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It saddens me that we're banning speech patterns on HN, not discussing arguments. I have seen this in another thread yesterday(?), where somebody was accused of

by moring 21d ago

It saddens me that we're banning speech patterns on HN, not discussing arguments. I have seen this in another thread yesterday(?), where somebody was accused of being an LLM based on speech patterns and downvoted, no further evidence needed. This site used to be above that level.

hansvm 21d ago
Not in the slightest. I didn't touch the voting functionality and tried to be as nice as possible. I saw an opportunity to make somebody's life better for reasons it didn't seem they were aware of, since their speech seemed similar enough to certain AI idioms that I thought it would be demonized, and the fact that they wrote it anyway suggests they didn't know. As I'm looking at it right now, there might be some nuance I'm missing in how HN works, but the post doesn't seem to be greyed out or anything, suggesting that if it is being downvoted then the upvotes are counterbalancing sufficiently. > banning speech patterns AI is prevalent and often bad. Society is reacting quickly but maybe not quickly enough. Blanket speech "bans" are part of that. Is that bad? Eh. It's not ideal. It's to be expected though. I work with the society I'm given, not the one I should have.
holoduke 21d ago
Above is just AI slop. There is a good reason to be critical
bryanrasmussen 21d ago
I mean on the one hand it is annoying because everybody has speech patterns, I like to say "I mean" and "on the one hand" a lot. On the other hand it seems a sort of self-protective recoil, nobody wants to spend a lot of time talking to an AI. Our jobs and society already make us spend way too much time and effort doing that! On the other hand: so, people throw the baby out with the bathwater, which is a problem, but not sure if it's as big a problem in the old days when you threw out the baby with the bathwater and it was only one tub of bathwater, because in the present time it's 2000 tubs of bathwater, and the baby is drowning anyway. I say this as a guy whose editor is complaining an article I'm collaborating on, about how the continual whining about AI tends to have a lot of false positives and is anyway annoying, is taking too long.
- hmry 21d ago
  Your comment has three hands, that's the kind of collaborative communication style we should all aspire to. Personally, I suspect good writers will adapt in due time, not because they don't want to sound like AI, but because they don't want to sound cliche. Even the ones stubbornly holding on to their em-dashes. The ones hit hardest will be the mediocre writers, who have always relied on cliches. Their writing will become indistinguishable from reading chatbot output. At least that's my prediction.
  - vintermann 21d ago
    > Your comment has three hands, that's the kind of collaborative communication style we should all aspire to. The Zaphod Beeblebrox style of communication. So far I haven't been accused of using AI for my comments, even though I use (and always used) a lot of the tropes. It's probably because my rhetorical skills overall suck.
  - gilleain 21d ago
    > Your comment has three hands Also sometimes known as 'The Gripping Hand' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gripping_Hand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gripping_Hand
  - FeepingCreature 21d ago
    I like "and on the third hand." Like, yes I have three hands, what of it.
    - esseph 21d ago
      Do you shop at a third hand store?
  - bryanrasmussen 20d ago
    ah I thought I had forgotten to make the second hand, and so I went in to add it in, but then I got three hands, typical Hindu deity problem.
jjmarr 21d ago
I like how you have to constantly use the LLMs in order to understand their speech patterns enough to consciously reject them.
jeltz 21d ago
The site used to not be under constant assault of low effort LLM submissions and low effort LLM comments. That people start getting cranky about that is just normal.
MarkSweep 21d ago
It’s not about the LLM usage. It was such a dumb construction: > <totally vague statement>. This matters. Like, just because you say something matters does not make it true. Explain your case and then make predictions about the implications of it. The entire thing was a vague post. Just “this matters” and “pay attention”. It’s trying to create a sense of FOMO but not spending any effort to explain why we should care.
moron4hire 21d ago
This site has had speech pattern bans built into it's software, aka "anti click bait" algorithms, for basically ever.
dgellow 21d ago
It’s the whole internet, it’s not an HN problem. The AI industry is little by little invading and destroying every space where humans gather, removing everything that made genuine human interactions interesting and worthwhile. (Also, don’t take HN votes too seriously, being downvoted doesn’t say much)

by moring 21d ago

hansvm 21d ago

Not in the slightest. I didn't touch the voting functionality and tried to be as nice as possible. I saw an opportunity to make somebody's life better for reasons it didn't seem they were aware of, since their speech seemed similar enough to certain AI idioms that I thought it would be demonized, and the fact that they wrote it anyway suggests they didn't know. As I'm looking at it right now, there might be some nuance I'm missing in how HN works, but the post doesn't seem to be greyed out or anything, suggesting that if it is being downvoted then the upvotes are counterbalancing sufficiently. > banning speech patterns AI is prevalent and often bad. Society is reacting quickly but maybe not quickly enough. Blanket speech "bans" are part of that. Is that bad? Eh. It's not ideal. It's to be expected though. I work with the society I'm given, not the one I should have.

holoduke 21d ago

Above is just AI slop. There is a good reason to be critical

bryanrasmussen 21d ago

I mean on the one hand it is annoying because everybody has speech patterns, I like to say "I mean" and "on the one hand" a lot. On the other hand it seems a sort of self-protective recoil, nobody wants to spend a lot of time talking to an AI. Our jobs and society already make us spend way too much time and effort doing that! On the other hand: so, people throw the baby out with the bathwater, which is a problem, but not sure if it's as big a problem in the old days when you threw out the baby with the bathwater and it was only one tub of bathwater, because in the present time it's 2000 tubs of bathwater, and the baby is drowning anyway. I say this as a guy whose editor is complaining an article I'm collaborating on, about how the continual whining about AI tends to have a lot of false positives and is anyway annoying, is taking too long.

hmry 21d ago
Your comment has three hands, that's the kind of collaborative communication style we should all aspire to. Personally, I suspect good writers will adapt in due time, not because they don't want to sound like AI, but because they don't want to sound cliche. Even the ones stubbornly holding on to their em-dashes. The ones hit hardest will be the mediocre writers, who have always relied on cliches. Their writing will become indistinguishable from reading chatbot output. At least that's my prediction.
- vintermann 21d ago
  > Your comment has three hands, that's the kind of collaborative communication style we should all aspire to. The Zaphod Beeblebrox style of communication. So far I haven't been accused of using AI for my comments, even though I use (and always used) a lot of the tropes. It's probably because my rhetorical skills overall suck.
- gilleain 21d ago
  > Your comment has three hands Also sometimes known as 'The Gripping Hand' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gripping_Hand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gripping_Hand
- FeepingCreature 21d ago
  I like "and on the third hand." Like, yes I have three hands, what of it.
  - esseph 21d ago
    Do you shop at a third hand store?
- bryanrasmussen 20d ago
  ah I thought I had forgotten to make the second hand, and so I went in to add it in, but then I got three hands, typical Hindu deity problem.

jjmarr 21d ago

I like how you have to constantly use the LLMs in order to understand their speech patterns enough to consciously reject them.

jeltz 21d ago

The site used to not be under constant assault of low effort LLM submissions and low effort LLM comments. That people start getting cranky about that is just normal.

MarkSweep 21d ago

It’s not about the LLM usage. It was such a dumb construction: > <totally vague statement>. This matters. Like, just because you say something matters does not make it true. Explain your case and then make predictions about the implications of it. The entire thing was a vague post. Just “this matters” and “pay attention”. It’s trying to create a sense of FOMO but not spending any effort to explain why we should care.

moron4hire 21d ago

This site has had speech pattern bans built into it's software, aka "anti click bait" algorithms, for basically ever.

dgellow 21d ago

It’s the whole internet, it’s not an HN problem. The AI industry is little by little invading and destroying every space where humans gather, removing everything that made genuine human interactions interesting and worthwhile. (Also, don’t take HN votes too seriously, being downvoted doesn’t say much)