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Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles

• deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
• ranger_danger 2mo ago
  Similar discussion on the other site: https://lobste.rs/s/ktew3s/who_does_anubis_actually_stop#c_cjsk7i https://lobste.rs/s/ktew3s/who_does_anubis_actually_stop#c_c...
• edoceo 2mo ago
  Maybe just adding down-vote to submissions would do?
  • jagged-chisel 2mo ago
    We have “flag”
    • bakugo 2mo ago
      As far as I understand, "flagging" is intended for things that break the guidelines. AI-generated content is explicitly banned, but only in comments, not submissions. I think it would be great if AI-generated submissions were outright banned as they fundamentally break the balance of effort that HN was built upon, but as was already stated by another user, YC is heavily invested in AI so there's a conflict of interest there.
      • al_borland 2mo ago
        Not posting for self promotion is in the guidelines. I have to assume anyone pushing out AI articles is primarily looking for traffic and self promotion, as they didn’t care enough about the topic to write their own opinion.
        • minimaxir 2mo ago
          Self promotion isn't banned, otherwise Show HNs wouldn't exist. The exact guideline, emphasis mine: > Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.
        • add-sub-mul-div 2mo ago
          Do the guidelines even matter if they're not enforced? This place is drowning in AI shovelware submissions from accounts that are only used for self promotion.
      • jagged-chisel 2mo ago
        Consensus ultimately determines what the guidelines are. There’s no one enforcing how “flag” is being used (i.e. you are not asked why you want to flag something.) Guideline or not, I’m using “flag” on content that I feel absolutely does not belong on HN. If enough people hold the same sentiment and flag a particular post for being AI-generated, then it falls off the home page because it was AI-generated.
  • JimsonYang 2mo ago
    Hn rarely allows people to downvote,only after you become an active member for many years And im sure this was designed in order to encourage positive discussion
    • jagged-chisel 2mo ago
      There is no longer a downvote on submissions.
      • JimsonYang 2mo ago
        Do you know the reason? Allowing down voting on comments but not on submissions?
        • al_borland 2mo ago
          This could be a false memory, but I think it’s the idea that the submission downvotes should be reserved for things that break the rules, and in that case, the post should be flagged instead.
          • what 2mo ago
            Shouldn’t that be the case for comments too then?
    • ranger_danger 2mo ago
      As for the ability to downvote comments, my understanding is that the only requirement is having at least 500 karma.
      • Aachen 2mo ago
        As of a few years ago I can confirm that. Don't need (as stated by GP) to be active for years, at least, depending on how much and what/where/when you post. Being the first reasonable-sounding or insider-knowledge comment on a new article that then becomes popular gets you ~1/7th of the way with 2 minutes of effort per attempt; being the first to post from an RSS feed of a here-popular blog can get you +500 points in a single go. Just posting regularly, not doing anything special to farm, will get you there in a few months
• dawnerd 2mo ago
  Considering YC invests in AI I doubt you’ll get anything of the sort. Too many people here also think you just have to give in and accept (abuser mentality IMO).
  • browski 2mo ago
    [flagged]
    • lkt 2mo ago
      I don't think that's a very good comparison. People can drive a car without an expert but they can't build a car. People can use software without being an expert but still require an expert to build software. AI could provided assistance with building both cars and software, but you still need a decent level of knowledge in either field to get a good result.
      • defrost 2mo ago
        > People can drive a car without an expert Not every person can drive a car. > but they can't build a car. Not every person is unable to build a car. Eg: my father, born 1935, still alive, has built double axle trailers, cars and vehicles that work, medical caravans for St Johns Ambulance, ... His education was six years of primary school and these were all "side projects" for himself or for his community. > you still need a decent level of knowledge in either field and the barrier to picking up sufficient knowledge to safely create software, cars, even ground effect flying boats isn't that high for normal human beings .. although it does require a certain can do attitude.
      • browski 2mo ago
        Programmers do not build a computer. EEs and computer engineers do that. They are driving (lol) towards the sale of a computer with a model on chip without a programmer salary and benefits adding to cost and resource use (all the tools of the trade need to be stored and copied around). This is capitalism, not honorific obligationism! Saving your job is no one else's burden! Disrupt! (YC crowd 15 years ago). Oh how the turn tables. Move the context of the code to the presentation layer and eliminate state by keeping the hardware focused on computing geometric transforms. Biggidy bam label the data on the display and save both geometry and labels There's no reason for biz logic context to exist in code.
• JimsonYang 2mo ago
  > why is the regular voting system not enough Voting systems can be gamed and as HN becomes bigger and bigger it'll start to attract unsavory audiences who have an agenda.
  • Arubis 2mo ago
    Setting aside that this is subjective, I think it’s safe to say that from the POV of most of this site’s target audiences, that “start” happened a long time ago. PG’s essay on submarine articles didn’t come out of nowhere, and he hasn’t been active here in…a decade? Ish?
    • stackghost 2mo ago
      My original account dated to 2010 and even then he wasn't very active
• CqtGLRGcukpy 2mo ago
  A problem I see is that what someone may consider to be AI-generated actually isn't. And the AI checkers aren't reliable enough to definitely enough say something is AI-generated.
  • bakugo 2mo ago
    If something like this was implemented, the benefit of the doubt would have to be given in ambiguous cases, but I don't think it's that hard to tell most of the time. The latest codemaxxed models all tend to write in very distinct, instantly recognizable ways unless carefully instructed otherwise (honestly a good thing if you want to avoid wasting time reading AI text). A great example is this submission that's currently #1 on the front page (which is also just a thinly veiled advertisement): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48884853 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48884853
  • esjeon 2mo ago
    Yup, and calling out a human-written article as AI-generated would be a serious insult. AI-flagging would incur bigger damage to the community than just having AI-generated contents around.
• jaredcwhite 2mo ago
  I'm of the deepest conviction AI-generated text should not show up at all. Proving that however can be difficult (obvious LLM tells aside). Requiring evidence of authentic human authorship is also difficult, though increasingly I lean towards communities where that is a given for any legitimate shares.
  • stackghost 2mo ago
    >increasingly I lean towards communities where that is a given for any legitimate shares. I have a hard time finding these communities
    • dawnerd 2mo ago
      Mastodon, but the hard part is discovery for sure.
  • ldoughty 2mo ago
    What qualifies as AI generated? If a human writes it then has AI improve/fix it, does that count? How do you tell which is the case? If we don't allow AI help at all, is that perhaps discriminating against those who don't feel comfortable posting with imperfect English? I agree in principle, but am concerned in implementation... I'm not sure we can be fair without high risk of discrimination Edit: typo fix Edit: or am I AI?! And making edits looks more legit.... (To be clear: I'm not, I play by rules)
    • fuckaiwriter 2mo ago
      [flagged]
      • minimaxir 2mo ago
        AI written comments have been more constructive than what you have been commenting thus far in this post.
        • 2mo ago
• simonreiff 2mo ago
  The recent rule addition to the Guidelines says this: "Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans." And I think that covers comments, but I'd be happy to see it also cover articles that are blatantly and primarily if not exclusively AI-generated. But how much AI is permitted? For instance: I'm writing a blog post now. It's all mine. If I include an AI-generated cartoon at the end, just to illustrate something, but not to be the whole or primary point of the article, is that AI-generated? Would the rule be conservative in nature to the extent that mostly human but clearly also AI-enhanced might get flagged but it's in the discretion of the moderators? How would you propose enforcing as to articles (versus comments which are usually quite obvious and thankfully have pretty much stopped being AI-generated since the rule was implemented, for the most part)?
  • matheusmoreira 2mo ago
    Asking questions like that nearly got me kicked out of Lobsters.
  • visarga 2mo ago
    How about if you did part of your research with AI, then typed the text yourself?
    • simonreiff 2mo ago
      That's a good question. My view is that AI-assisted research is an important and valid use, and getting human-written articles and papers is (I think) the whole point of this thread. However, a lot of the academic or technical posts on this site have turned out to include AI hallucinations (a problem that is not just on HN, in fairness). If an article or paper contains nonexistent or obviously, blatantly wrong citations, then I feel very strongly that such content is disrespectful to the HN audience, certainly to me, because I've just wasted my time trying to take the author seriously only to discover that the argument was founded on a hallucination. In a sense, it doesn't matter to me whether the hallucination was due to AI or not -- if a person puts in bogus citations, AI-generated or otherwise, my view is that their article or paper fully deserves to be flagged so that we don't waste other people's time.
• matheusmoreira 2mo ago
  That will only further increase the stigma surrounding LLMs. On Lobsters it actually got to the point where I no longer felt welcome on the site, even though I don't use LLMs to generate articles. The constant "this is AI slop" commentary is noisy and tiresome as well.
  • tadfisher 2mo ago
    Why would you no longer feel welcome?
    • matheusmoreira 2mo ago
      Saw three years worth of my work be classified as "slop" because a few months ago I subscribed to and started using Claude. Had someone describe me as a slop fetishist, as though I was some kind of exhibitionist. Got flagged so much I became the second most flagged user on the site according to their own statistics. Got told to delete my account by the website itself. Got directly told to leave by other users. I think the only reason I didn't is enough people messaged me privately to ask me to stay. It got to the point I'm sitting on reviewed and tested patches for Mesa that I'm too ashamed to submit because of Claude's participation in their making.
      • asdff 2mo ago
        Sounds like the point is getting across to you a little bit.
        • matheusmoreira 2mo ago
          The prejudice? You bet.
          • asdff 2mo ago
            More that people want to deal with the real you.
• Retr0id 2mo ago
  Regarding 1, I think a) a sizeable fraction of voters are not able to recognize AI-generated text b) many who notice don't care, or are willing to overlook it if the premise is interesting enough. (The latter is true for me, on occasion) Maybe we need a two-dimensional voting system: good/bad, ai/human. I think the second axis could cut down on meta-discussions over how much of the article was AI-generated.
  • DaiPlusPlus 2mo ago
    > many who notice don't care, or are willing to overlook it if the premise is interesting enough I imagine the set of articles that are somehow both interesting-enough-to-read but not interesting-enough-to-write is smaller than you'd think.
    • Retr0id 2mo ago
      In most cases the bar is not "is it worth reading" but "is it worth discussing"
      • asdff 2mo ago
        Why even go to this site then? If it is all llm posts and llm comments, just prompt claude to make you a self hosted truman show esque forum to do your venting and what have you’s with the llm fodder.
  • andrewmutz 2mo ago
    Why do we need anything more than good/bad? If there is a great post on a topic and the author used AI when generating it, what’s so bad about that?
    • Retr0id 2mo ago
      Different people weight the slop factor differently, which is the main source of pain at the moment. (For example, another top-level comment in this thread suggests banning AI-generated content outright)
• PaiDxng 2mo ago
  [flagged]
• kgwxd 2mo ago
  Sounds like a good job for AI. Why should humans have to waste their time on it? Accounts that post any should just get banned and deleted.
• user3939382 2mo ago
  Great so I can use a CSS rule to hide anything with the flag.
• jeremyjh 2mo ago
  The regular voting system is not enough because posts can't be downvoted and for some reason many people are not bothered by the notion of reading something no one bothered to write. The issue is complicated by the fact that there can be substantial effort invested in a process outside of the writing itself - and so AI written does not guarantee that the content will not valuable. But I'm inclined to punish it anyway to establish a norm of valuing genuine human communication. I think this norm has always been present but we didn't know until we'd really explored the alternatives. I spend a LOT of time reading AI generated content because I use AI a lot for various purposes - maybe I'm more sensitive to its voice than some. AI voice always bothers me and its been getting more annoying the more I notice it, but there is a huge difference in reading responses to my own prompts and in reading the response to a prompt I haven't seen, when I don't know how many revisions there were, when I don't know if a human mind reviewed it at all before clicking send. It becomes an unacceptable distraction because I don't know if I'm investing more time in the content than the author did, when in normal written communication the author would be putting in at least 5x the work.
  • visarga 2mo ago
    I get annoyed when I see AI telltale signs too, but for example in my case I type 10x more than the final piece, is it really AI generated or just reworded? I don't use AI to fix my comments, just when I want to format article size pieces I post on my blog.
    • jeremyjh 2mo ago
      People keep asking this but I don't see how this is even a consideration - it isn't going to have AI voice if AI didn't write it. To some extent humans have picked up some of these tells but part of the writing process involves reading your own work, noticing things that are awkward, and rewriting them. If you aren't investing in the writing process even that much, I don't really want to read it anyway. My entire position: I'm not interested in reading text that sounds like it was written by AI.
      • lelanthran 2mo ago
• mattas 2mo ago
  Might be more appropriate to add a "not AI" flag at this point.
• wxw 2mo ago
  +1, I would love to stop reading AI slop.
• deadbabe 2mo ago
  This makes sense if AI articles are bad or low quality, but what if one day, the AI generated content is actually good? As good or even better than what any human creates? Is it purely just a "human supremacist" desire that fuels the motivation to ban or block such articles?
  • fuckaiwriter 2mo ago
    [flagged]
  • unsungNovelty 2mo ago
    Imagine you writing in your style. Now imagine 1000s of you writing. That's LLM. Just like you don't like eating the same thing everyday, it gets boring very easy. It irritates even more easily. It's not about the end output. End output is already good IMO. Now, the sentiment is "if you don't give a damn about writing what's on your mind, why should we give a damn about reading it?" It doesn't matter how bad your writing is. You have a flavour to it. You write and make it better. Not to mention, everytime I write something, my thoughts get clearer and clearer. Vibing an article kills this process. It's about the unknown unknowns. You don't even know what you don't know until you start writing. LLM doesn't help you here. It might help you get some likes.
  • tom_ 2mo ago
    A problem for us to deal with when we encounter it.
    • deadbabe 2mo ago
      In a few months
      • tom_ 2mo ago
        So need to think about it now. Our future selves will be much better placed to deal with it.
• minimaxir 2mo ago
  This is something that works better on paper in practice. Namely, there are a hell of a lot of false positives of AI use which frequently causes shitstorms on social media where someone says "AI?" in bad faith and now the OP has to defend themselves and in the case of writing a blog post there aren't as concrete ways to defend yourself. (no, demanding the edit history of the post is not reasonable) Hacker News adopting such a feature would likely do more harm than good.
  • Joel_Mckay 2mo ago
    uBlock Origin users already filter a large portion of "AI" slop sites. Saves a lot of time when searching for something specific. =3 https://github.com/alvi-se/ai-ublock-blacklist https://github.com/alvi-se/ai-ublock-blacklist https://github.com/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist https://github.com/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist https://github.com/Stevoisiak/Stevos-AI-Blocklist/ https://github.com/Stevoisiak/Stevos-AI-Blocklist/
    • minimaxir 2mo ago
      Just from looking at the sites in the BlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist blocklist, it blocks anything tangent to AI such as Hugging Face and other model developers like Mistral/Z.ai, not sites that actually post AI slop. That's a good example of the exact problem with such a broad stroke rule.
      • Joel_Mckay 2mo ago
        In general, each blacklist targets a different facet of slop content farm structures. Some LLM use-cases like search are legitimate, but most traffic volume is spam/slop related. Depends on your use-case, but most people don't need content used in network nuisances like YC AstroTurf posts. =3
        • minimaxir 2mo ago
          Being carelessly overzealous with flags/blocking is a reliable way to kill a community by making it overly toxic, speaking from experience.
• 152334H 2mo ago
  Most parsimonious explanation IMV: site staff can't see most AI slop. Reasons unimportant, but moderation systems are guaranteed to break down when the moderators themselves have poor classification ability. A simple beneficial step that would lead to modest improvements and little downside: partner with Pangram. Either adding it as an automated spam filter, or by simply attaching the detection % to all posts.
• dang 2mo ago
  We don't allow genai text on HN itself - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079. How to enforce it is a separate question, of course, but the rule exists. We don't have a similar rule yet about article content but my sense is that the community mostly doesn't want to read it—or, to put it more conservatively, discounts it. This is why we see so many "just show me the prompt" responses, along with others like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/genai-pushback https://news.ycombinator.com/genai-pushback. I built that list so I have something to send to users who email about why their genai articles got flagged. It's a fascinating arms race right now: the AIs are training on the humans but the human hivemind is also training on the AIs. Readers are developing allergic sensitivities to language that sounds like an LLM produced it. The AIs will adapt to this, but the humans will adapt in turn. Where it ends up is anyone's guess. For the present, there is an emerging class distinction between writing (and writers) that use genai vs. writing that does not. As soon as the "this sounds like an LLM" allergy kicks in, the writing instantly gets relegated to a low-status bucket in the reader's mind. That doesn't mean it won't still get looked at - but it is now under a stigma. (I was rather pleased with the originality of this until I remembered pg had come up with "writes and write-nots" in https://paulgraham.com/writes.html https://paulgraham.com/writes.html. Oh well, it's the point that matters.) This has the happy flipside that anyone who would like readers to classify their article as high-status rather than low-status can apply the judo move of simply writing it themselves. Now I need to add the disclaimer that none of this is a dismissal of LLM technology per se. We rely on it heavily, and there's no question that it's useful. The question is how to use it (pg again: https://x.com/paulg/status/2058871512451412457 https://x.com/paulg/status/2058871512451412457) and whether one should use it on writing that one publishes to other humans. To turn to OP's questions: > Should HN add the ability to flag articles as AI-generated? [...] it could just show up as an indicator Flagging-as-just-an-indicator would be tagging, which we've always resisted adding to HN, but I wouldn't rule it out. What I do think we'll (finally) add is a "please give a reason why you flagged this post" step, and "because I think it's genai" will be one choice among several (spam, offtopic, mean, etc.) > Why is the regular voting system not enough? The regular voting system is never enough. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22upvotes%20alone%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... > Should HN change in response to the gen AI era? To this I am tempted to reply with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48887149 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48887149 in homage to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742902.
• feedweave 2mo ago
  Regular downvotes/flags are for low quality or spam. AI content isn't always 'bad' per se, it’s just... empty. It eats up attention without saying anything new. A dedicated tag would be great because I don't want to bury the post, I just want to opt out of reading a glorified autocomplete.
• senectus1 2mo ago
  how are we detecting AI gen text? Humans? We're not particularly effective at this as a whole... AI service ? We'd probably have to pay for that AI to detect that AI and well.. Its also not particularly effective Effectiveness is important, because we dont want real human produced data to be accidentally removed from view, just as much if not more so than having AI gen data being left on the site.
• IgorPartola 2mo ago
  Nobody wants to label their stuff as AI generated because they removed credibility. Communities can flag posts as AI generated based on speculation and telltales but it won’t be 100% and will take extra work. I think the era of the blog is simply dead now and that’s mostly ok. Blogspam and corporate blogs had killed quality bogs ages ago even before AI was a thing. The real question is what replaces it. Oh and of course the $64k question is this: if an AI generated article is indistinguishable from a human written article and it is accurate and interesting, do you care who wrote it? We want to avoid low quality, not AI generation, right?
  • fuckaiwriter 2mo ago
    [flagged]
    • simonreiff 2mo ago
      Why don't you say how you really feel instead of being so wishy-washy?
      • el_io 2mo ago
        They are pretty clear about how they feel.
        • arjie 2mo ago
          It’s an English language idiom that always trips me up. Here’s another example: https://englishidiomsblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/tell-us-how-you-really-feel.html?m=1 https://englishidiomsblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/tell-us-how-y... The idiom is someone says “tell us how you really feel” (which he’s rephrased here) to express (I think) that one’s expressed opinion is far too dramatic in its opposition of some thing. It’s meant to be read ironically.
      • fuckaiwriter 2mo ago
        [dead]
  • 2mo ago
• nickandbro 2mo ago
  Even if you did, how would you even enforce it? Say it was a pure text article, do you count the number of em dashes? Even AI detection scanners purpose built for this are extremely faulty.
• fuckaiwriter 2mo ago
  [dead]
• smallerfish 2mo ago
  The voting system could be enough if downvoting was added. AI writing is not the problem - low effort is the problem. Low effort AI articles are full of tics which are obvious, if you've done a lot of AI writing. To write well with AI you need to spend a good deal of time editing. If you submit something that's low effort but has a clickbait headline that appeals to HN, you may well make the front page even if the article is lightweight (it does happen!) This is true both for AI and for human written articles. On the flip side, somebody could spend an enormous amount of effort creating a masterpiece with AI. Penalizing that because of the tool that was used is arbitrary.
  • fuckaiwriter 2mo ago
    [flagged]
    • awllau 2mo ago
      The fact that you made a new account to write says it all.
      • fuckaiwriter 2mo ago
        [dead]
  • awllau 2mo ago
    I was thinking the same. A lot of people use AI to refine their writing and make it more concise. I do think the dead giveaways (em dashes, it's not X it's Y, etc.) are annoying to come across repeatedly. A person not bothering to remove these tells feels 'low effort' to me.
• deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
• jvwww 2mo ago
  Personally I just use Pangram's chrome extension, which is amazing for spotting AI generated text.
  • pokpokpok 2mo ago
    I wish I had a version that worked on mobile!
• sjs382 2mo ago
  It seems like we get a post like this every other day or so...
• feverzsj 2mo ago
  Just ban anything AI.
• rddbs 2mo ago
  I care more about hiding AI related articles than I do about AI-authored content in articles. Feels like most of the content on HN is now AI related and it’s just exhausting. Anyone have a way they’re correcting this balance of content, like a browser extension maybe?
  • insin 2mo ago
    I have default "AI" keyword and domain filters as a separate toggleable option (so you can keep your personal filters separate) in my HN extension (which I really need to add recent model names to): https://soitis.dev/comments-owl-for-hacker-news https://soitis.dev/comments-owl-for-hacker-news
  • dijksterhuis 2mo ago
    people have done regex-filtering hn clones, ai to detect the ai, etc. been a few show hns. but threads like this would get caught up in that (no perfect solution). i just manually hide anything ai related. first pass: hide anything related to AI on front page. second pass: is there anything interesting left on the front page? sadly the answer to the second question is often no nowadays :/
• lazyasciiart 2mo ago
  What about a title marker similar to [1997]? It’s content that people may or may not be interested in but will react differently if they know this about it’s origin.
  • sph 2mo ago
    Probably one of the best solutions I have heard. Just add [AI] at the end. Though it should probably be [SLOP] as the term AI has legitimate uses.
• danieltanfh95 2mo ago
  1. because your belief that AI-generated text is worse than human written text is flat out illogical and wrong. 2. judge content not by its cover and think.
  • atahanacar 2mo ago
    >judge content not by its cover and think If we are supposed to not judge the content by its cover, then don't put a cover on it. It's that simple. AI adds no value to the content, just some noise that makes it harder to reach the actual information/emotion.
    • danieltanfh95 2mo ago
      what do you even mean to "not put a cover" on it, everyone communicates differently. Your comment here puts on a "snide, snarky, trying to be smart but failing" cover that I have discarded because your idea may have some merit to be discussed on.
      • atahanacar 2mo ago
        >everyone communicates differently Yes, and those differences have an intrinsic value. As an example, my comment's "cover" communicates my discontent and frustration with "AI tone". As a matter of fact, my "cover" here became the discussion itself. Thus, my comment's "cover" is not actually a cover but a part of the communication. In contrast, the "AI tone" is just a cover to make a writing look superficially more professional without adding any value to the communicated idea or emotion.
        • danieltanfh95 2mo ago
          > my "cover" here became the discussion itself My "cover" is good because of X, their "cover" is bad because of Y, is not a helpful analogue nor a useful one.
  • nickthegreek 2mo ago
    I do not have unlimited time. If enough of this community flags an article as low caliber AI, that is useful to me. The whole idea of a site like this is that the community IS judging the content at some level to up/down vote.
• minittsnet 2mo ago
  [dead]
• jabrown44 2mo ago
  [flagged]
• deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
• xeyownt 2mo ago
  I find the proposal ridicule. Would you skip articles because it's written with a text processor? You need to have it written bit by bit by fusing it directly in memory? AI / LLM is the new word editor. Get over it. What I find really annoying is all the comments that pretend to see / detect AI slop... with lot of false positives.
  • lpribis 2mo ago
    False equivalence, text processor leaves the authors intention completely in tact and is deterministically controlled completely by the author. Not true for gen ai
  • Cadabrum 2mo ago
    You might as well try tagging stupid articles. That would be a useful feature, by the way.
• nunez 2mo ago
  I asked for this a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48296731 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48296731 I'm glad the idea is picking up steam. IMO, the post title should get "[AI Generated]" at the end if enough people flag the content as AI.
• DevKoala 2mo ago
  Only care that an article is informative, grounded in facts, unbiased, etc. How it was composed doesn’t matter to me.
• luciana1u 2mo ago
  [flagged]
• jocelyner 2mo ago
  [dead]
• arjie 2mo ago
  I had to create a killfile list to block other users’ comments on the site that were repetitive. Likely we will simply have to create for ourselves such killfile lists for domains (sites, I suppose) and users who post them that are primarily generated text. The problem with these texts to me is that the parts that are information-dense are often not real and the majority is not information-dense. It’s just filler text of a sort that’s pointless “35% ram. 3x throughout. No latency trade off. That’s the whole point”. Okay, what’s this random “that’s the whole point” added there. Useless. I know it’s passé to say “HN is becoming like X” but this is pure LinkedIn slop. Someone publishes pure bullshit and their fan club posts a bunch of likes and “I’m so excited to see this. Great post”.
• atomicthumbs 2mo ago
  telling someone to read something written by a machine is disrespectful of their time. if you didn't care enough to write it, why should anyone else care enough to read it? its value is zero.
• ramon156 2mo ago
  I made a personal extension just for that :) if I find a person to be mostly posting AI generated information I will blacklist them from my feed. Works on a personal level, unsure if this would work well in practice. Maybe just a tag is enough, so people can conclude for themselves. I know there are extensions out there that are doing the democratic part right. Mostly YouTube-related extensions like DeArrow and SponsorBlock
  • arjie 2mo ago
    Have you made your blocklist public? I would like it please.
• mleroy 2mo ago
  Instead of chasing and flagging AI content, you could just use Self-Labeled Original Content. Let authors voluntarily tag their links with [Handmade], [Craft-Article] or [Artisan-Thinking].
• KingOfCoders 2mo ago
  An article is either great or it isn't. I don't care if a human, an AI or a cat wrote it.
  • pillmillipedes 2mo ago
    can you give your example of a great article written by an ai or a cat?
• hgs3 2mo ago
  Can we also flag AI generated projects posted on Show HN? I used to love reading HN for the handwritten articles and handmade projects, but in the LLM era the quality has deteriorated significantly. I find myself flocking to other message boards where LLM content is flagged, discouraged, or banned.
• aryehof 2mo ago
  This makes me fear for the ability to easily dismiss or silence a particular human viewpoint just by insinuating it is “AI-generated”.
• teiferer 2mo ago
  It is not black or white. Many articles start with a human brainstorming the content, maybe writing a rough draft, and then AI filling gaps or just polishing the language. Maybe the author isn't a native speaker or has dylexia. It's hard to draw a line.
• itsgrimetime 2mo ago
  I don’t have a problem with labeling them. I would love to see more engagement with the content regardless of how it was written, though. I know a lot of folks do but I feel like I’ve been seeing more and more instant dismissal/criticism of how it was written rather than what the submission is actually about.
• the__alchemist 2mo ago
  Personally, I've been using a small browser plugin called "hn_mute_" (On FF and chrome). It lets me permanently mute any user with 1 click. I have a 0 tolerance policy for ai-gen article posts, among other types of behavior. This sound harsh, and so unfortunately has false positives. But is required in this environment. This is a partial solution, and would be enhanced by network effects. (e.g. people sharing mute lists, and aggregating)
• nyellin 2mo ago
  No, because every article will devolve into a discussion on if AI generated or not, and to what degree. Let content speak for itself.
• rienbdj 2mo ago
  Ask HN: add a flag for articles about AI?
• Debugreality 2mo ago
  It's a tough one because some ideas may not exist without AI help. Personally I recently published a white paper on an idea for democracy that has been bouncing around in my head for decades. AI helped flesh out the idea and write the pages of text and structure the whitepaper. I'm not an academic so I probably would never have fleshed out this idea without AI but I think it's better to have the idea published so it can be seen than to have remained bouncing around in my head until I passed away. I'd agree that an academic version of my idea written by hand would be better. But a mostly AI written version is better than the knowledge never being published and I still spent a good two days on it making sure I agreed with every paragraph and fixed every issue I could find. Considering this in general I think the amount of human effort that goes into creating something is probably the right measure of it's quality over if AI was used to assist in it's creation.
  • Aachen 2mo ago
    > AI helped flesh out the idea and write the pages of text and structure the whitepaper. - LLM for helping with structure: sure. feels to me like more of a motivation problem to commit a first version to paper so you can start editing and moving bits around, and the LLM's role is being a conversational partner who cares and talks to you, but whatever works - LLM for writing the pages of text: I would almost certainly prefer the version where you just write the key aspects (your insights) and not have to wade through pages of prose to find them - LLM for fleshing out: hell no. if you want to lecture and bore people to death, this is the way to go Turning insights into elaborate documents is relevant once this makes it to legal codification (compare "tell people how you use their data" with the relevant articles in GDPR)
• lukasbm 2mo ago
  Nobody likes reading straight unfiltered chatbot output, but it's also impossible to detect
• tukunjil 2mo ago
  Tried to say similar thing here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48039702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48039702
• shahzaibmushtaq 2mo ago
  AI hasn't a higher power than HI. AI isn't a higher power than HI and it never shall. It is the author's and writer's duty and sole responsibility to tell viewers/readers that their respective works are AI-generated or how much percentage of it.
• admiralrohan 2mo ago
  We should prioritize original thinking over thinking about whether it's written by AI. A human can type motivational nonsense by hand, and also can use AI as a thinking partner for their original thesis. Which is more valuable?
• warshinder 2mo ago
  I just look at the comments first. I probably shouldn’t give away these hn secrets so freely, but people will always comment if it’s ai, or not worth reading, or won’t load, and in the early hn days it actually helped submitters avoid the hug of death. Also works for paywalled; someone will comment the archived version.
• thinkingemote 2mo ago
  Most articles that people want on HN are about LLMs and most of those are written by LLMs. The submissions are always horrible to read and usually have no gems to inspire, so if relevant I will at most skim it but the comments on HN about the submission is where the real jewels are likely to be. If you can easily detect the pattern of LLM writing here's something for you to look at: I was reading some pre-consumer-LLM papers by AI researchers and founders and the way these are written are incredibly similar to existing LLM prose!
• ivanjermakov 2mo ago
  Not too long until next gen LLMs to produce text indistinguishable from human's. Voting system is usually enough to filter out low quality submissions.
• brador 2mo ago
  Prove it. A good article is a good article. Doesn't matter who wrote it. Obfuscation of facts is the major issue with AI articles that should be bopped.
• oupsz 2mo ago
  [dead]
• shantnutiwari 2mo ago
  NO. Quoting myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48063759 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48063759 >> Every post that reaches the top of HN will have at least a few comments saying "This is LLM!" It has become a proxy for "I don't like this article, so it must be a LLM" To me, it feels like lazy karma farming, as these comments often do get a few upvotes. And of course, accuse a 100 posts if being LLM, you are guaranteed to be right at least once, then like astrologers you can claim success. Is there anything we can do to discourage this type of lazy and low effort posting?
• Xotic007 2mo ago
  That would just turn into a nameable target to avoid. Ofc you'd end up with less obviously-AI text but it wouldn't take much more effort to produce than the AI-generated version did since it is not that hard to game it.
• wartywhoa23 2mo ago
  Yes, it absolutely should!
• amelius 2mo ago
  Unicode should add a codepage for characters in latin1 but reserved for AI tools. That would allow us to have a sticky bit in AI generated stuff, at least to an approximation. We can do it already if we ask the AI companies to use one of the special whitespace characters instead of ascii 0x20. It would also help them avoid the problem of feeding their training loop on generated data.
• MAESTRO1955 2mo ago
  [flagged]
• Esophagus4 2mo ago
  See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_bit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_bit
• sean_pedersen 2mo ago
  It is not about AI generated or not, it is and always has been about quality of the content. So just let the people up- / downvote.
• armanckeser 2mo ago
  Places like r/selfhosted try this and to be completely frank, puts that community into the "naive" side of history. One day not so far in the future AI assisted/generated will mean more reliable, better tested, better documented by default, and do you think AI companies are not focusing on making their LLMs not sound like AI? In 2 generations everything we know about identifying LLM generated content will be obsolete. Only thing that matters is if the content is quality or not.
• deevus 2mo ago
  I tried to post a Show HN on here and got auto-modded, even though I hand-wrote my post. To be honest it triggered my rejection sensitivity and I haven't posted here since.
• rdataguy 2mo ago
  Well, it's not always easy to tell and it seems like it could be abused. But I guess the wisdom of the crowd would be able to discern enough AI generated content that it might be useful.
• gverrilla 2mo ago
  Increasingly you will have to go offline for human experiences and the internet will be more and more ads and agents land. It has barely started - we're still in early adoption and early infra phase. Content for the web is already so perishable. I have no problem whatsoever reading LLM text if it was produced by SOTA models - earlier/currently free models are pretty bad, but their style is almost instantly recognizable so it's an easy skip. Not only model "intelligence" will increase, it seems, but also the skill/habit of customizing the writing style of your LLM. It all feels inevitable, tbh: incentives are too great in this era - so distant of knowledge, reading, community, rationality, etc. Last time I've hand-written a long text, it was a 2-page letter - I took 8 hours to write it, thinking carefully about each and every word, idea, paragraph and logic - and the receiver answered with a single meme gif.
• lezojeda 2mo ago
  [dead]
• dennysora-main 2mo ago
  [dead]
• CM30 2mo ago
  I do think it'd be useful if AI generated content was pointed out here, given that it usually indicates a lot less investment in the work than if someone made it themself. But I'm not sure there's a great way to handle it. Flagging works as AI generated is good in theory, but it's become a bit of a witch hunt online, with plenty of human created pieces getting wrongly flagged as AI generated due to using em dashes in text, having the hands drawn awkwardly in artwork, or using other stylistic traits that AI content overuses. I fear half the site could end up flagged as AI-generated, just because a lot of people are hyper-vigilant about such content and assume the worst for everything. At the same time, there's not really much of a way to incentivise writers to flag their own articles here, since revealing that a work is created by AI is a great way to both kill your credibility and drive away about half the people who'd otherwise enjoy it. So, if it's up to the authors, the incentives are for them to lie through their teeth. I also don't really trust many AI detection tools, since they usually use AI themselves and misflag a lot of content. But I don't think the site should change that much. Maybe add an option for AI content in the flagging system, and assume good faith for submissions in general. I'd rather not see the site get too paranoid or restrictive over this stuff.
• ltbarcly3 2mo ago
  1. It's only going to get harder to identify these articles. 2. Labeling the ones that are honest about being AI generated punishes honesty and rewards lying by boosting AI generated articles that say they are not AI generated.
• pocksuppet 2mo ago
  The regular voting system is not enough because there is no downvoting for articles.
• saint-evan 2mo ago
  yaaay... More fuzzy 'me vs them'-ism.
• spwa4 2mo ago
  How would you prevent it from just becoming another AI benchmark?
• rendonroman 2mo ago
  [flagged]
• cloudpilot 2mo ago
  Ya, no kidding, I've had the help of AI to create my app, but im the one putting in the messages and I get flagged
• chickenuggies69 2mo ago
  I can AI generate my own articles
• oleggromov 2mo ago
  Yes, please.
• teo_zero 2mo ago
  If you are allergic to AI-generated articles, I can't stand syntactic mistakes. The day you get your "AI generated" flag, I'll want my "lousy with mistakes", too.
• pritesh1908 2mo ago
  labeling should focus less on whether AI touched the article and more on whether a human is accountable for stats, claims, sources, and corrections. It would be unfair to expect humans to write everything themselves anymore
• Ma4etaSS 2mo ago
  This occurred on HN as well. It's not just Reddit-coded
• PaiDxng 2mo ago
  A non-ranking indicator seems compatible with HN’s fundamentals: voting still decides visibility, while readers get a choice. The harder problem is defining “AI-generated” without creating an unenforceable honor system.
• antfarm 2mo ago
  There should be a global registry for books written by generative AI and sold under the name of a "real" (probably non-exisiting) author.
• ThierryRakt 2mo ago
  Many hackers and developers haven't truly mastered english writing, so they use translators or AI to check for grammatical errors. I think this case should be considered separately, but sometimes I really don't know how to distinguish them from ai slop