5 ms·

People are posting on this very website and commenting on Reddit using AI. I can't get myself into the headspace that would enable this behaviour. What exactly

People are posting on this very website and commenting on Reddit using AI. I can't get myself into the headspace that would enable this behaviour. What exactly is the point of not engaging in conversation yourself and getting a bot to post it for you on an free platform. Crazy.

cheschire 1mo ago
What drives people to cheat at competitive games? I imagine it’s the same genes.
- rockinghigh 1mo ago
  Using tools to fix your writing style or grammar is not exactly cheating.
  - jackjeff 1mo ago
    There’s a world of difference between using AI as an editor vs letting it write a whole essay for you. AI;DR is about the latter.
    - thatjoeoverthr 1mo ago
      I'll push back and say it's the former. Good business writing is all about the editing, and autoregressive LLMs are terrible editors. They roll dice on every word and put the same tics on every text. They meander. Suppose you check something with ChatGPT, get nine hundred words, edit that down to three or even one and send that. You won't get AI;DR for "I checked, we're good."
      - johnnyanmac 1mo ago
        >Suppose you check something with ChatGPT, get nine hundred words, edit that down to three or even one and send that. You won't get AI;DR for "I checked, we're good." Maybe. The issue here is we know most people are simply posting 900 words wholesale, maybe editing down 20-30 words to try and sweep some dust under the rug (meanwhile the trash is still fully featured on top of the carpet). For your style: I'm not a writer but I question if it's even more efficient to edit 900 AI words down to 100. I can see some people finding it easier to change other's words than generate your own ideas, but I don't think it's a majority. I certainly know it's more annoying to edit 900 lines of AI code into a succinct 100 line function/class.
    - teo_zero 1mo ago
      > using AI as an editor vs letting it write a whole essay for you. AI;DR is about the latter I'm sure that's the intention, but the alarming trend, at least here on HN, is crying wolf at the first em-dash.
      - account42 29d ago
        Why is that alarming? Your immune system will also do some small amount of collateral damage to your own cells when its in a heightened state.
        teo_zero 29d ago
        While you went this road of the medical metaphor, taking antibiotics at the first suspect of sickness without checking what's really going on, is a sure way to help develop antibiotic-resistant viruses. Please note the key item is without checking. I'm not denying that many AI-generated documents are likely to be garbage. But refusing to read them just because of it will result in a lot of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
  - brandon272 1mo ago
    This implies that writing styles are simply "correct" or "incorrect". I'd prefer to read someone's natural writing style, even if they do not consider themselves a good writer, because it comes from them genuinely. Much better than enduring text that has been fed into an LLM and homogenized.
- xdennis 1mo ago
  As a previous massive cheater in RPG games (when a was young and it was easy to write your own tools) the reason to cheat is because many games (especially RPGs) have bullshit mechanics. You have to perform a lot of repetitive stuff to get ahead. Cheating is seen as honorable because it's about getting back at a system which forces you into unfair circumstances (this is akin to corruption/graft in real life). In my opinion, this is not the same as people who use AI comment bots. Of course, other cheaters had other reasons, but the few I was friends with had similar motivations. (Actually, a few just created tools because they enjoyed creating tools, not so much actually using them.)
  - account42 29d ago
    Do you mean MMORPGs or single-player RPGs. Because modifying a game or game state to your likes with the goal of improving your personal enjoyment of the game is very different compared to cheating to get ahead of other people.
- mister_mort 1mo ago
  Some people have an inner drive like a rat that likes pushing the reward button in the cell to dose them with opium. They want to see the YOU WIN screen and absolutely do not care what it takes to get them there. Hence the booming market for custom memory modding cheat devices and subscription cheat services. They don't want to improve their skills, they just want to be number one on the board.
otterley 1mo ago
The HN Guidelines explicitly forbid posting AI-generated comments; they will be deleted if detected or reported. I'd like them to go further and delete links to AI-generated content, but I haven't been able to persuade management to do that yet.
- miyoji 1mo ago
  The HN guidelines prohibit a lot of behaviors that remain unmoderated, you can see it in any thread that goes over 80 comments.
  - nick__m 1mo ago
    If those behaviors bothers you enough you can always mail hn@ycombinator.com because dang is not omniscient even if sometimes it looks like he is...
    - HDBaseT 1mo ago
      How many active moderators are there? This site has a lot of comments, far too many for one person to read.
      - XOPJ 26d ago
        Not many and if you lurk more than comment (like I do) then you don't have enough credibility on this site to down vote or flag things. Which is in my humble opinion counter productive since a bot would comment far more often to influence the comments than a human which like me often doesn't comment because my comment doesn't hold enough value to further the insightful discussion so I look more like a new account even with many years of membership.
  - Barbing 1mo ago
    Community mostly keeps us in check though. (Sharing next sentence for the newbies, since you know-) All our jobs to flag on site & even email the worst offenders to hn@ycombinator.com . That said I rarely flag or even downvote anything. People either really behave, or perhaps the rulebreakers break rules that don’t grind my gears. Politely admonishing good faith rulebreakers is another tactic in the arsenal. AI-generated comment posters with comment histories of exclusively slop get email alerts from me. Don’t know whether they’re planning to sell or spam but they clearly need help finding the door :)
plorg 1mo ago
I get the sense that people who spend all day interacting with software can start to see every interaction, especially in online text platforms, as a kind of API or user interface. You might learn to instrumentalize your interactions and relationships with people. Chatbots, including coding agents, only reinforce this kind of behavior, as they don't have the kind of limits of patience or of bodily or emotional needs that humans have.
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
tayo42 1mo ago
Everyone can use the Internet. Some people are just crazy, neurodivergent or whatever.
strbean 1mo ago
I've seen it used as a newer evolution of trolling on Reddit. A user hops in to a somewhat nuanced discussion and gives a very curt and rude contradiction, and then just uses an LLM to generate walls of argumentative text after you respond with "What are you talking about and why are you being such a dick?" Very low effort the ensnare someone and waste their time for a bit, even though it is pretty quickly obvious what they are doing.
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
asadotzler 1mo ago
Attention is all they need. It's ego-tripping, whoring for social status.

cheschire 1mo ago

What drives people to cheat at competitive games? I imagine it’s the same genes.

rockinghigh 1mo ago
Using tools to fix your writing style or grammar is not exactly cheating.
- jackjeff 1mo ago
  There’s a world of difference between using AI as an editor vs letting it write a whole essay for you. AI;DR is about the latter.
  - thatjoeoverthr 1mo ago
    I'll push back and say it's the former. Good business writing is all about the editing, and autoregressive LLMs are terrible editors. They roll dice on every word and put the same tics on every text. They meander. Suppose you check something with ChatGPT, get nine hundred words, edit that down to three or even one and send that. You won't get AI;DR for "I checked, we're good."
    - johnnyanmac 1mo ago
      >Suppose you check something with ChatGPT, get nine hundred words, edit that down to three or even one and send that. You won't get AI;DR for "I checked, we're good." Maybe. The issue here is we know most people are simply posting 900 words wholesale, maybe editing down 20-30 words to try and sweep some dust under the rug (meanwhile the trash is still fully featured on top of the carpet). For your style: I'm not a writer but I question if it's even more efficient to edit 900 AI words down to 100. I can see some people finding it easier to change other's words than generate your own ideas, but I don't think it's a majority. I certainly know it's more annoying to edit 900 lines of AI code into a succinct 100 line function/class.
  - teo_zero 1mo ago
    > using AI as an editor vs letting it write a whole essay for you. AI;DR is about the latter I'm sure that's the intention, but the alarming trend, at least here on HN, is crying wolf at the first em-dash.
    - account42 29d ago
      Why is that alarming? Your immune system will also do some small amount of collateral damage to your own cells when its in a heightened state.
      - teo_zero 29d ago
        While you went this road of the medical metaphor, taking antibiotics at the first suspect of sickness without checking what's really going on, is a sure way to help develop antibiotic-resistant viruses. Please note the key item is without checking. I'm not denying that many AI-generated documents are likely to be garbage. But refusing to read them just because of it will result in a lot of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
- brandon272 1mo ago
  This implies that writing styles are simply "correct" or "incorrect". I'd prefer to read someone's natural writing style, even if they do not consider themselves a good writer, because it comes from them genuinely. Much better than enduring text that has been fed into an LLM and homogenized.
xdennis 1mo ago
As a previous massive cheater in RPG games (when a was young and it was easy to write your own tools) the reason to cheat is because many games (especially RPGs) have bullshit mechanics. You have to perform a lot of repetitive stuff to get ahead. Cheating is seen as honorable because it's about getting back at a system which forces you into unfair circumstances (this is akin to corruption/graft in real life). In my opinion, this is not the same as people who use AI comment bots. Of course, other cheaters had other reasons, but the few I was friends with had similar motivations. (Actually, a few just created tools because they enjoyed creating tools, not so much actually using them.)
- account42 29d ago
  Do you mean MMORPGs or single-player RPGs. Because modifying a game or game state to your likes with the goal of improving your personal enjoyment of the game is very different compared to cheating to get ahead of other people.
mister_mort 1mo ago
Some people have an inner drive like a rat that likes pushing the reward button in the cell to dose them with opium. They want to see the YOU WIN screen and absolutely do not care what it takes to get them there. Hence the booming market for custom memory modding cheat devices and subscription cheat services. They don't want to improve their skills, they just want to be number one on the board.

otterley 1mo ago

The HN Guidelines explicitly forbid posting AI-generated comments; they will be deleted if detected or reported. I'd like them to go further and delete links to AI-generated content, but I haven't been able to persuade management to do that yet.

miyoji 1mo ago
The HN guidelines prohibit a lot of behaviors that remain unmoderated, you can see it in any thread that goes over 80 comments.
- nick__m 1mo ago
  If those behaviors bothers you enough you can always mail hn@ycombinator.com because dang is not omniscient even if sometimes it looks like he is...
  - HDBaseT 1mo ago
    How many active moderators are there? This site has a lot of comments, far too many for one person to read.
    - XOPJ 26d ago
      Not many and if you lurk more than comment (like I do) then you don't have enough credibility on this site to down vote or flag things. Which is in my humble opinion counter productive since a bot would comment far more often to influence the comments than a human which like me often doesn't comment because my comment doesn't hold enough value to further the insightful discussion so I look more like a new account even with many years of membership.
- Barbing 1mo ago
  Community mostly keeps us in check though. (Sharing next sentence for the newbies, since you know-) All our jobs to flag on site & even email the worst offenders to hn@ycombinator.com . That said I rarely flag or even downvote anything. People either really behave, or perhaps the rulebreakers break rules that don’t grind my gears. Politely admonishing good faith rulebreakers is another tactic in the arsenal. AI-generated comment posters with comment histories of exclusively slop get email alerts from me. Don’t know whether they’re planning to sell or spam but they clearly need help finding the door :)

plorg 1mo ago

I get the sense that people who spend all day interacting with software can start to see every interaction, especially in online text platforms, as a kind of API or user interface. You might learn to instrumentalize your interactions and relationships with people. Chatbots, including coding agents, only reinforce this kind of behavior, as they don't have the kind of limits of patience or of bodily or emotional needs that humans have.

deleted 1mo ago

[deleted]

tayo42 1mo ago

Everyone can use the Internet. Some people are just crazy, neurodivergent or whatever.

strbean 1mo ago

I've seen it used as a newer evolution of trolling on Reddit. A user hops in to a somewhat nuanced discussion and gives a very curt and rude contradiction, and then just uses an LLM to generate walls of argumentative text after you respond with "What are you talking about and why are you being such a dick?" Very low effort the ensnare someone and waste their time for a bit, even though it is pretty quickly obvious what they are doing.

deleted 1mo ago

[deleted]

asadotzler 1mo ago

Attention is all they need. It's ego-tripping, whoring for social status.