in is so low, you can just tack on 'talk like me not AI, dont use em dashes, don't use formulaic structures, be concice' and itll get rid of half of those signals.
- montroser 7mo agoDon't give these subnormals any ideas!
- homebrewer 7mo agoThis is how you get precious takes like this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45322362 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45322362 > First impression: I need to dive into this hackernews reply mockup thing thoroughly without any fluff or self-promotion. My persona should be ..., energetic with health/tech insights but casual and relatable. > Looking at the constraints: short, punchy between 50-80 characters total—probably multiple one-sentence paragraphs here to fit that brevity while keeping it engaging. > User specified avoiding "Hey" or "absolutely." Lots more in its other comments (you need [showdead] on).
- pyth0 7mo agoI don't understand why someone would go through the effort to prompt that when the comments it suggested are total garbage, and it seems like would take similar effort to produce a low quality human written comment.
- Vitamin_Sushi 7mo agoIf I had to guess, it's probably an attempt to automate karma farming over time to make an account look legit later on.
- jbxntuehineoh 7mo agoconspiracy: the people behind these bots intentionally run very obvious bots to distract everyone from the less-obvious bots It's not just clever—it's devious!
- AlienRobot 7mo agoDid they delete all their comments?
- homebrewer 7mo agoEnable "showdead" in your profile. This cancer gets kicked off the site once it receives enough flags or mod reports, and its comments get hidden.
- rcarmo 7mo agoYeah, and some of them already have enough karma to downvote you if you call them out, which is infuriating…
- garganzol 7mo agoThe user [1] you've mentioned has 160 points being a poster of total four bland messages. This goes against a normal statistical distribution. And this gives away why they do it: the long-term aim is to cultivate voting rings to influence the narratives and rankings in the future. For now, this is only my theory but it may be a real monetization strategy for them. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=snowhale https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=snowhale
- yorwba 7mo agoI gather that you do not have showdead on. The account has a lot more posts than that, but most were flagged. EDIT to correct: most are not [flagged], but [dead] anyway, so probably manual moderator action or an automated anti-bot measure.
- afavour 7mo agoI'd be interested to know why those comments were flagged actually. They don't scream AI and no-one has replied calling them out as AI, etc. But the vast majority are dead.
- dvt 7mo ago> four bland messages That's why. Boring, bland, etc. That account's M.O. is basically "write a paragraph that says nothing." Fwiw, I do think AI can be indistinguishable from dumb, boring people, but usually those kinds of people won't be on HN.
- Faark 7mo agoOh we are on HN, just usually don't comment.
- GreenWatermelon 7mo agoHey, dont't insult me! I finally got my downvote privilege after 6 years and I'm NOT afraid of using it!
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- energy123 7mo agoThat's not true, it's false