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. 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. I have an optimistic view, but I've been wrong about this so many times that I have low confidence in it.
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. 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) 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.)
I think classifying it as an allergy or a status thing is a little too glib. I’ve read and reviewed, conservatively, hundreds of AI generated documents for work, and “written”/commissioned a bunch too. My biggest issue is that it’s impossible to engage with and give feedback on an AI written document, because it’s impossible to know whether misconceptions or gaps are because the author doesn’t understand the material deeply enough or the author does but the AI doesn’t and the author’s not proofreading carefully enough. Or if a surprising idea is raised — is it the authors insight, can they elaborate on it, where did it come from, etc?
Hackernews isn’t work, obviously, but “it’s impossible to engage deeper with the material because the author doesn’t really exist” is sort of a problem for a discussion site. If the human coauthor puts in enough work, they can make sure the doc really reflects their views and their understanding, but in my experience that’s much less common.
>My biggest issue is that it’s impossible to engage with and give feedback on an AI written document, because it’s impossible to know whether misconceptions or gaps are because the author doesn’t understand the material deeply enough or the author does but the AI doesn’t and the author’s not proofreading carefully enough.
FWIW, same problem with PRs or PoC that I have to work on; now my first question is, "did you know about his behaviour?". The first step, getting a decent spec, is delayed to after a first draft implementation is already pushed...
This exactly. Whenever someone shows me their (or someone else's) AI-assisted-coded (vibe coded) thing, I can only ever engage with it on a very superficial level, saying "oh cool".
You can't have a discussion about it, how it was done, because for 80% of cases it's "the AI did it".
I don't think this is that interesting or useful for HN, because indeed it's a discussion site.
It would be different if the vibe coded thing didn't come as a "look what it made and its vibe written README" but instead as a human written blog article about "how I made this thing using AI, what models, prompts and harnesses, how the experience was etc etc etc" --- again that would be something interesting to have a discussion about.
But otherwise what is there to say except "yeah cool that's cool that the AI made you that thing"
> it’s impossible to know whether misconceptions or gaps are because the author doesn’t understand the material deeply enough or the author does but the AI doesn’t and the author’s not proofreading carefully enough. Or if a surprising idea is raised — is it the authors insight, can they elaborate on it, where did it come from, etc?
You can engage with an AI-written document! Simply paste the document into the AI (same or different as the AI that wrote it) and ask questions. You can get an answer in seconds compared to an hour (if it's a blog post by an HN reader), days (if it's a professional blogger), or never (if it's by a journalist).
Perhaps AI-written articles should include the prompt as hidden text on the page. Or include a link with the prompt embedded, that causes the AI to spit out the same article that you could then ask questions about.
That's interesting, thank you! My only pushback is that my bit about "allergy" and "status" is about the audience response here, whereas you seem to be talking on a somewhat different level.
Oh for sure. My only point is that IME (and I’d assume many other commenters) the quality of discussion and engagement around an imperfect ai-written doc is considerably worse than the same doc written by a human. Work is where it’s most obvious to me… because many of these are design docs for systems I care deeply about us delivering, but I’ve noticed the same thing elsewhere.
But you wouldn't have called it "allergy" or a "status" problem when considering the audience's response to human written posts of a similar low quality level.
It's always been the case that the HN audience has been "allergic" to low effort slop (including human generated).
The OP (and my) point was trying to point out how the AI generated stuff might masquerade as something "interesting" if it had been human written, but actually is much of a nothing burger when there's no human behind it:
if a human made a strange, weird, or even sub-optimal design decision, that's something to possibly have an interesting discussion about.
if an AI does the same, first of, I don't care and don't wanna guess why its weights did the thing it did, it's just not as interesting as human motivations, UNLESS the main meat of the article/link is in fact about (again the human experience of) "how I made this thing, using AI, what prompts, harness, models, etc".
I hope it makes sense and allows you to no longer dismiss this as an "allergy" (aka the audience's problem), but as something that is actually a quality problem with the post.
> 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
Does that mean that an article being AI-generated is a flaggable offense? Should we be flagging suspected AI-generated articles already, or should we wait for the flagging system to support reasons first?
Damn you people for asking good questions that go straight to the fuzzy areas!
I don't know for sure yet. But you're right that that would follow from what I said.
What I do know is that users should flag articles that they think don't belong on HN. But this should rely on their reading of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not just be based on a like/dislike reaction. That is, users should flag articles that they think break the site guidelines, not just ones they dislike.
I have been discouraging people from flagging ‘articles that they think don't belong on HN’, because you have disabled my ability to do so time and time again. In private conversation with you, you have confirmed that if I flag/vouch stuff you mods don’t agree with, I get the privilege taken away, even if I genuinely believe a post to fall outside of the guidelines.
So either I read your mind, or it is best not to flag unless something is obviously, unequivocally, running afoul of the guidelines.
I keep being annoyed at how arbitrary, and dare I say hypocritical, the entire flagging mechanism and its surrounding politics are.
Flagging, to me, seems like pissing in the wind. If I notice serial posters submitting extremely low effort content (a pair of their own posts every waking hour from "6 months and 5 minutes ago", off-topic wikipedia nearly once a day, "I have 60000+ points but only upload from thealtantic/guardian/nytimes") then I go on an irate ten-minute flagging binge.
I've also been aghast at the nerve of those same serial posters applying the letter of the law against other users. I genuinely wouldn't care if Bartosz Ciechanowski only self-promotes every last one of his own posts. Some users are significantly more interesting than others, whether or not they violate the site guidelines marginally on a technicality.
I have suspected it's possible some users flags are worth more than others, and I wouldn't be surprised if my flagging ability was silently removed several years ago.
> In private conversation with you, you have confirmed that if I flag/vouch stuff you mods don’t agree with, I get the privilege taken away, even if I genuinely believe a post to fall outside of the guidelines.
People love to make vague claims like this based on things we supposedly said. How about you quote what exactly what I literally said so readers can make up their own minds?
Sorry if that is testy (well, it is testy), but I can't count the number of times that disgruntled users have posted falsely to HN threads to vent their residual frustrations with the mods.
Sure, quoting select passages over multiple emails with you personally.
> I'm afraid we took vouching privileges away from your account because you vouched for too many comments that were unsubstantive and/or flamebait and/or otherwise broke the site guidelines
> If you want to build up a track record for a while of vouching for good comments only, and then email so we can look at the recent vouches
Wondering how does one tell what is ‘good’ in your mind:
> Btw if you're unsure about a case you can always check with us about it. I know the borderline cases are not always easy to call.
—-
In other words, do as dang himself would do, or get penalised. I am not in the business of mind reading.
This was years ago. I am pretty sure lately I have been flagging/vouching stuff I genuinely believe were OK, though you have all the data in front to smite me with “ah, but on this day you vouched this bad comment! Gotcha!” so in the end it’s always a losing battle.
In any case, my issue is with you saying, I quote, ”users should flag articles that they think don't belong on HN”. Emphasis mine. No. It is more nuanced than that.
Kudos to you for responding exactly as I asked! That is rare to begin with, and even more so when I'm being irritable. Big respect.
I can see how using the word "good" was confusing, but I just meant the opposite of "comments that were unsubstantive and/or flamebait and/or otherwise broke the site guidelines". It just boils down to: what fits the guidelines or not.
> Wondering how does one tell what is ‘good’ in your mind
Since you can't read my mind (at least I assume you can't, and if you could you wouldn't have this question), that's not doable. What you can do is assess things according to your own reading of the site guidelines. If you assimilate https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and evaluate comments based on that and not just on what you like/dislike, then I imagine you won't end up too far from where the mods are, because that's what we're also trying to do.
I'm sure there will always be individual cases where we disagree—even tomhow and I disagree on individual cases—but they
should be a minority.
If there are specific cases where you think we got it wrong, I'd be interested to see links, and we're always willing to hear a contrary argument.
It is no coincidence lawyering is a lucrative career, even when (in most countries) it is simply about interpreting what’s written in the big book.
Until you rewrite the guidelines in an unambiguous programming language (Lisp will do), and provide a system to discern whether a comment falls afoul of them, your personal interpretation of the Word will often differ from someone else’s.
Completely meta and possibly out-of-place, but this thread was I think my first encounter with dang (the human), and, based on it, I'm filled with respect for him.
I have had plenty of disagreements with dang over my time on this site, yet I am the first to claim he has been instrumental in making HN as good as it is, notwithstanding the deluge of posts, bots, trolls, and other ungovernable people.
How were you penalised? Was it just losing the ability to flag?
If however you see things isn’t lining up well with how they want things flagged, it makes sense to remove that from you. Unless there’s more punishment attached this seems very sensible regardless of how genuinely you believe in things.
(Not OP.) I can understand that it feels like a punishment though, if you are legitimately trying to help and this is the thanks you get. It's not just a human-to-human notice, but a change of your permission level; you're being stepped down. Of course I have no idea about this specific case and what the user flagged/vouched, and I can see your logic, just that I'd probably also feel bad if it happened to me and the wording seems fitting enough to me
I like people who follow the site guidelines and want to use HN as intended. That doesn't mean I dislike people who don't, but that side of the moon is more...nuanced.
> users should flag articles that they think break the site guidelines
I'm more and more think that link actually hurts the site more than helps. It's a gotcha against everything, can be used a sword and a shield too.
See the part about politics. There is more and more US domestic politics post here (which I actually flag all the time) yet when the topic comes up people will say: "should hackers turn their back on when the world burns" So basically everything goes as long as it fits the narrative.
And the worst offender imo is the last part about reddit. Because I do _really agree_ that HN is more and more like reddit, if not already is. This very post with the comments where everyone is asking for a downvote button is a perfect example of that.
What I do know is that users should flag articles that they think don't belong on HN
If this is true then this statement should be added to the guidelines. Many a time I've seen a submission and thought "My god, this is the most moronic thing I've ever read in my life, nearly every single factual claim in this is wrong" but I don't flag it because "don't post utter drivel" is not in the guidelines.
What did you think flagging was for? (Genuine question)
It's true that we don't spell things out precisely, but that's because it's impossible to spell things out fully precisely. If you start, where do you stop?
What did you think flagging was for? (Genuine question)
Same as on other sites: Spam and/or bot, abuse and/or insults and other ad hominems and particularly the point in the guidelines where you go: Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. and Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Not that my flagging amounts to anything, there's so much domestic US politics articles from mainstream media on here that I often wonder whether I misunderstand the guidelines, but then, I'm just an Europoor /s
Generally speaking, HN seems to have more of a problem now of people just drive-by downvoting things because they don't like someone's opinion.
I know you hate the supposedly "noob" comment, as you've put it over the years, and as it is written in the guidelines, that HN is or isn't turning into Reddit, but this aspect of HN makes it indistinguishable to me as a long-time reader here whether you accept it from your perspective as a long-time moderator or not.
Because HN moderation allows people to downvote or flag things simply because they don't like something, it will always be like Reddit. There is no distinguishing feature to separate it otherwise.
One thing that would, would be forcing users to say why they downvoted or flagged something.
Edit: If you spend years saying "no, no, it isn't true" to people, you're just sticking your fingers in your ears. Where there's smoke, there's fire.
Yeah, even if this is very hard to get it perfect, I keep thinking there has to exist a better voting system than what we have. We can do a presumed step in the right direction and evaluate.
- To give an outlet for (dis)agreement: We could have two arrows on each post, one for agree/disagree, the other for 'legitimate post that helps the conversation'. Someone posting wrong info rarely helps the conversation, but also often enough it's an opinion matter and you can disagree while leaving the latter arrow alone. The latter determines sort order (most helpful first); the former is displayed as a fun fact on posts that are deemed helpful (author sees exact counts just like now)
- A system that seems to work better: A local tech site uses a system where you assign a quality level to a post. The short labels are (translated) "flamebait", "irrelevant but well-intentioned", "relevant but well-known", "useful contribution", and "exceptionally useful". Each one has a numerical value, ranging from -1 to +3, and it'll take the median of all votes (with a half-vote bias towards +1 I think, but that's an implementation detail). If your median comes out to -1, it's collapsed by default; at +2 and +3, it gets highlighted. Incorporating opinion into your quality assessment is a problem here, too, but then you might get +0 instead of +1 and not (like on HN) a score of -7. Not just does that feel a lot more fair, the system and its UI also just makes more clear to everyone that you're supposed to objectively score the comments on the mentioned guidelines (it shows a description every time you hover over a vote option)
Don't you need a certain number of upvotes on your account before you can even use the downvote button? I seem to remember that being a thing, has it changed?
The fact you can't just make an account, log in and start downvoting is already a massive improvement over Reddit
I hope HN doesn't get into moderating the politics of articles.
I can see a grim future (present?) where "AI generated" turns into a slur, warranted or otherwise, in a world where the difference between human trained to talk like an AI and AI masquerading as human becomes increasingly difficult to discern, and some hidden cabal passes judgement.
That is wholly different from taking a stance on HN being a place for humans to comment on articles.
AI has a distinct, low-quality and unnecessarily sensational writing style, which signals low effort post first of all. If you use AI and you put the effort to make it not look like AI it means that at least you put some effort into it.
I am not sure how the future may be, but the direction of AIs has been to solidify their distinct writing style rather than assimilate to humans. So we can start addressing what we are dealing with now. I doubt HN tagging/flagging can put enough pressure to affect how llms will evolve anyway in the future, while the llm speech becomes more and more ubiquitous and unhinged.
> AI has a distinct, low-quality and unnecessarily sensational writing style, which signals low effort post first of all
Yes, but what if it doesn't? Anyone can create a model or prompt to adjust the tone, remove the tells that people are now on the lookout for, etc.
And it's self-reinforcing, because the people that are on the lookout will always consider themselves to be right in their judgment, also because of survivorship bias - they won't know if they missed an AI generated comment/post unless it's revealed.
This is one reason why I'm in favor of tagging AI generated posts, because at one point we can't tell. If we can't tell, does it still matter? I don't know, but I'd like to know anyway.
Of course, it can't be mandated, so if the submitter doesn't tag it and the readers can't tell the difference, it's futile.
people could do this, but they don't. and if they did spend that effort, it would be better. but as it is now, the vast majority of AI written text, especially "documentation" of software projects, has this style signifying communication was outsourced to an AI.
we are not at the point where "we can't tell", and if we actually couldn't tell we wouldn't be complaining about it
There's significant overlap between the front pages of HN and Lobsters. Almost every time I try to submit the interesting articles I see on Lobsters here, I just get redirected to the existing discussion thread.
The massive 1000+ comments/upvotes AI model release threads only show up on HN. Lobsters doesn't accept "business" articles like that. You're quite likely to find reactionary articles that are critical of AI on the front page though. There are several on the front page right now, in addition to the ones derisively tagged vibecoding.
This happens all the time, depending on the trend of the time. It was Rust for a while, then cryptocurrencies, machine learning, starups / unicorns / enormous funding rounds, etc.
That's a high exaggeration of course, but in the wonderful old HN tradition of perceiving the site as dominated by $badness, where everyone has their own perception of $badness.
Fine. Looking at today's /active, it's more than half just based on the titles. (Likely 2/3 or more in practice, but I did not delve into each post.) And this does not feel particularly unusual.
(Apologies if you've commented on the following already, but I've not seen it.)
The most concerning growing trend I see is comments that don't violate any guidelines, but are flagged to dead.
I'm not talking about posters that are shadowbanned, but about comments that engaged thoughtfully on a topic but the rest of the thread disagreed emphatically with.
I also don't even mean controversial takes on hot-button issues like vaccines.
Just plain old bucking the trend in a thread about AI, transit, housing, layoffs, etc.
I've been browsing with showdead on for as long as I can remember, and I'm seeing this accelerate. Comments from folks both you and I respect as high quality contributors here.
I don't know what the solution is, but it discourages me (and I'm sure others) from having the kind of thought-provoking dialog I've gotten used to reading here for the last 15 years.
> comments that don't violate any guidelines, but are flagged to dead.
Vouch them and/or email to hn@ycombinator.com and say why you think they deserve to be [undead].
I see that a lot, some have been erroneously caught by the real time AI detect filter (which actually isn't too bad at slicing out the actual AI gen comments) others have gone hard against the zeitgeist.
I've had the mods reinstate comments that I've thoroughly disagreed with but were making their best case for an opposing view - the threads are better with the best arguments forward for all sides of the elephant.
I have vouched a couple (~3-5) benign comments a while back and now I no longer have a vouch button for comments.
I don't know if the vouch threshold has increased or if the mods have removed my ability to vouch for other comments entirely.
Wondering if it was my good faith attempt to inform a user of their comments being auto-flagged [1] before I had any context that they were supposed to be persona non grata.
I always vouch them but have never bothered to email. I figure the mods are seeing the same HN I am. But maybe I spend too much time here some evenings..
But yes, it's the "going against the zeitgeist" ones I have in mind. It feels very damaging to the community.
It's a rare individual that reads all the comments .. my impression is they appreciate on point heads up emails about accidentally auto-binned comments and are happy to reverse flagging on good comments, even those that try and make the dark side of a case.
Probably best not to try and flood the zone with anti/pro pet subject matter karen emails though.
FWiW I semi frequently pick apart comments supporting cases I'm in favour of .. because I want to see better arguments being made and to discourage weak easily dismissed shallow support.
I agree with that, the ones I see flagged are frequently espousing viewpoints I disagree with. But they should be debated then, and flagging them denies everyone that opportunity.
Personally, I've seen two - both ones that I emailed about (and I really disliked the stance taken on one of those, but they were debating at a level that was polite, addressed objections raised, acknowledged other PoVs etc.)
Vouch, I've perhaps seen reverse things several times (more of a background observation not pursued, so, you know, fuzzy anecdata at best), I did get feedback from @dang that one comment I vouched for was, in fact, a legitimate AI gen comment .. so clearly I'm human enough to fall for the occasional clanker.
>in a world where the difference between human trained to talk like an AI and AI masquerading as human
I was once accused of using AI for writing in the voice of a depressed character because the character had a certain emotional detachment that to the person lodging the accusation indicated AI.
In short it is not just specific phrasing or words but also aesthetic effects that mean one is AI nowadays.
Honest question, why would it be a grim future for people to be allergic to what, in 99% of the cases, is effortless slop?
Personally that is the future I hope to see. Hence my continuous protestations at the lazy excuses for articles that get posted these days, and the lazier excuses given by their authors for avoiding using their brain.
You posted your comment while I was editing mine so this conversation is in an indeterminate state! (Not a criticism - I take forever to edit these things sometimes.)
For example, I think you said "the politics of articles" before I added the thing about a "class distinction". Intriguing overlap!
I don't quite follow what you mean about grim future but if you wouldn't mind reading the edited version of my post, I can respond to anything that isn't addressed there.
Hacker News is already in the business of policing articles though. This is a curated list of articles that people share, and a lot of unrelated articles are automatically deleted or just downvoted out of existence. This isnt Reddit.
It’s okay to have an opinionated website. Not every corner of the internet needs to be a bastion of free speech
It's sometimes used that way, sometimes a fact, and sometimes both. It's all unclear because we're still in the early stages of this working itself out.
This is a nested-enough subthread that I can say whatever I want because no one will ever link to it because if they do no one will care.
The class of comments you're talking about—not just ones that say "clanker" literally but the more general category—is particle-wave undecidable right now.
If the commenter is right—i.e. if the commenter they are castigating actually did post LLM-generated text—then it's a community immune system response.
If the commenter is wrong—i.e. they are castigating a sincere human and hauling them to court on false charges—then it's the kind of attack that we tell people not to post here.
They can't know for sure whether what they're saying is true or false, and we can't know for sure whether we should moderate it. Both questions depend on information that is unavailable. This is what I mean when I say that the whole question is in a chaotic state right now, and it's too soon to know which way it will stabilize.
I think the decision to ban AI submissions is a good one, but ultimately it's going to create this conflict for some time, maybe a really long time until things stabilize around AI in the broader culture
I hope eventually AI usage does become a taboo, at least in some fields. Creative fields should be for creative humans, not people who can't even publish an article without the help of an LLM
and then some articles will have maybe a small section, 10% of it, LLM generated. And the it really is a superposition of LLM/human written, and flaggable/unflaggable
Why would humans ever be trained to talk like an AI? If they are working in some capacity where there is strong incentive to write llm-slop adjacent content, might as well use the llm slop generator.
> 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.
Humans are training to detect AI content. Humans writing more like AIs is an unrelated (and slower) phenomenon.
'humans trained to talk like an AI' is just LinkedIn and I would hope that the last thing anyone wants is for HN to become the utter void that is LinkedIn posts.
I'd prefer a tag to the mounds of "this looks like it is AI generated, I can tell from the pixels and from having seen quite a few AIs in my time" comments. That way the people who reject AI content can filter it out rather than having to argue about it in the comments.
> The current picture is that 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.
It's not a purity test, it's as the author is communicating they don't care whether the reader has any signals of what is accurate vs inaccurate information, which puts the burden of investigating how much is accurate on the reader at every step when there's some minimum expectation that should be an author's role (outside of topics where there is some expectation of ulterior motives/biases and one would naturally engage more critically minded).
When people complain here it's more often than not when an article has no disclaimer about AI use or what has been human-reviewed, so the burden again falls on the reader who is now even more skeptical. That is more to ask of a reader than when it's coming from say a known expert and the reader is receptive to engage and learn.
That's the reason tired cliches and turns of phrase (overused by LLMs) have become a heuristic for whether to pay attention, because it's a sign that there's some unknown quantity of of the article that hasn't had human review and it's easier to put in the bucket of 'maybe worthwhile but would need a fully human analysis of this' or just outright rejection (as we've seen from comments).
Edit: I see a sibling comment has raised the same observation.
This[1] comment, mostly in terms of not knowing which parts are generated and which not when not disclosed, which puts an added burden on the reader to assess.
Like, if some non-controversial article makes a statement about something technical (where one's guard isn't already raised) but you've observed signs of LLM use (without any disclosure of to what degree) then instead of thinking it might be an interesting thing to follow-up on or remember one might be thinking instead 'is this something the author themselves understands and has reviewed for accuracy or slipped in by the LLM' and other such distractions (and legwork if wanting to try and fact-check such things on the spot).
It goes from having a perhaps pleasurable, educational read to questioning and being more skeptical/cynical about the material. HN's guidelines meanwhile encourage good faith engagement, which is challenging.
Edit: corrected permalink (had accidental extra digit).
I can live with well-composed articles that have a huge chunk of AI in their generation.
Stuff interesting enough to get upvoted (i.e. not slop), but I'm so irritated and triggered by pointless, human, comment threads moaning about "this is AI generated".
Another good question I don't know the answer to! Which is probably why we haven't done it yet.
I guess the idea is that if lots of people flag a comment for the "genai" reason then we can treat that a more precise community signal than "flagged in general". But this argument seems weaker to me as soon as I write it out.
> 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.
I really really hope more people take up pen and paper! My last blog post [0] came with proof-of-work attached.
I was just thinking about this, the proof of work angle. Maybe written blogs need to come with recordings of the process now too, otherwise they will be suspicious.
What a goofy situation to imagine. I hope we can figure out a way though. I personally have no interest in reading anything spat out by an LLM, so if anything can be used to prove that an author wrote something themselves, I'm interested
Sensible policy. I think with mainstream news publications now obviously using LLMs in their day to day workflows, it's going to be hard to take a purist stance here. Some do this more responsibly than others. But I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing if it is done responsibly. It's only a problem if it is done poorly.
Poor writing is not a new thing, of course. Most of the moderation mechanisms that it uses were perfected a quarter century ago when sites like Slashdot were popular as a defense mechanism against bad user behavior. Bad user behavior impacts commenting, article submissions, and moderating itself. While bad users now have AI to abuse, the problem of a large volume of low quality content is is largely the same. The moderation mechanisms end up targeting the problem at the source: identifying good and bad users. So, the same amount of bad users generating a lot more garbage isn't that big of a deal. Getting good karma still is a lot of work and it makes identifying all the garbage created by users without that relatively straightforward.
Using LLMs to tag, flag and filter content might not be a bad thing to experiment with. There are a lot of low quality AI generated opinion pieces that somehow make it to the front page. Same for political and controversial stuff, which of course is against the HN guidelines for content. Auto flagging things that obviously violate guidelines should not be that hard. It's just a matter of having good guard rails. @dang might actually already be doing that. I know I would be if staying on top of piles of generated garbage was part of my job description. It might also be done to give good content a little boost.
The new articles section has a very low signal to noise ratio currently and the window for good content to make it past that is very short. Often articles on the front page will have many duplicate submissions that never made it past that. IMHO duplicate submissions should just count as upvotes on the original. Auto de-duplicating based on canonical URL should not be that hard.
Community generated tags seems like the obvious solution to all of this. You could easily give a setting to turn them off, breaks no existing systems, and allows for a broad emergent taxonomy. Only surface tags above X community upvotes except to superusers who are allowed to propose tags.
I think that goal only works when the community is small and culturally homogeneous and the velocity of content is relatively slow, but all of those result in implicit silos at scale. People's subjective experience of HN already differs wildly from others based entirely on when they show up, from where and what kind of content they consider on topic, and it already creates a great deal of tension and hostility.
Plus, HN's design makes it easy for a single story or kind of story to appear to overwhelm the forum (I say "appear" because really there's more than what's on the frontpage, but most people never bother to check past the frontpage,) which only results in complaints and threads like this. Another layer of organization to handle HN's increasing scale and complexity might be necessary.
The tricky thing about tags is that we get a tag for genai this year, what about next year’s thing and the year after that? We’d end up with a list of tags attached haphazardly all over the place. Flagging with a box to add a reason sounds like an excellent idea.
I dunno, certainly some tags are justified, such as distinguishing submissions which are publicly-readable versus ones which require an account--or worse, payment.
That's not a value-judgement of the true content of an article or piece of media, but a fairly objective facet which impacts the HN participant's experience.
It's kind of like how, back in the day, people really wanted to know the filesize of something before they clicked, to avoid a blind-investment of their dial-up bandwidth for indeterminate minutes of waiting (and opportunity-cost of other things not downloaded) that might be more than they really wanted for whatever-it-was.
For example, if I quote a GenAI response –even in criticism– (See what I did, there?), it can get flagged, and result in a shadowban (has happened to me -lesson learned).
But a good use for LLMs, is as a copyeditor. They do a great job. Some unedited stuff is so bad, I'd rather read slop, any day.
The problem is, what's the threshold? If they just fix a few typos and misspellings, that's fine, but what if they offer more substantial changes? How much text must change, before we can legit dismiss as "slop"?
Also, what if there's a significant GenAI component, but the article really is something that we want on the HN frontpage, because of its content?
I would love to see a 'flag as AI' coupled with a profile setting to hide posts that have had a certain number of AI flags. Allow people who don't want to see likely AI content to filter it silently.
I know several people that have difficulty writing but are still f*cking smart. So what, they should refrain from using AI to help them because the AI police says so?
But yeah, let's continue classifying people based on their outer qualities and habits... History showed us were this leads us to.
And here an em dash -- to freak out the AI police.
> I know several people that have difficulty writing but are still f*cking smart. So what, they should refrain from using AI to help them because the AI police says so?
Do what other people do when they cannot do something: don’t do it?
I can’t draw or do art and I don’t have an AI generate art for me so I can LARP as an artist.
You can just… not do things? Nobody is putting a gun to your head to make you write blog posts and post them on HN.
> I know several people that have difficulty writing but are still f*cking smart. So what, they should refrain from using AI to help them because the AI police says so?
The issue is that AI doesn't actually help them; it corrects grammar and removes voice. If you're trying to sound more professional/convincing/engaging, AI usage undermines that.
A judgement on the content (product of writing) is not a judgement on people. I dont care if a person uses LLMs in their life – heck, I myself do. But I care if I want to spend my time reading an LLM-written/assisted article or not.
I agree with your second paragraph - in fact I posted something pretty sympatico a couple hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48887812. But I have such a different reaction to pg's article that I can't fathom why you say that.
I strongly agree. Humanity only benefits from having more smart ideas published.
Better is simply don't publish slop. If someone spends time refining and editing their idea with AI assistance and are happy with the quality of the finished product then I say go for it.
It's not like all human writers produce content that is worth reading.
I think the problem space needs to be divided into two - AI generated articles (which the OP's question is about) and AI generated content/comments. The articles - honestly, normal flagging just works. If the content and the information in it is worthwhile, I don't think people would flag it. Isn't this the whole point of flagging?
However, the second part of the problem - the AI comments, that's really what kills the discussion and eventually the community. If I have trust issues that I'm talking to a bot but not a real user, I am not going to engage further. I might or might not flag the account, but at some point, I'm going to be tired of reporting if everywhere around me it's just bots pretending to be humans. I think this is the more serious problem that needs focus.
In my experience, sloppy AI content almost always, sometime instantly even gets flagged out.
My only thought is that "good" genai authors/articles will easily get through the filter while "generic" ones will fail. So the outcome won't be all genai articles getting flagged (unless people self-report), just the low quality ones. I'm guessing that's okay and I'm one of those people who discounts genai writing the second I read one of the tells, so the flag would save me time.
Ultimately though this is the same debate as "should we allow genai code in codebases". High quality code lands naturally while slop is slop. Not much value in banning AI outright--the desire is predominantly to ban the slop.
Maybe the tag should be [slop] rather than [genai]...
There have definitely been cases of "good" genai articles that led to quite good HN threads. (Don't ask me for links - alas but my sandblasted memory doesn't retain anything.)
I guess my response to that is we want the most interesting threads.
A fixed dropdown list of flag reasons would be a very good change, I think, because it would somewhat counteract strategic flagging of stories as a downvote. I think you'd want to keep the list pretty tight, because it seems like a huge source of meta drama.
The times I've pointed point out pretty blatant AI comments, I get nuked with downvotes. So often that I've stopped pointing them out.
Before you say I'm just falsely calling them out, it's typical ChatGPT style of either very amicable or Nobel Laureate tone, lots of formatting, with a couple of paragraphs and then a clever one-line punchline at the end. If you look at those commenters their history, it's all like that. Either generated or assisted. For older accounts you can see the steep increase of it around 2025ish.
Seems like the HN crowd absolutely adores AI comments and the rule banning them is (sadly) unnecessary. Or at least not what 'the people' want.
Out of curiosity I looked through your post history to find an example of a time you got downvoted for calling out AI comments. The first one I could find was 3 months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47493096), where you got downvoted for calling out an AI comment...to a comment that had zero common signs of AI writing.
The OP then replied:
> Not AI. Not sure how I feel getting my writing style called out like that though :D
Not OP, but I’ve been nuked with downvotes for this several times too and tend to delete the dead comments. The slop is so prevalent that at this point it’s not a particularly interesting thing to say I think.
".. Fault-tolerant and highly available hardware must facilitate low-latency, single-threaded communication with high semantic density in order to achieve multi-dimensional consensus in a safety-critical, heterogeneous, adversarial environment. .."
I am not sure why you think someone saying "not AI trust me bro" carries any merit.
At any rate, like I said, I've given up the war. People enjoy reading that stuff, I'll just be the old man no longer yelling at the clouds.
Just the idea that something is AI is bothersome to some, and some AI content is genuinely useful and gets thrown out with the bathwater. Not saying all of it is useful, but there are shades of grey, not just black and white.
The broader point stands that all this AI stuff is highly polarizing, for a reason. I think you did a good job explaining why people get polarized. Sorry for any confusion.
I can't speak for everyone, but I've done a lot of reflecting on this so I have something of an explanation for why I feel this way about AI
I think it's because I'm not optimizing my life to get the correct answer as fast as possible, or to build things as fast as possible.
To me, the most important thing about the internet is connecting with other people. If I ask a question on a forum it's because I want to talk to someone about it, maybe make an acquaintance or even a friend. Otherwise I would of course just ask the AI now. Google has been around for a long time, and could already usually find answers for me. I still would rather discuss with a colleague sometimes than Google every single thing.
Human connection. We need more of it, not less. I think heavy AI use and reliance on AI for thinking, research, communication and building... It's going to isolate people even more
IMO posting "This article is AI" does not add anything to the conversation.
The HN guidelines[1] include:
Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage.
and
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken.
I'd argue pointing out that you think an article is AI is very similar in value to pointing out any of the above. None of us like AI slop. But I wouldn't be surprised if, by the end of 2026, 90-95% of articles posted online are AI slop. Pointing it out is useless. As useless as pointing out that the article breaks the scrollbar (which happens often) or that the article is formatted badly or has poor text contrast, or that an article is Chinese propaganda. Probably true, but posting about it adds nothing to the discussion, and is not allowed on HN.
All we really need is to add "Don't complain that an article is AI" to the guidelines.
But it is useful. I can deal with a broken scrollbar if the content is good, but if an article is AI written I don't want to read the content at all. That's a huge difference.
Nowadays I usually check the comments first for the "This is AI" comment, I've left a few of my own and gotten thank yous in reply.
You could just ask your AI to flag it with an extension, or rewrite it in a style you prefer (or just do a good job summarizing the articles core meaning).
A real v12, vs hypothetical in my example, actually does in the form of gas consumed. Still, doesn't mean it is a good excuse to justify the waste in energy and materials, all to achieve what I already can do. It would be nice to throw that compute towards stuff like curing disease or towards something that might stave off climate change, instead of using it to turn bullet points into an article and me turning that article back into bullet points.
I'm suggesting using AI to combat the AI issue, not complaining endlessly with pointless points that do nothing to solve the very real problem that is not going away by being stubborn or rude. My suggestion, which I use myself, helps limit the blast radius. Doesn't mean I have to get involved with it while it's doing what it does. Do you also question email filters and argue that sending spam is wrong and suggesting to use a spam filter is not useful to the conversation?
I don't think I agree with that. Complaining about AI written articles is more about the quality of the writing. it's on par with a piece of writing that wasn't proof read, well researched or some stream of consciousness rant.
I think the criticism also signals to the submitter or idk co-author? That the article isn't valued
Agreed, I find comments whining about AI slop to be far less valuable than the supposed AI slop, and I wonder if the commenters are aware of the irony, or perhaps those comments are also AI slop themselves.
We already have tags for PDF and Video so I could definitely see one for [LLM] working!
Generally I'd appreciate a top level comment from the submitter saying this is LLM generated but I read it and found it interesting because x,y,z because I'd rather read slop someone vouches for than slop someone hasn't
Can we just make it official in the guidelines that "Articles written by genai" should generally not be submitted to HN? (And by extension, that they are okay to flag?)
(I already flag submissions I think were written by AI.)
I don't think this is true, at least not right now, and in a way I'm actually thankful for it.
The frantic rush to chase the only potentially profitable use case for LLMs found so far (writing code) and the resulting focus on coding RLHF means models are actively becoming worse at sounding like humans.
This is totally tangential to your point, but what is that page? It's not your usual link to an algolia search. Is this already part of some sort of manual tagging system? Clicking on the first one, these comments don't seem to be moderated. Are you using these complaints to help detect AI generated content? I think the existence of that page just leaves me confused on whether you actually want people to comment like this or not.
It's just a list of posts that we tagged manually and then defined a URL endpoint for. We do that sometimes, but rarely enough that I can understand the confusion.
Keep in mind that we have a REPL over here and can make any link do anything!
It's just a collection of comments pushing back on LLM-generated prose. 'dang sends it in replies to emails that ask him why their comments were flagged when that's the reason. He's offering examples of the broad community sentiment on the matter, to the commenter who was flagged.
Oh, there's a non sequitir in the parent comment that gives away some kind of leaky context situation, and the commenter is just replying with the same very generic "please elaborate" that we all throw at a language model from time to time. Not because anyone cares what the random text generator has to say, just because it's funny to light a few thousand tokens on fire.
I dont see that. To me it reads like a genuine question to an actually underspecified part of how much embedded carbon emissions ram entails. I read the question at the time and found it reasonable and genuine, and I see no strong reason to suspect that any of the commenters there is an LLM.
1st: the presumption that AI generated text is actually unsuccessful, rather than proliferating broadly unchallenged today
2nd: the disposition that negative attitudes towards AI text are unjustified discrirmination, rather than working as a strong latent predictor of low-effort content
3rd: the assumption that human writing is reliably doled benefits, rather than some poor proxy of it (winning the social contest for claiming authenticity)
Operationally, only a very small minority of humans actually successfully identify AI generated text at rates ≥ Pangram. People discriminate against the label of "AI", but mostly fail to vote accurately. It's not uncommon to see bots abusing this gap for their own success -- accusing humans, sympathizing with generated profiles... FUD environment where people routinely get away with dismissing true accusations.
For someone who is mediocre at detection, this would structurally feel like an unhinged, unjustified bias: look at all these good posts, these honest people, getting undermined by discrimination...
Interesting points! though I don't follow them all.
> 1st: the presumption that AI generated text is actually unsuccessful, rather than proliferating broadly unchallenged today
I can only talk about HN. If you think this is proliferating broadly on HN itself, I'd like to see such links. Assuming it's "broadly", they should be easy to find.
> 2nd: the disposition that negative attitudes towards AI text are unjustified discrirmination, rather than working as a strong latent predictor of low-effort content
I don't understand this bit.
> 3rd: the assumption that human writing is reliably doled benefits, rather than some poor proxy of it (winning the social contest for claiming authenticity)
Sorry, but I don't understand this either.
> only a very small minority of humans actually successfully identify AI generated text at rates ≥ Pangram.
That's not what we seem to be seeing. I do agree that there's a wide spectrum and a lot of wrong guesses.
> It's not uncommon to see bots abusing this gap for their own success
I'd like to see specific links of this on HN itself. If it's not uncommon, they should be easy to find.
What about people who genuinely write their own articles but due to their time spent with AI, they are sounding like AI? I know people like this. They really are writing like that now. Shouldn't there be fairness to them?
LLMs are unquestionably useful. The number of things I've used them to accomplish on HN—things that I've wanted to do for over a decade—is mind-blowing. Performance optimizations, log file anlaysis, tracking down race conditions—it's quite incredible.
I think you and I have a difference of opinion on what it means to be unquestionably useful, and whether any technology should ever be described as such.
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?
Put it this way, if the ai article is indeed so good, why store the article in a dusty long form output mode from a soon to be obsolete model? Just give us the prompt, and in 6 months with some newer, bigger, better model, we can feed that prompt and get an even better article out of it.
I store all prompts as docs, but I doubt I can rerun the whole prompt history with a better model and get sizable return for the cost, personally.
EDIT: I'm referring to a small codebase not articles tho
to play devils advocate - i doubt the articles that end up on the front page are one shotted (theres probably a sequence of back and forward refinement). and in any case, i feel the avg reader would actually not prefer to read the prompt, which would be very information dense
having said that, i'd still much prefer a norm of including prompt history with the article, or the codebase for that matter, so people can choose for themselves :)
On the extreme end you have recipe blogspam, with the tropey life stories and Amazon affiliate spam that precede the meat (pardon the pun). If that pre-filler is inconsequential, why not have an LLM parse the semantic markup - which 99% of recipe sites use for Google SEO - to produce custom content for you? Like a history of the ingredients, or better instructions with an equipment list tailored to your kitchen and timings/temps for your specific oven?
I can see there being a middle ground where you publish some sort of context that a user’s LLM can generate the content from. Is it fundamentally any different from dramatized non-fiction? Think of books like Operation Mincemeat where the facts are thoroughly researched, but the author uses a lot of artistic license to tell the story.
But to your point, if there is back-and-forth, I wish people would pay more attention to the obvious traits of LLM writing. Not everything needs to read like it’s a snappy editorial, but I sense we’re still in the early days where people have been handed this technology and are simply excited that they can pump out 1000 words in a coherent narrative.
Your middle ground idea is interesting. And maybe inevitable in some ways, if the llm becomes even more of a universal interface to the outside world.
Regarding llm writing, it is disappointing. Especially as people could use it in the “opposite” direction, using the tirelessness of the llm to experiment with the communication with the aim to make it as clear as possible for the reader…
A lot of my PRs are the result of hours of back and forth between an AI and myself. In many cases the sum total of my prompts is much larger than the final output.
The fallacy here is that you can't reduce the wide range of things that “AI generated” means into a single flag. As for why not “show us the prompt”: https://sgnt.ai/p/prompt-is-not-the-work/
> Blogspam and corporate blogs had killed quality bogs ages ago
One of the main reasons that I (and I assume others) am here is because I can discover interesting content. It is true that there is a lot of spam in the internet but if I wanted that I would be in x, linkedin or sth. My problem with AI right now is that I consider machine generated content low quality one, and I would like to be able to decide if I want to read such an article without having to waste time before I realise it is ai generated.
> if an AI generated article is indistinguishable from a human written article and it is accurate and interesting, do you care who wrote it
Ideally I would like to know regardless. Practically in such a hypothetical future scenario it may be impossible, but I think that not doing sth right now because of some hypothetical future that may or may not happen is not a very good argument. Right now the AI content is pretty distinguishable, and if one took the time and effort to make it not seem like AI then at least that text contains some more human effort.
I think the era of blogging is pretty alive. I find most of the signal on agentic coding in articles (Armin Ronacher, Simon Willison, etc.). It's just harder to find because of all the noise.
> Nobody wants to label their stuff as AI generated because they removed credibility.
I don't think this is true. I think most of the people who post LLM content without editing and without even style guidelines are simply of the opinion that the resulting text is genuinely of an acceptable quality.
Agreed with the rest of your post. We should think of this in terms of quality of the result, not the process.
> I think most of the people who post LLM content without editing and without even style guidelines are simply of the opinion that the resulting text is genuinely of an acceptable quality.
I don't disagree with that assessment, with one extra detail: for many of them their bar of “an acceptable quality” is too low. No higher than “sod it, it'll do” and often lower. To too many, generated content is seen as a gateway to maybe accidentally becoming some sort of influencer, a way to get themselves out there with little or no care about whether their contribution is actually useful overall just as long as it garners a bit of attention.
I don't want to waste time hunting through the extra piles of “it'll do” or worse to find the remaining nuggets of actually good writing, be they entirely human made or created by humans using LLM assistance. There are at lease a few people of agree with me on the matter.
The problem with judging on quality is that you often have to at least start reading the slop to realise and move on to the next thing. Rating systems and flags may help somewhat, but they will all eventually be gamed so it will become yet another battle of attrition: people and systems trying to filter out the crap while other people and their systems finding it more profitable to spend time breaking the filtering mechanisms instead of producing content good enough to not actually be filtered by them.
The era of people caring about knowledge/learning seems to be dead. At least in the way we used to, because a lot of what we needed that for can now be done by the LLMs.
> 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?
Right now, in mid 2026, many of believe that LLM prose is not as good as human output.
The deception is one aspect. AI for spellcheck and proofreading is one thing; AI writing the content wholesale in the first person, which you pass off as your own, is another. I also don’t care for the Tailwind-styled demo sites that have flooded Show HN.
The sort of content that people react viscerally to (as slop) is rarely that subtle. Again, no problem with careful and subtle use (see CGI in movies), but when I see Claude-isms and snappy section headings that nobody used to use, I close the page.
You can/should write for you, to get experience writing, to present a portfolio, to share things you find interesting, a photo a day, whatever. Why does that have to die?
I believe we're in a fairly limited window of time right now where that's even detectable via tools like Pangram. For small models it'll, maybe not the case. But for anything worth paying for.
If counterfeit or stolen cash is indistinguishable from real or honest cash, should you accept it? Should you spend it? No. Why? Because doing so erodes and potentially destroys society.
Whether you agree that a con artist is only a criminal if he gets caught, or you think he’s a criminal the whole time, surely you can see why many people might want to know if they are dealing with a friend and not something simulating a friend.
unless you signed a contract with your readers, saying "this article was not LLM written" while being written by LLMs is not fraud, just lying which is legal
but we are not even talking about that, most authors do not claim LLMs were not used
> Blogspam and corporate blogs had killed quality bogs ages ago even before AI was a thing.
That was a two-pronged thing. As well as the blog-spam drowning out what good blogs there were, a lot of people that used to output that way moved to centralised platforms that then either tried to lock their content in, or surrounded it with ad-tech bothers, or both.
> if an AI generated article is indistinguishable from a human written article…
Quite a bit of AI generated output is indistinguishable from crap human writing, often mediocre human writing, and that is actually part of the problem. A lot of people bang something out of their LLM/agents of choice and not bother taking the time needed to lift to good or excellent, so there is a bulk of mediocre or worse stuff flooding the medium because it is so easy to produce. But do we really need 100+ mediocre articles and a few good ones on a subject where there would previously have been a few mediocre ones and still a few good+ ones? It makes the genuinely worthwhile content much harder to stumble upon, especially as the ones taking the lazier approaches to writing seem to be making greater efforts in self-promotion with the time they have saved!
> if an AI generated article is […] is accurate and interesting, do you care who wrote it?
Firstly: maybe not, or at least less so. But I'm not convinced they can be trusted to be that accurate. I don't trust the average human that much either, they are often authoritatively wrong too (which doesn't help the LLMs, which have been at least partially trained on authoritatively wrong content), but I trust good human writers (who may be assisted by LLMs these days, like they've been assisted by spelling & grammar checkers for decades) above other human writers and content almost entirely drawn from LLMs.
Secondly: Yes. I care. I'm still smarting that after years of people being fined heavily, banned from things, and even imprisoned, for copying content, we seem fine with the big companies pirating whatever they want for training purposes⁰. Yes, some fines have been paid, but a few hours worth of income isn't even a slap on the wrist given how much funny money is being sloshed around the sector ATM, and do you know any content makers who got a share of those fines? I'm still trying to avoid being a part of that, to the point of being willing to commit career suicide¹, so yes, I do care who/what made most effort on creating the article. Given a choice between human, human with LLM assist, LLM with minimal human editing, and purer slop, I would morally prefer something from as close to the “just humans” end of the scale over anything else, even if the quality is practically identical.
--------
[0] I wonder how the corporates would take the “we only downloaded and used it ignoring the licence for model training purposes” point being used about their output. After all, I'm only using it irrespective of your licence to train the intelligence model that sits between my ears!
[1] The current corporate overlords have as much said “get with AI or be left behind”, and I'm sure being left behind will involve being PIPed out to pasture. I might be able to argue “the difference is enough to be considered a material change in roll, so you can't force that under UK employment law nor sack me for not playing ball”, but the same change-of-roll argument just opens up the possibility of redundancy instead², which is only marginally better. In either case I'm done for working in development with my current attitudes.
[2] this interpretation, if not legal pigswill entirely, also makes “we need less legacy developers and more agenic developers, your legacy roll is therefore redundant, do you want to change to an agent-based job or do you want to leave?” perfectly legal.
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.
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.
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)
Take any existing article you find insightful and then ask an LLM to "rewrite it, but make better and more engaging". The result is likely "good + slop", assuming the actual content is preserved.
If what people here say is right, and AI usage online is growing and accelerating, then by the end of the year, the vast, vast majority articles posted to the internet (and linked by HN readers) are going to be AI slop, at which point it is not going to matter. "This article is AI" is going to add about as much insight to the conversation as "The author used a spell checker."
Then we are fucked. A quality platform must strive for more quality than what the average lurker, likely a bot, decides is worth reading. That’s how you get modern Reddit.
Is the goal of this site to remain high-quality, or to rely on random, anonymous users to discern quality? Consider the possibility that the two options might be incompatible.
I agree with you, though you’ll find other old users that will claim people have been moaning about the ‘decline in morals’ of this site since its inception
> 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.
agreed.
For me, the issue I have is that a vocal group seems to despise AI-edited content and they can't manage to take their disgust eleswhere.
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.
"bad faith"? As in, that the person posts the accusation while actually believing the opposite? I would think the far, far more common reason for posting that incorrectly is that they legitimately thought it was slop. Of course such low-effort wrongful accusations are bad to post for multiple reasons, but I don't think people frequently post such things falsely
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.
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
I am skeptical YC frequency of "AI" related content is representative of actual users interest. Yet I agree there are a lot of cultural differences in this world that don't often translate well for some users. Some folks will assume because they disagree about some subject, that it is some sort of personal slight.
Even scoring posts does provably change peoples behavior, and studies showed it tended to make people more punitive in their conduct with strangers.
At bare minimum, YC should have bot CAPTCHA protection on posts. As unleashing chat bots on users is often disrespectful, and just cows people out of participating in conversations in good faith. =3
Not sure why it has gravitated to a narrow scope subject, but compared to the diverse interests most technical people had in the past. LLM weights now seems like an oddly over-represented topic even when its unrelated to actual use-cases.
Throwing up a bot challenge would probably improve signal-to-noise ratios, but who knows for sure. =3
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.
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.
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).
I'd be curious if you'd read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48887149 and let me know (once I've finished editing the damn thing) how this changes, or doesn't change, your response.
I think that is really reasonable. I’ve always felt weird with flagging too because there’s no reason attached. Even if it’s not displayed in the UI, it would be nice to have something in the html if a link gets enough flags for ai. Would let people css filter them out.
Investors want to see their investment grow. What is the conspiracy? HN also hosted a likely war criminal to talk about his experiencing killing children in gaza. You think these people have morals or ideals?
> HN also hosted a likely war criminal to talk about his experiencing killing children in gaza.
WTF? What do you mean by "hosted"?
I know it's the internet's happy place to blithely accuse others of monstrosity and then derive from that how nobody other then themselves has any "morals or ideals", but this one sticks in my craw.
I don't know what rsoto2 was referring to, but it's not at all hard to believe that YC (which I acknowledge is somewhat separate from HN) would happily host and support war profiteers. YC helped found a way profiteering company directly[1], eagerly brags about the NFT scam companies they helped start[2], and its founder managed to stomach publishing this utter garbage[3] under his name in order to establish himself as a friend and ally to America's growing fascist movement. The folks running YC may not be as openly evil as the people running Google and Facebook and X and OpenAI, but that's only a difference in scale and opportunity.
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.
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.
> 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)
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!
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.
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.
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?
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):
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 :/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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].
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> my work be classified as "slop" because a few months ago I subscribed to and started using Claude
Wait I'm not sure I understand the cause and consequence here if you're saying you use an LLM but your articles aren't slop (note that those are rough synonyms). Do you mention in your submissions you subscribed to or used Claude? The mere existence of the subscription and using it for unrelated things won't be why people flag, I can only assume they notice the quality level and/or style
> you're saying you use an LLM but your articles aren't slop
Not a single word of my articles was written by LLMs. I used them for proofreading and critique.
Writing articles by hand is useful for me since it allows me to crystallize my knowledge. Writing it down for my own future reference essentially prevents me from forgetting in the first place. LLMs accelerated me so much I'm actually trying to slow down so I can let my recent achievements sink in a bit. Writing is how I do that.
> Do you mention in your submissions you subscribed to or used Claude?
I don't use Claude for my articles. I use Claude for code review and design. Implementation is almost a footnote, and even that gets significantly rewritten during my numerous human review passes. I still write code by hand too.
That's for the projects I actually care about. I do have some explicitly vibecoded projects, and I never made a secret out of it. Projects that wouldn't exist at all were it not for LLMs making it easy to execute. I personally review those too, just not as often.
I don't add AI models as co-authors to commits of my own repositories. I'm not in the business of providing free advertising to trillion dollar corporations. If other projects require it, I do so as per their rules.
> The mere existence of the subscription and using it for unrelated things won't be why people flag
It will. They will zero in on things like CLAUDE.md and dismiss your entire project as slop the second they see it.
I know because I asked people directly. Response? If an LLM touched your project, then your project is slop. Verbatim. And that's the polite reply.
Trying to establish some simple criteria for sloppy vs good work nearly got me kicked out. People came at me with literal "I know it when I see it" nonsense. Even Claude does a better job of defining "slop" than that. I find it hilarious how these rules are based on vibes. People just get LLM vibes out of other people's projects, and then dismiss them.
> I can only assume they notice the quality level and/or style
I'm not sure they even saw my project. It's just pure prejudice. AI detected? Slop, no need to even read it. If they actually read my work and thought it sucked, fine. In fact I'd be very interested in knowing why so I can improve. I refuse to accept these predetermined judgements though.
Getting outright called "LLM pusher", "slop fetishist" and "clanker lover" is pretty fun too. It's not the overt racism-tier insults that bother me, it's the fact not a single person seems to have gotten banned over this. One could be forgiven for thinking they opened a 4chan tab.
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”.
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.
False equivalence, text processor leaves the authors intention completely in tact and is deterministically controlled completely by the author. Not true for gen ai
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
We don't allow genai text on HN itself - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and 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. 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. I have an optimistic view, but I've been wrong about this so many times that I have low confidence in it.
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. 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) 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&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 in homage to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742902.
I think classifying it as an allergy or a status thing is a little too glib. I’ve read and reviewed, conservatively, hundreds of AI generated documents for work, and “written”/commissioned a bunch too. My biggest issue is that it’s impossible to engage with and give feedback on an AI written document, because it’s impossible to know whether misconceptions or gaps are because the author doesn’t understand the material deeply enough or the author does but the AI doesn’t and the author’s not proofreading carefully enough. Or if a surprising idea is raised — is it the authors insight, can they elaborate on it, where did it come from, etc?
Hackernews isn’t work, obviously, but “it’s impossible to engage deeper with the material because the author doesn’t really exist” is sort of a problem for a discussion site. If the human coauthor puts in enough work, they can make sure the doc really reflects their views and their understanding, but in my experience that’s much less common.
>My biggest issue is that it’s impossible to engage with and give feedback on an AI written document, because it’s impossible to know whether misconceptions or gaps are because the author doesn’t understand the material deeply enough or the author does but the AI doesn’t and the author’s not proofreading carefully enough.
FWIW, same problem with PRs or PoC that I have to work on; now my first question is, "did you know about his behaviour?". The first step, getting a decent spec, is delayed to after a first draft implementation is already pushed...
This exactly. Whenever someone shows me their (or someone else's) AI-assisted-coded (vibe coded) thing, I can only ever engage with it on a very superficial level, saying "oh cool".
You can't have a discussion about it, how it was done, because for 80% of cases it's "the AI did it".
I don't think this is that interesting or useful for HN, because indeed it's a discussion site.
It would be different if the vibe coded thing didn't come as a "look what it made and its vibe written README" but instead as a human written blog article about "how I made this thing using AI, what models, prompts and harnesses, how the experience was etc etc etc" --- again that would be something interesting to have a discussion about.
But otherwise what is there to say except "yeah cool that's cool that the AI made you that thing"
> it’s impossible to know whether misconceptions or gaps are because the author doesn’t understand the material deeply enough or the author does but the AI doesn’t and the author’s not proofreading carefully enough. Or if a surprising idea is raised — is it the authors insight, can they elaborate on it, where did it come from, etc?
You can engage with an AI-written document! Simply paste the document into the AI (same or different as the AI that wrote it) and ask questions. You can get an answer in seconds compared to an hour (if it's a blog post by an HN reader), days (if it's a professional blogger), or never (if it's by a journalist).
Perhaps AI-written articles should include the prompt as hidden text on the page. Or include a link with the prompt embedded, that causes the AI to spit out the same article that you could then ask questions about.
That's interesting, thank you! My only pushback is that my bit about "allergy" and "status" is about the audience response here, whereas you seem to be talking on a somewhat different level.
Oh for sure. My only point is that IME (and I’d assume many other commenters) the quality of discussion and engagement around an imperfect ai-written doc is considerably worse than the same doc written by a human. Work is where it’s most obvious to me… because many of these are design docs for systems I care deeply about us delivering, but I’ve noticed the same thing elsewhere.
But you wouldn't have called it "allergy" or a "status" problem when considering the audience's response to human written posts of a similar low quality level.
It's always been the case that the HN audience has been "allergic" to low effort slop (including human generated).
The OP (and my) point was trying to point out how the AI generated stuff might masquerade as something "interesting" if it had been human written, but actually is much of a nothing burger when there's no human behind it:
if a human made a strange, weird, or even sub-optimal design decision, that's something to possibly have an interesting discussion about.
if an AI does the same, first of, I don't care and don't wanna guess why its weights did the thing it did, it's just not as interesting as human motivations, UNLESS the main meat of the article/link is in fact about (again the human experience of) "how I made this thing, using AI, what prompts, harness, models, etc".
I hope it makes sense and allows you to no longer dismiss this as an "allergy" (aka the audience's problem), but as something that is actually a quality problem with the post.
> 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
Does that mean that an article being AI-generated is a flaggable offense? Should we be flagging suspected AI-generated articles already, or should we wait for the flagging system to support reasons first?
Damn you people for asking good questions that go straight to the fuzzy areas!
I don't know for sure yet. But you're right that that would follow from what I said.
What I do know is that users should flag articles that they think don't belong on HN. But this should rely on their reading of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not just be based on a like/dislike reaction. That is, users should flag articles that they think break the site guidelines, not just ones they dislike.
I have been discouraging people from flagging ‘articles that they think don't belong on HN’, because you have disabled my ability to do so time and time again. In private conversation with you, you have confirmed that if I flag/vouch stuff you mods don’t agree with, I get the privilege taken away, even if I genuinely believe a post to fall outside of the guidelines.
So either I read your mind, or it is best not to flag unless something is obviously, unequivocally, running afoul of the guidelines.
I keep being annoyed at how arbitrary, and dare I say hypocritical, the entire flagging mechanism and its surrounding politics are.
Flagging, to me, seems like pissing in the wind. If I notice serial posters submitting extremely low effort content (a pair of their own posts every waking hour from "6 months and 5 minutes ago", off-topic wikipedia nearly once a day, "I have 60000+ points but only upload from thealtantic/guardian/nytimes") then I go on an irate ten-minute flagging binge.
I've also been aghast at the nerve of those same serial posters applying the letter of the law against other users. I genuinely wouldn't care if Bartosz Ciechanowski only self-promotes every last one of his own posts. Some users are significantly more interesting than others, whether or not they violate the site guidelines marginally on a technicality.
I have suspected it's possible some users flags are worth more than others, and I wouldn't be surprised if my flagging ability was silently removed several years ago.
> In private conversation with you, you have confirmed that if I flag/vouch stuff you mods don’t agree with, I get the privilege taken away, even if I genuinely believe a post to fall outside of the guidelines.
People love to make vague claims like this based on things we supposedly said. How about you quote what exactly what I literally said so readers can make up their own minds?
Sorry if that is testy (well, it is testy), but I can't count the number of times that disgruntled users have posted falsely to HN threads to vent their residual frustrations with the mods.
Sure, quoting select passages over multiple emails with you personally.
> I'm afraid we took vouching privileges away from your account because you vouched for too many comments that were unsubstantive and/or flamebait and/or otherwise broke the site guidelines
> If you want to build up a track record for a while of vouching for good comments only, and then email so we can look at the recent vouches
Wondering how does one tell what is ‘good’ in your mind:
> Btw if you're unsure about a case you can always check with us about it. I know the borderline cases are not always easy to call.
—-
In other words, do as dang himself would do, or get penalised. I am not in the business of mind reading.
This was years ago. I am pretty sure lately I have been flagging/vouching stuff I genuinely believe were OK, though you have all the data in front to smite me with “ah, but on this day you vouched this bad comment! Gotcha!” so in the end it’s always a losing battle.
In any case, my issue is with you saying, I quote, ”users should flag articles that they think don't belong on HN”. Emphasis mine. No. It is more nuanced than that.
Kudos to you for responding exactly as I asked! That is rare to begin with, and even more so when I'm being irritable. Big respect.
I can see how using the word "good" was confusing, but I just meant the opposite of "comments that were unsubstantive and/or flamebait and/or otherwise broke the site guidelines". It just boils down to: what fits the guidelines or not.
> Wondering how does one tell what is ‘good’ in your mind
Since you can't read my mind (at least I assume you can't, and if you could you wouldn't have this question), that's not doable. What you can do is assess things according to your own reading of the site guidelines. If you assimilate https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and evaluate comments based on that and not just on what you like/dislike, then I imagine you won't end up too far from where the mods are, because that's what we're also trying to do.
I'm sure there will always be individual cases where we disagree—even tomhow and I disagree on individual cases—but they should be a minority.
If there are specific cases where you think we got it wrong, I'd be interested to see links, and we're always willing to hear a contrary argument.
> what fits the guidelines or not
It is no coincidence lawyering is a lucrative career, even when (in most countries) it is simply about interpreting what’s written in the big book.
Until you rewrite the guidelines in an unambiguous programming language (Lisp will do), and provide a system to discern whether a comment falls afoul of them, your personal interpretation of the Word will often differ from someone else’s.
That said, thanks for the edifying discussion.
Completely meta and possibly out-of-place, but this thread was I think my first encounter with dang (the human), and, based on it, I'm filled with respect for him.
Good job being you. Please continue doing so.
I have had plenty of disagreements with dang over my time on this site, yet I am the first to claim he has been instrumental in making HN as good as it is, notwithstanding the deluge of posts, bots, trolls, and other ungovernable people.
I have a lot of respect for his work.
I can honestly say I've never seen a moderator on any forum as good as Dang. I wish I had!
How were you penalised? Was it just losing the ability to flag?
If however you see things isn’t lining up well with how they want things flagged, it makes sense to remove that from you. Unless there’s more punishment attached this seems very sensible regardless of how genuinely you believe in things.
(Not OP.) I can understand that it feels like a punishment though, if you are legitimately trying to help and this is the thanks you get. It's not just a human-to-human notice, but a change of your permission level; you're being stepped down. Of course I have no idea about this specific case and what the user flagged/vouched, and I can see your logic, just that I'd probably also feel bad if it happened to me and the wording seems fitting enough to me
Dan likes some people and you ain't in the group, buddy.
I like people who follow the site guidelines and want to use HN as intended. That doesn't mean I dislike people who don't, but that side of the moon is more...nuanced.
He has no idea who I am.
Privately, when I was new he was polite and helpful. (Tried to be polite, was returned.)
/singular anecdote for reader reference
> users should flag articles that they think break the site guidelines
I'm more and more think that link actually hurts the site more than helps. It's a gotcha against everything, can be used a sword and a shield too.
See the part about politics. There is more and more US domestic politics post here (which I actually flag all the time) yet when the topic comes up people will say: "should hackers turn their back on when the world burns" So basically everything goes as long as it fits the narrative.
And the worst offender imo is the last part about reddit. Because I do _really agree_ that HN is more and more like reddit, if not already is. This very post with the comments where everyone is asking for a downvote button is a perfect example of that.
What I do know is that users should flag articles that they think don't belong on HN
If this is true then this statement should be added to the guidelines. Many a time I've seen a submission and thought "My god, this is the most moronic thing I've ever read in my life, nearly every single factual claim in this is wrong" but I don't flag it because "don't post utter drivel" is not in the guidelines.
What did you think flagging was for? (Genuine question)
It's true that we don't spell things out precisely, but that's because it's impossible to spell things out fully precisely. If you start, where do you stop?
What did you think flagging was for? (Genuine question)
Same as on other sites: Spam and/or bot, abuse and/or insults and other ad hominems and particularly the point in the guidelines where you go: Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. and Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Not that my flagging amounts to anything, there's so much domestic US politics articles from mainstream media on here that I often wonder whether I misunderstand the guidelines, but then, I'm just an Europoor /s
Generally speaking, HN seems to have more of a problem now of people just drive-by downvoting things because they don't like someone's opinion.
I know you hate the supposedly "noob" comment, as you've put it over the years, and as it is written in the guidelines, that HN is or isn't turning into Reddit, but this aspect of HN makes it indistinguishable to me as a long-time reader here whether you accept it from your perspective as a long-time moderator or not.
Because HN moderation allows people to downvote or flag things simply because they don't like something, it will always be like Reddit. There is no distinguishing feature to separate it otherwise.
One thing that would, would be forcing users to say why they downvoted or flagged something.
Edit: If you spend years saying "no, no, it isn't true" to people, you're just sticking your fingers in your ears. Where there's smoke, there's fire.
Yeah, even if this is very hard to get it perfect, I keep thinking there has to exist a better voting system than what we have. We can do a presumed step in the right direction and evaluate.
- To give an outlet for (dis)agreement: We could have two arrows on each post, one for agree/disagree, the other for 'legitimate post that helps the conversation'. Someone posting wrong info rarely helps the conversation, but also often enough it's an opinion matter and you can disagree while leaving the latter arrow alone. The latter determines sort order (most helpful first); the former is displayed as a fun fact on posts that are deemed helpful (author sees exact counts just like now)
- A system that seems to work better: A local tech site uses a system where you assign a quality level to a post. The short labels are (translated) "flamebait", "irrelevant but well-intentioned", "relevant but well-known", "useful contribution", and "exceptionally useful". Each one has a numerical value, ranging from -1 to +3, and it'll take the median of all votes (with a half-vote bias towards +1 I think, but that's an implementation detail). If your median comes out to -1, it's collapsed by default; at +2 and +3, it gets highlighted. Incorporating opinion into your quality assessment is a problem here, too, but then you might get +0 instead of +1 and not (like on HN) a score of -7. Not just does that feel a lot more fair, the system and its UI also just makes more clear to everyone that you're supposed to objectively score the comments on the mentioned guidelines (it shows a description every time you hover over a vote option)
It’s not necessarily that it isn’t true - the most common problem voters have is that it just isn’t interesting or unique.
Don't you need a certain number of upvotes on your account before you can even use the downvote button? I seem to remember that being a thing, has it changed?
The fact you can't just make an account, log in and start downvoting is already a massive improvement over Reddit
This post from awhile back suggests it's at 501 karma - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439437
I hope HN doesn't get into moderating the politics of articles.
I can see a grim future (present?) where "AI generated" turns into a slur, warranted or otherwise, in a world where the difference between human trained to talk like an AI and AI masquerading as human becomes increasingly difficult to discern, and some hidden cabal passes judgement.
That is wholly different from taking a stance on HN being a place for humans to comment on articles.
AI has a distinct, low-quality and unnecessarily sensational writing style, which signals low effort post first of all. If you use AI and you put the effort to make it not look like AI it means that at least you put some effort into it.
I am not sure how the future may be, but the direction of AIs has been to solidify their distinct writing style rather than assimilate to humans. So we can start addressing what we are dealing with now. I doubt HN tagging/flagging can put enough pressure to affect how llms will evolve anyway in the future, while the llm speech becomes more and more ubiquitous and unhinged.
> AI has a distinct, low-quality and unnecessarily sensational writing style, which signals low effort post first of all
Yes, but what if it doesn't? Anyone can create a model or prompt to adjust the tone, remove the tells that people are now on the lookout for, etc.
And it's self-reinforcing, because the people that are on the lookout will always consider themselves to be right in their judgment, also because of survivorship bias - they won't know if they missed an AI generated comment/post unless it's revealed.
This is one reason why I'm in favor of tagging AI generated posts, because at one point we can't tell. If we can't tell, does it still matter? I don't know, but I'd like to know anyway.
Of course, it can't be mandated, so if the submitter doesn't tag it and the readers can't tell the difference, it's futile.
people could do this, but they don't. and if they did spend that effort, it would be better. but as it is now, the vast majority of AI written text, especially "documentation" of software projects, has this style signifying communication was outsourced to an AI.
we are not at the point where "we can't tell", and if we actually couldn't tell we wouldn't be complaining about it
You've accurately described the current state of Lobsters.
As opposed to wonderful old HN, where about 95% of the front page is now AI, AI-related, or AI-generated.
There's significant overlap between the front pages of HN and Lobsters. Almost every time I try to submit the interesting articles I see on Lobsters here, I just get redirected to the existing discussion thread.
The massive 1000+ comments/upvotes AI model release threads only show up on HN. Lobsters doesn't accept "business" articles like that. You're quite likely to find reactionary articles that are critical of AI on the front page though. There are several on the front page right now, in addition to the ones derisively tagged vibecoding.
There's a bot user that seems to crosspost every lobsters story here if it isn't already.
This happens all the time, depending on the trend of the time. It was Rust for a while, then cryptocurrencies, machine learning, starups / unicorns / enormous funding rounds, etc.
It'll pass when the next cool tech comes around.
And the remainder is people complaining about all the AI
It is understandable why so much content is ai-related, so many people are using it
My memory is pretty spotty, but wasn't it similar with other hype-cycle topics like cryptocurrencies?
That's a high exaggeration of course, but in the wonderful old HN tradition of perceiving the site as dominated by $badness, where everyone has their own perception of $badness.
I'm not picking on you - it's practically a universal response, so much so that it must be driven by human hard-wiring. I've written about this so many times that for once I don't even know what to link to. Perhaps https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098. Or maybe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48427800
Fine. Looking at today's /active, it's more than half just based on the titles. (Likely 2/3 or more in practice, but I did not delve into each post.) And this does not feel particularly unusual.
(Apologies if you've commented on the following already, but I've not seen it.)
The most concerning growing trend I see is comments that don't violate any guidelines, but are flagged to dead.
I'm not talking about posters that are shadowbanned, but about comments that engaged thoughtfully on a topic but the rest of the thread disagreed emphatically with.
I also don't even mean controversial takes on hot-button issues like vaccines.
Just plain old bucking the trend in a thread about AI, transit, housing, layoffs, etc.
I've been browsing with showdead on for as long as I can remember, and I'm seeing this accelerate. Comments from folks both you and I respect as high quality contributors here.
I don't know what the solution is, but it discourages me (and I'm sure others) from having the kind of thought-provoking dialog I've gotten used to reading here for the last 15 years.
> comments that don't violate any guidelines, but are flagged to dead.
Vouch them and/or email to hn@ycombinator.com and say why you think they deserve to be [undead].
I see that a lot, some have been erroneously caught by the real time AI detect filter (which actually isn't too bad at slicing out the actual AI gen comments) others have gone hard against the zeitgeist.
I've had the mods reinstate comments that I've thoroughly disagreed with but were making their best case for an opposing view - the threads are better with the best arguments forward for all sides of the elephant.
I have vouched a couple (~3-5) benign comments a while back and now I no longer have a vouch button for comments.
I don't know if the vouch threshold has increased or if the mods have removed my ability to vouch for other comments entirely.
Wondering if it was my good faith attempt to inform a user of their comments being auto-flagged [1] before I had any context that they were supposed to be persona non grata.
I can still vouch submissions though
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46381180
I always vouch them but have never bothered to email. I figure the mods are seeing the same HN I am. But maybe I spend too much time here some evenings..
But yes, it's the "going against the zeitgeist" ones I have in mind. It feels very damaging to the community.
> I figure the mods are seeing the same HN I am.
It's a rare individual that reads all the comments .. my impression is they appreciate on point heads up emails about accidentally auto-binned comments and are happy to reverse flagging on good comments, even those that try and make the dark side of a case.
Probably best not to try and flood the zone with anti/pro pet subject matter karen emails though.
FWiW I semi frequently pick apart comments supporting cases I'm in favour of .. because I want to see better arguments being made and to discourage weak easily dismissed shallow support.
I agree with that, the ones I see flagged are frequently espousing viewpoints I disagree with. But they should be debated then, and flagging them denies everyone that opportunity.
Personally, I've never seen a dead comment come back to life. I'm not sure using the vouch button does anything. (It does for submissions, though.)
I have, but it's definitely very rare. And might have been manual intervention as described above.
Personally, I've seen two - both ones that I emailed about (and I really disliked the stance taken on one of those, but they were debating at a level that was polite, addressed objections raised, acknowledged other PoVs etc.)
Vouch, I've perhaps seen reverse things several times (more of a background observation not pursued, so, you know, fuzzy anecdata at best), I did get feedback from @dang that one comment I vouched for was, in fact, a legitimate AI gen comment .. so clearly I'm human enough to fall for the occasional clanker.
I'd need to see specific links, but many of those posts are probably being killed because our software classified them as being genai, which is not allowed on HN (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079.)
Happy to find and email you some when I'm at my desk.
(I'm well aware of the genAI policy, and very supportive of it.)
In the meantime, here's one I saw recently:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48660796
That definitely wasn't a genai-related issue but the kind of issue it was is a knot that I'm too tired to untangle right now!
lol, fair. It wasn't a great example. Have a good night.
>in a world where the difference between human trained to talk like an AI and AI masquerading as human
I was once accused of using AI for writing in the voice of a depressed character because the character had a certain emotional detachment that to the person lodging the accusation indicated AI.
In short it is not just specific phrasing or words but also aesthetic effects that mean one is AI nowadays.
Honest question, why would it be a grim future for people to be allergic to what, in 99% of the cases, is effortless slop?
Personally that is the future I hope to see. Hence my continuous protestations at the lazy excuses for articles that get posted these days, and the lazier excuses given by their authors for avoiding using their brain.
You posted your comment while I was editing mine so this conversation is in an indeterminate state! (Not a criticism - I take forever to edit these things sometimes.)
For example, I think you said "the politics of articles" before I added the thing about a "class distinction". Intriguing overlap!
I don't quite follow what you mean about grim future but if you wouldn't mind reading the edited version of my post, I can respond to anything that isn't addressed there.
Hacker News is already in the business of policing articles though. This is a curated list of articles that people share, and a lot of unrelated articles are automatically deleted or just downvoted out of existence. This isnt Reddit.
It’s okay to have an opinionated website. Not every corner of the internet needs to be a bastion of free speech
“AI generated” is already a slur.
It's sometimes used that way, sometimes a fact, and sometimes both. It's all unclear because we're still in the early stages of this working itself out.
And then there's clanker (which has fortunately tapered off a bit): https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
This is a nested-enough subthread that I can say whatever I want because no one will ever link to it because if they do no one will care.
The class of comments you're talking about—not just ones that say "clanker" literally but the more general category—is particle-wave undecidable right now.
If the commenter is right—i.e. if the commenter they are castigating actually did post LLM-generated text—then it's a community immune system response.
If the commenter is wrong—i.e. they are castigating a sincere human and hauling them to court on false charges—then it's the kind of attack that we tell people not to post here.
They can't know for sure whether what they're saying is true or false, and we can't know for sure whether we should moderate it. Both questions depend on information that is unavailable. This is what I mean when I say that the whole question is in a chaotic state right now, and it's too soon to know which way it will stabilize.
I don't envy the position you're in.
I think the decision to ban AI submissions is a good one, but ultimately it's going to create this conflict for some time, maybe a really long time until things stabilize around AI in the broader culture
I hope eventually AI usage does become a taboo, at least in some fields. Creative fields should be for creative humans, not people who can't even publish an article without the help of an LLM
Ok, but we're not talking about all AI usage. We're talking about using AI to process text that we publish for others to read.
There are tons of ways to use AI that don't intersect with that.
That's a fair response.
and then some articles will have maybe a small section, 10% of it, LLM generated. And the it really is a superposition of LLM/human written, and flaggable/unflaggable
It's true! Or maybe 20% or 60% or 80%.
Why would humans ever be trained to talk like an AI? If they are working in some capacity where there is strong incentive to write llm-slop adjacent content, might as well use the llm slop generator.
(Subconscious training like when we pick up an accent, though eventually folks might automatically code switch - so that’s hopeful.)
That's just LinkedIn.
Scrolling the general feed there makes me want to put a pencil in my eye
Just detox by heading over to youtube logged out.
Are you maybe misunderstanding this point?
> 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.
Humans are training to detect AI content. Humans writing more like AIs is an unrelated (and slower) phenomenon.
'humans trained to talk like an AI' is just LinkedIn and I would hope that the last thing anyone wants is for HN to become the utter void that is LinkedIn posts.
I'd prefer a tag to the mounds of "this looks like it is AI generated, I can tell from the pixels and from having seen quite a few AIs in my time" comments. That way the people who reject AI content can filter it out rather than having to argue about it in the comments.
> The current picture is that 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.
It's not a purity test, it's as the author is communicating they don't care whether the reader has any signals of what is accurate vs inaccurate information, which puts the burden of investigating how much is accurate on the reader at every step when there's some minimum expectation that should be an author's role (outside of topics where there is some expectation of ulterior motives/biases and one would naturally engage more critically minded).
When people complain here it's more often than not when an article has no disclaimer about AI use or what has been human-reviewed, so the burden again falls on the reader who is now even more skeptical. That is more to ask of a reader than when it's coming from say a known expert and the reader is receptive to engage and learn.
That's the reason tired cliches and turns of phrase (overused by LLMs) have become a heuristic for whether to pay attention, because it's a sign that there's some unknown quantity of of the article that hasn't had human review and it's easier to put in the bucket of 'maybe worthwhile but would need a fully human analysis of this' or just outright rejection (as we've seen from comments).
Edit: I see a sibling comment has raised the same observation.
I'm afraid I don't understand this - can I ask what was the sibling comment? Maybe that will help me triangulate.
This[1] comment, mostly in terms of not knowing which parts are generated and which not when not disclosed, which puts an added burden on the reader to assess.
Like, if some non-controversial article makes a statement about something technical (where one's guard isn't already raised) but you've observed signs of LLM use (without any disclosure of to what degree) then instead of thinking it might be an interesting thing to follow-up on or remember one might be thinking instead 'is this something the author themselves understands and has reviewed for accuracy or slipped in by the LLM' and other such distractions (and legwork if wanting to try and fact-check such things on the spot).
It goes from having a perhaps pleasurable, educational read to questioning and being more skeptical/cynical about the material. HN's guidelines meanwhile encourage good faith engagement, which is challenging.
Edit: corrected permalink (had accidental extra digit).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48888422
If AI-generated comments are disallowed, why are AI-generated articles allowed? Seems like they have the same issues.
It's a fair question and I don't have a good answer yet, other than to say that comment content and article content are two very different spheres.
I can live with well-composed articles that have a huge chunk of AI in their generation.
Stuff interesting enough to get upvoted (i.e. not slop), but I'm so irritated and triggered by pointless, human, comment threads moaning about "this is AI generated".
What I do think we'll (finally) add is a "please give a reason why you flagged this post" step
Do you believe adding friction to flagging will reduce the quantity of low quality articles?
Or is the flagging of high quality articles a bigger and more pressing problem?
Or is the problem simply too-many-damn-flags?
Just curious.
Another good question I don't know the answer to! Which is probably why we haven't done it yet.
I guess the idea is that if lots of people flag a comment for the "genai" reason then we can treat that a more precise community signal than "flagged in general". But this argument seems weaker to me as soon as I write it out.
> 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.
I really really hope more people take up pen and paper! My last blog post [0] came with proof-of-work attached.
[0] https://abner.page/post/are-we-harold-bloom/
I was just thinking about this, the proof of work angle. Maybe written blogs need to come with recordings of the process now too, otherwise they will be suspicious.
What a goofy situation to imagine. I hope we can figure out a way though. I personally have no interest in reading anything spat out by an LLM, so if anything can be used to prove that an author wrote something themselves, I'm interested
It's a tough problem, since I assume any common proof-of-work standard will inevitably generate a big enough dataset to train on.
But nonetheless a problem in desperate need of solving!
Sensible policy. I think with mainstream news publications now obviously using LLMs in their day to day workflows, it's going to be hard to take a purist stance here. Some do this more responsibly than others. But I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing if it is done responsibly. It's only a problem if it is done poorly.
Poor writing is not a new thing, of course. Most of the moderation mechanisms that it uses were perfected a quarter century ago when sites like Slashdot were popular as a defense mechanism against bad user behavior. Bad user behavior impacts commenting, article submissions, and moderating itself. While bad users now have AI to abuse, the problem of a large volume of low quality content is is largely the same. The moderation mechanisms end up targeting the problem at the source: identifying good and bad users. So, the same amount of bad users generating a lot more garbage isn't that big of a deal. Getting good karma still is a lot of work and it makes identifying all the garbage created by users without that relatively straightforward.
Using LLMs to tag, flag and filter content might not be a bad thing to experiment with. There are a lot of low quality AI generated opinion pieces that somehow make it to the front page. Same for political and controversial stuff, which of course is against the HN guidelines for content. Auto flagging things that obviously violate guidelines should not be that hard. It's just a matter of having good guard rails. @dang might actually already be doing that. I know I would be if staying on top of piles of generated garbage was part of my job description. It might also be done to give good content a little boost.
The new articles section has a very low signal to noise ratio currently and the window for good content to make it past that is very short. Often articles on the front page will have many duplicate submissions that never made it past that. IMHO duplicate submissions should just count as upvotes on the original. Auto de-duplicating based on canonical URL should not be that hard.
Community generated tags seems like the obvious solution to all of this. You could easily give a setting to turn them off, breaks no existing systems, and allows for a broad emergent taxonomy. Only surface tags above X community upvotes except to superusers who are allowed to propose tags.
But then again, there’s always reddit :)
It breaks a central goal of HN, which is a non-siloed experience where the entire community is exposed to the same feed.
The "show [dead]" setting already exists, so it is not 100% "exposed to the same feed".
> is a non-siloed experience where the entire community is exposed to the same feed
Slashdot is still around
I think that goal only works when the community is small and culturally homogeneous and the velocity of content is relatively slow, but all of those result in implicit silos at scale. People's subjective experience of HN already differs wildly from others based entirely on when they show up, from where and what kind of content they consider on topic, and it already creates a great deal of tension and hostility.
Plus, HN's design makes it easy for a single story or kind of story to appear to overwhelm the forum (I say "appear" because really there's more than what's on the frontpage, but most people never bother to check past the frontpage,) which only results in complaints and threads like this. Another layer of organization to handle HN's increasing scale and complexity might be necessary.
tags could be display only with no way of filtering for a certain tag.
The tricky thing about tags is that we get a tag for genai this year, what about next year’s thing and the year after that? We’d end up with a list of tags attached haphazardly all over the place. Flagging with a box to add a reason sounds like an excellent idea.
I dunno, certainly some tags are justified, such as distinguishing submissions which are publicly-readable versus ones which require an account--or worse, payment.
That's not a value-judgement of the true content of an article or piece of media, but a fairly objective facet which impacts the HN participant's experience.
It's kind of like how, back in the day, people really wanted to know the filesize of something before they clicked, to avoid a blind-investment of their dial-up bandwidth for indeterminate minutes of waiting (and opportunity-cost of other things not downloaded) that might be more than they really wanted for whatever-it-was.
This is, IMO, an excellent analogy.
Then it was to protect our modems bandwidth (cost and time) while now it's more about protecting our own cognitive bandwidth.
This is a real conundrum.
For example, if I quote a GenAI response –even in criticism– (See what I did, there?), it can get flagged, and result in a shadowban (has happened to me -lesson learned).
But a good use for LLMs, is as a copyeditor. They do a great job. Some unedited stuff is so bad, I'd rather read slop, any day.
The problem is, what's the threshold? If they just fix a few typos and misspellings, that's fine, but what if they offer more substantial changes? How much text must change, before we can legit dismiss as "slop"?
Also, what if there's a significant GenAI component, but the article really is something that we want on the HN frontpage, because of its content?
I would love to see a 'flag as AI' coupled with a profile setting to hide posts that have had a certain number of AI flags. Allow people who don't want to see likely AI content to filter it silently.
I find PG's article so dismissive.
I know several people that have difficulty writing but are still f*cking smart. So what, they should refrain from using AI to help them because the AI police says so?
But yeah, let's continue classifying people based on their outer qualities and habits... History showed us were this leads us to.
And here an em dash -- to freak out the AI police.
> I know several people that have difficulty writing but are still f*cking smart. So what, they should refrain from using AI to help them because the AI police says so?
Do what other people do when they cannot do something: don’t do it?
I can’t draw or do art and I don’t have an AI generate art for me so I can LARP as an artist.
You can just… not do things? Nobody is putting a gun to your head to make you write blog posts and post them on HN.
> I know several people that have difficulty writing but are still f*cking smart. So what, they should refrain from using AI to help them because the AI police says so?
The issue is that AI doesn't actually help them; it corrects grammar and removes voice. If you're trying to sound more professional/convincing/engaging, AI usage undermines that.
A judgement on the content (product of writing) is not a judgement on people. I dont care if a person uses LLMs in their life – heck, I myself do. But I care if I want to spend my time reading an LLM-written/assisted article or not.
PS that's not an em-dash – this is.
re PS: no; unless HN now swallows em dashes, what you posted is https://unicodeplus.com/U+2013, not https://unicodeplus.com/U+2014
Oops — sorry.
I agree with your second paragraph - in fact I posted something pretty sympatico a couple hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48887812. But I have such a different reaction to pg's article that I can't fathom why you say that.
I strongly agree. Humanity only benefits from having more smart ideas published.
Better is simply don't publish slop. If someone spends time refining and editing their idea with AI assistance and are happy with the quality of the finished product then I say go for it.
It's not like all human writers produce content that is worth reading.
Great response. Thanks for weighing in and all the moderation you do!
We should try replacing forum mods with AI
just for a while :)
I think the problem space needs to be divided into two - AI generated articles (which the OP's question is about) and AI generated content/comments. The articles - honestly, normal flagging just works. If the content and the information in it is worthwhile, I don't think people would flag it. Isn't this the whole point of flagging?
However, the second part of the problem - the AI comments, that's really what kills the discussion and eventually the community. If I have trust issues that I'm talking to a bot but not a real user, I am not going to engage further. I might or might not flag the account, but at some point, I'm going to be tired of reporting if everywhere around me it's just bots pretending to be humans. I think this is the more serious problem that needs focus.
In my experience, sloppy AI content almost always, sometime instantly even gets flagged out.
Let's make flags public, too. Flagged_by link.
Congratulations on your recursive ascension, too
My only thought is that "good" genai authors/articles will easily get through the filter while "generic" ones will fail. So the outcome won't be all genai articles getting flagged (unless people self-report), just the low quality ones. I'm guessing that's okay and I'm one of those people who discounts genai writing the second I read one of the tells, so the flag would save me time.
Ultimately though this is the same debate as "should we allow genai code in codebases". High quality code lands naturally while slop is slop. Not much value in banning AI outright--the desire is predominantly to ban the slop.
Maybe the tag should be [slop] rather than [genai]...
There have definitely been cases of "good" genai articles that led to quite good HN threads. (Don't ask me for links - alas but my sandblasted memory doesn't retain anything.)
I guess my response to that is we want the most interesting threads.
A fixed dropdown list of flag reasons would be a very good change, I think, because it would somewhat counteract strategic flagging of stories as a downvote. I think you'd want to keep the list pretty tight, because it seems like a huge source of meta drama.
The problem with fixed lists is that what is in the spirit of HN evolves.
Single page info-graphics and Awesome-Lists come to mind.
Hell, one or more of PG’s books has one or more baysian generated texts presented as poems.
The times I've pointed point out pretty blatant AI comments, I get nuked with downvotes. So often that I've stopped pointing them out.
Before you say I'm just falsely calling them out, it's typical ChatGPT style of either very amicable or Nobel Laureate tone, lots of formatting, with a couple of paragraphs and then a clever one-line punchline at the end. If you look at those commenters their history, it's all like that. Either generated or assisted. For older accounts you can see the steep increase of it around 2025ish.
Seems like the HN crowd absolutely adores AI comments and the rule banning them is (sadly) unnecessary. Or at least not what 'the people' want.
Out of curiosity I looked through your post history to find an example of a time you got downvoted for calling out AI comments. The first one I could find was 3 months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47493096), where you got downvoted for calling out an AI comment...to a comment that had zero common signs of AI writing.
The OP then replied:
> Not AI. Not sure how I feel getting my writing style called out like that though :D
Not OP, but I’ve been nuked with downvotes for this several times too and tend to delete the dead comments. The slop is so prevalent that at this point it’s not a particularly interesting thing to say I think.
HN guidelines are to flag/downvote and move on anyways.
And if you flag/downvote AI content (or any other class of content) too consistently, you’ll find your flags and downvotes quickly become ineffective.
So the guidelines are in some sense a red herring.
That's not true- can I ask what you saw that made you come to that conclusion?
OP wrote in the parent:
".. Fault-tolerant and highly available hardware must facilitate low-latency, single-threaded communication with high semantic density in order to achieve multi-dimensional consensus in a safety-critical, heterogeneous, adversarial environment. .."
I am not sure why you think someone saying "not AI trust me bro" carries any merit.
At any rate, like I said, I've given up the war. People enjoy reading that stuff, I'll just be the old man no longer yelling at the clouds.
Your post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47493096) might also have been downvoted for saying "Be better", which is an internet putdown trope.
Also that.
Just the idea that something is AI is bothersome to some, and some AI content is genuinely useful and gets thrown out with the bathwater. Not saying all of it is useful, but there are shades of grey, not just black and white.
That isn't related to my comment? My comment is more criticizing accusing something of being AI based on vibes, and likely being wrong about it.
The broader point stands that all this AI stuff is highly polarizing, for a reason. I think you did a good job explaining why people get polarized. Sorry for any confusion.
I can't speak for everyone, but I've done a lot of reflecting on this so I have something of an explanation for why I feel this way about AI
I think it's because I'm not optimizing my life to get the correct answer as fast as possible, or to build things as fast as possible.
To me, the most important thing about the internet is connecting with other people. If I ask a question on a forum it's because I want to talk to someone about it, maybe make an acquaintance or even a friend. Otherwise I would of course just ask the AI now. Google has been around for a long time, and could already usually find answers for me. I still would rather discuss with a colleague sometimes than Google every single thing.
Human connection. We need more of it, not less. I think heavy AI use and reliance on AI for thinking, research, communication and building... It's going to isolate people even more
to be honest, I hope you'll also recognize that non-native English speakers have limited vocabulary and phrasing when participating in HN.
IMO posting "This article is AI" does not add anything to the conversation.
The HN guidelines[1] include:
and I'd argue pointing out that you think an article is AI is very similar in value to pointing out any of the above. None of us like AI slop. But I wouldn't be surprised if, by the end of 2026, 90-95% of articles posted online are AI slop. Pointing it out is useless. As useless as pointing out that the article breaks the scrollbar (which happens often) or that the article is formatted badly or has poor text contrast, or that an article is Chinese propaganda. Probably true, but posting about it adds nothing to the discussion, and is not allowed on HN.All we really need is to add "Don't complain that an article is AI" to the guidelines.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
But it is useful. I can deal with a broken scrollbar if the content is good, but if an article is AI written I don't want to read the content at all. That's a huge difference.
Nowadays I usually check the comments first for the "This is AI" comment, I've left a few of my own and gotten thank yous in reply.
Flagged as AI is useful as it would mean I skip the article.
You could just ask your AI to flag it with an extension, or rewrite it in a style you prefer (or just do a good job summarizing the articles core meaning).
That would be like driving a v12 down my driveway everytime I want to check the mailbox.
I have a local 12GB GPU doing this, and it's definitely not a v12.
But what if your v12 was fueling an entire economy based on miles driven?
A real v12, vs hypothetical in my example, actually does in the form of gas consumed. Still, doesn't mean it is a good excuse to justify the waste in energy and materials, all to achieve what I already can do. It would be nice to throw that compute towards stuff like curing disease or towards something that might stave off climate change, instead of using it to turn bullet points into an article and me turning that article back into bullet points.
> > I don't want to deal with AI or AI slop
> You should add more AI to your life
I hope you can see how this is not a useful suggestion.
I'm suggesting using AI to combat the AI issue, not complaining endlessly with pointless points that do nothing to solve the very real problem that is not going away by being stubborn or rude. My suggestion, which I use myself, helps limit the blast radius. Doesn't mean I have to get involved with it while it's doing what it does. Do you also question email filters and argue that sending spam is wrong and suggesting to use a spam filter is not useful to the conversation?
> But I wouldn't be surprised if, by the end of 2026, 90-95% of articles posted online are AI slop. Pointing it out is useless.
Actually, when 90%-95% of articles posted online are AI slop, it's even more useful to identify those which aren't.
When the signal/noise ratio is too low, having an indicator of signal is tremendously useful.
I don't think I agree with that. Complaining about AI written articles is more about the quality of the writing. it's on par with a piece of writing that wasn't proof read, well researched or some stream of consciousness rant.
I think the criticism also signals to the submitter or idk co-author? That the article isn't valued
I am exclusively interested in the remaining 5% that is not AI slop, so yes, I always want to see that information.
Agreed, I find comments whining about AI slop to be far less valuable than the supposed AI slop, and I wonder if the commenters are aware of the irony, or perhaps those comments are also AI slop themselves.
We already have tags for PDF and Video so I could definitely see one for [LLM] working!
Generally I'd appreciate a top level comment from the submitter saying this is LLM generated but I read it and found it interesting because x,y,z because I'd rather read slop someone vouches for than slop someone hasn't
Can we just make it official in the guidelines that "Articles written by genai" should generally not be submitted to HN? (And by extension, that they are okay to flag?)
(I already flag submissions I think were written by AI.)
> The AIs will adapt to this
I don't think this is true, at least not right now, and in a way I'm actually thankful for it.
The frantic rush to chase the only potentially profitable use case for LLMs found so far (writing code) and the resulting focus on coding RLHF means models are actively becoming worse at sounding like humans.
This is my favorite example, and it's already relatively outdated: https://progress.openai.com/?prompt=10
>This is why we see so many "just show me the prompt" responses, along with others like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/genai-pushback.
This is totally tangential to your point, but what is that page? It's not your usual link to an algolia search. Is this already part of some sort of manual tagging system? Clicking on the first one, these comments don't seem to be moderated. Are you using these complaints to help detect AI generated content? I think the existence of that page just leaves me confused on whether you actually want people to comment like this or not.
It's just a list of posts that we tagged manually and then defined a URL endpoint for. We do that sometimes, but rarely enough that I can understand the confusion.
Keep in mind that we have a REPL over here and can make any link do anything!
It's just a collection of comments pushing back on LLM-generated prose. 'dang sends it in replies to emails that ask him why their comments were flagged when that's the reason. He's offering examples of the broad community sentiment on the matter, to the commenter who was flagged.
> This is why we see so many "just show me the prompt" responses, along with others like this
Many are quite a bit more subtle, like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48844062
The more subversive undercurrent is interesting to me. People intentionally fucking with someone's bot, burning tokens for the lulz.
If someone were so dumb they didn’t understand the method used in the link… mind explaining?
Oh, there's a non sequitir in the parent comment that gives away some kind of leaky context situation, and the commenter is just replying with the same very generic "please elaborate" that we all throw at a language model from time to time. Not because anyone cares what the random text generator has to say, just because it's funny to light a few thousand tokens on fire.
I dont see that. To me it reads like a genuine question to an actually underspecified part of how much embedded carbon emissions ram entails. I read the question at the time and found it reasonable and genuine, and I see no strong reason to suspect that any of the commenters there is an LLM.
lots of things happening in this post
1st: the presumption that AI generated text is actually unsuccessful, rather than proliferating broadly unchallenged today
2nd: the disposition that negative attitudes towards AI text are unjustified discrirmination, rather than working as a strong latent predictor of low-effort content
3rd: the assumption that human writing is reliably doled benefits, rather than some poor proxy of it (winning the social contest for claiming authenticity)
Operationally, only a very small minority of humans actually successfully identify AI generated text at rates ≥ Pangram. People discriminate against the label of "AI", but mostly fail to vote accurately. It's not uncommon to see bots abusing this gap for their own success -- accusing humans, sympathizing with generated profiles... FUD environment where people routinely get away with dismissing true accusations.
For someone who is mediocre at detection, this would structurally feel like an unhinged, unjustified bias: look at all these good posts, these honest people, getting undermined by discrimination...
Interesting points! though I don't follow them all.
> 1st: the presumption that AI generated text is actually unsuccessful, rather than proliferating broadly unchallenged today
I can only talk about HN. If you think this is proliferating broadly on HN itself, I'd like to see such links. Assuming it's "broadly", they should be easy to find.
> 2nd: the disposition that negative attitudes towards AI text are unjustified discrirmination, rather than working as a strong latent predictor of low-effort content
I don't understand this bit.
> 3rd: the assumption that human writing is reliably doled benefits, rather than some poor proxy of it (winning the social contest for claiming authenticity)
Sorry, but I don't understand this either.
> only a very small minority of humans actually successfully identify AI generated text at rates ≥ Pangram.
That's not what we seem to be seeing. I do agree that there's a wide spectrum and a lot of wrong guesses.
> It's not uncommon to see bots abusing this gap for their own success
I'd like to see specific links of this on HN itself. If it's not uncommon, they should be easy to find.
On the humans (vs. pangram) ability to reliably spot LLM generated content, there was an independent study: https://arxiv.org/html/2501.15654v1
What about people who genuinely write their own articles but due to their time spent with AI, they are sounding like AI? I know people like this. They really are writing like that now. Shouldn't there be fairness to them?
I do hear this sometimes but it's not clear to me how prevalent this is. I'd need to see specific examples.
Typical linkedin posts always sounded like that and they were already not well liked.
I don't rely on LLMs and I don't find them useful, hence I don't use LLMs and everything about them deserves to be questioned.
LLMs are unquestionably useful. The number of things I've used them to accomplish on HN—things that I've wanted to do for over a decade—is mind-blowing. Performance optimizations, log file anlaysis, tracking down race conditions—it's quite incredible.
I think you and I have a difference of opinion on what it means to be unquestionably useful, and whether any technology should ever be described as such.
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?
Put it this way, if the ai article is indeed so good, why store the article in a dusty long form output mode from a soon to be obsolete model? Just give us the prompt, and in 6 months with some newer, bigger, better model, we can feed that prompt and get an even better article out of it.
You'd need the whole edit tree along with all the prompts used along the way, which most people are not yet set up to capture.
I store all prompts as docs, but I doubt I can rerun the whole prompt history with a better model and get sizable return for the cost, personally. EDIT: I'm referring to a small codebase not articles tho
to play devils advocate - i doubt the articles that end up on the front page are one shotted (theres probably a sequence of back and forward refinement). and in any case, i feel the avg reader would actually not prefer to read the prompt, which would be very information dense
having said that, i'd still much prefer a norm of including prompt history with the article, or the codebase for that matter, so people can choose for themselves :)
This is a fascinating thought problem.
On the extreme end you have recipe blogspam, with the tropey life stories and Amazon affiliate spam that precede the meat (pardon the pun). If that pre-filler is inconsequential, why not have an LLM parse the semantic markup - which 99% of recipe sites use for Google SEO - to produce custom content for you? Like a history of the ingredients, or better instructions with an equipment list tailored to your kitchen and timings/temps for your specific oven?
I can see there being a middle ground where you publish some sort of context that a user’s LLM can generate the content from. Is it fundamentally any different from dramatized non-fiction? Think of books like Operation Mincemeat where the facts are thoroughly researched, but the author uses a lot of artistic license to tell the story.
But to your point, if there is back-and-forth, I wish people would pay more attention to the obvious traits of LLM writing. Not everything needs to read like it’s a snappy editorial, but I sense we’re still in the early days where people have been handed this technology and are simply excited that they can pump out 1000 words in a coherent narrative.
Your middle ground idea is interesting. And maybe inevitable in some ways, if the llm becomes even more of a universal interface to the outside world.
Regarding llm writing, it is disappointing. Especially as people could use it in the “opposite” direction, using the tirelessness of the llm to experiment with the communication with the aim to make it as clear as possible for the reader…
A lot of my PRs are the result of hours of back and forth between an AI and myself. In many cases the sum total of my prompts is much larger than the final output.
The fallacy here is that you can't reduce the wide range of things that “AI generated” means into a single flag. As for why not “show us the prompt”: https://sgnt.ai/p/prompt-is-not-the-work/
> Blogspam and corporate blogs had killed quality bogs ages ago
One of the main reasons that I (and I assume others) am here is because I can discover interesting content. It is true that there is a lot of spam in the internet but if I wanted that I would be in x, linkedin or sth. My problem with AI right now is that I consider machine generated content low quality one, and I would like to be able to decide if I want to read such an article without having to waste time before I realise it is ai generated.
> if an AI generated article is indistinguishable from a human written article and it is accurate and interesting, do you care who wrote it
Ideally I would like to know regardless. Practically in such a hypothetical future scenario it may be impossible, but I think that not doing sth right now because of some hypothetical future that may or may not happen is not a very good argument. Right now the AI content is pretty distinguishable, and if one took the time and effort to make it not seem like AI then at least that text contains some more human effort.
> it is accurate and interesting, do you care who wrote it?
Yes, because I have an interest in traces and mechanisms of human connections being preserved.
Thank you. I swear to god, it’s like half of the people on this site are fucked in the head socially.
Like, of course it matters who wrote it - an author imparts parts of themself onto their work. That’s what makes writing that’s worth reading.
> I swear to god, it’s like half of the people on this site are fucked in the head socially.
I really hope there's a huge bot army pretending to be those people, but alas, you might be right and the reality is worse than that.
I think the era of blogging is pretty alive. I find most of the signal on agentic coding in articles (Armin Ronacher, Simon Willison, etc.). It's just harder to find because of all the noise.
> do you care who wrote it?
I do.
> We want to avoid low quality, not AI generation, right?
We want to avoid further dehumanization of the already semi-dehumanized humankind.
> Nobody wants to label their stuff as AI generated because they removed credibility.
I don't think this is true. I think most of the people who post LLM content without editing and without even style guidelines are simply of the opinion that the resulting text is genuinely of an acceptable quality.
Agreed with the rest of your post. We should think of this in terms of quality of the result, not the process.
What upside is there to labeling your content as AI generated (except when you are showing some novel way to use AI)?
> I think most of the people who post LLM content without editing and without even style guidelines are simply of the opinion that the resulting text is genuinely of an acceptable quality.
I don't disagree with that assessment, with one extra detail: for many of them their bar of “an acceptable quality” is too low. No higher than “sod it, it'll do” and often lower. To too many, generated content is seen as a gateway to maybe accidentally becoming some sort of influencer, a way to get themselves out there with little or no care about whether their contribution is actually useful overall just as long as it garners a bit of attention.
I don't want to waste time hunting through the extra piles of “it'll do” or worse to find the remaining nuggets of actually good writing, be they entirely human made or created by humans using LLM assistance. There are at lease a few people of agree with me on the matter.
The problem with judging on quality is that you often have to at least start reading the slop to realise and move on to the next thing. Rating systems and flags may help somewhat, but they will all eventually be gamed so it will become yet another battle of attrition: people and systems trying to filter out the crap while other people and their systems finding it more profitable to spend time breaking the filtering mechanisms instead of producing content good enough to not actually be filtered by them.
> I think the era of the blog is simply dead now
The era of people caring about knowledge/learning seems to be dead. At least in the way we used to, because a lot of what we needed that for can now be done by the LLMs.
Similar to the era of when people could calculate logarithms on paper or remember exact years of when each Roman emperor ruled? Or is that different?
> 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?
Right now, in mid 2026, many of believe that LLM prose is not as good as human output.
The deception is one aspect. AI for spellcheck and proofreading is one thing; AI writing the content wholesale in the first person, which you pass off as your own, is another. I also don’t care for the Tailwind-styled demo sites that have flooded Show HN.
The sort of content that people react viscerally to (as slop) is rarely that subtle. Again, no problem with careful and subtle use (see CGI in movies), but when I see Claude-isms and snappy section headings that nobody used to use, I close the page.
You can/should write for you, to get experience writing, to present a portfolio, to share things you find interesting, a photo a day, whatever. Why does that have to die?
Pretty trivial for a writer to say “no AI used on this blog.”
And what's stopping a AI-written article from also doing that?
Reputation. If it’s not a one-off, they will eventually get discovered and lose their audience.
I believe we're in a fairly limited window of time right now where that's even detectable via tools like Pangram. For small models it'll, maybe not the case. But for anything worth paying for.
They only have to slip up once. And they will, because LLM users are lazy, and LLM content naturally regresses towards the mean.
If counterfeit or stolen cash is indistinguishable from real or honest cash, should you accept it? Should you spend it? No. Why? Because doing so erodes and potentially destroys society.
Whether you agree that a con artist is only a criminal if he gets caught, or you think he’s a criminal the whole time, surely you can see why many people might want to know if they are dealing with a friend and not something simulating a friend.
bullshitting has never been a crime
if it were, 90% of startups would be illegal and they founders jailable
Fraud is a crime, but admittedly, not all bullshitting is fraud.
unless you signed a contract with your readers, saying "this article was not LLM written" while being written by LLMs is not fraud, just lying which is legal
but we are not even talking about that, most authors do not claim LLMs were not used
> Blogspam and corporate blogs had killed quality bogs ages ago even before AI was a thing.
That was a two-pronged thing. As well as the blog-spam drowning out what good blogs there were, a lot of people that used to output that way moved to centralised platforms that then either tried to lock their content in, or surrounded it with ad-tech bothers, or both.
> if an AI generated article is indistinguishable from a human written article…
Quite a bit of AI generated output is indistinguishable from crap human writing, often mediocre human writing, and that is actually part of the problem. A lot of people bang something out of their LLM/agents of choice and not bother taking the time needed to lift to good or excellent, so there is a bulk of mediocre or worse stuff flooding the medium because it is so easy to produce. But do we really need 100+ mediocre articles and a few good ones on a subject where there would previously have been a few mediocre ones and still a few good+ ones? It makes the genuinely worthwhile content much harder to stumble upon, especially as the ones taking the lazier approaches to writing seem to be making greater efforts in self-promotion with the time they have saved!
> if an AI generated article is […] is accurate and interesting, do you care who wrote it?
Firstly: maybe not, or at least less so. But I'm not convinced they can be trusted to be that accurate. I don't trust the average human that much either, they are often authoritatively wrong too (which doesn't help the LLMs, which have been at least partially trained on authoritatively wrong content), but I trust good human writers (who may be assisted by LLMs these days, like they've been assisted by spelling & grammar checkers for decades) above other human writers and content almost entirely drawn from LLMs.
Secondly: Yes. I care. I'm still smarting that after years of people being fined heavily, banned from things, and even imprisoned, for copying content, we seem fine with the big companies pirating whatever they want for training purposes⁰. Yes, some fines have been paid, but a few hours worth of income isn't even a slap on the wrist given how much funny money is being sloshed around the sector ATM, and do you know any content makers who got a share of those fines? I'm still trying to avoid being a part of that, to the point of being willing to commit career suicide¹, so yes, I do care who/what made most effort on creating the article. Given a choice between human, human with LLM assist, LLM with minimal human editing, and purer slop, I would morally prefer something from as close to the “just humans” end of the scale over anything else, even if the quality is practically identical.
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[0] I wonder how the corporates would take the “we only downloaded and used it ignoring the licence for model training purposes” point being used about their output. After all, I'm only using it irrespective of your licence to train the intelligence model that sits between my ears!
[1] The current corporate overlords have as much said “get with AI or be left behind”, and I'm sure being left behind will involve being PIPed out to pasture. I might be able to argue “the difference is enough to be considered a material change in roll, so you can't force that under UK employment law nor sack me for not playing ball”, but the same change-of-roll argument just opens up the possibility of redundancy instead², which is only marginally better. In either case I'm done for working in development with my current attitudes.
[2] this interpretation, if not legal pigswill entirely, also makes “we need less legacy developers and more agenic developers, your legacy roll is therefore redundant, do you want to change to an agent-based job or do you want to leave?” perfectly legal.
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.
> 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.
In most cases the bar is not "is it worth reading" but "is it worth discussing"
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.
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?
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)
What’s different between “slop” and “bad”
Take any existing article you find insightful and then ask an LLM to "rewrite it, but make better and more engaging". The result is likely "good + slop", assuming the actual content is preserved.
If what people here say is right, and AI usage online is growing and accelerating, then by the end of the year, the vast, vast majority articles posted to the internet (and linked by HN readers) are going to be AI slop, at which point it is not going to matter. "This article is AI" is going to add about as much insight to the conversation as "The author used a spell checker."
A good link aggregator should strive to select the <1% of articles that are actually high quality. Who cares what “everyone” is doing?
Isn't that what the vote system is? If the users are selecting low quality then what exactly?
Then we are fucked. A quality platform must strive for more quality than what the average lurker, likely a bot, decides is worth reading. That’s how you get modern Reddit.
Is the goal of this site to remain high-quality, or to rely on random, anonymous users to discern quality? Consider the possibility that the two options might be incompatible.
It might come as a surprise to you, but "random anonymous users discerning quality" is exactly how this site operates and that's working pretty well.
I beg to differ. It's a far cry from where it was a decade ago.
I agree with you, though you’ll find other old users that will claim people have been moaning about the ‘decline in morals’ of this site since its inception
> 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.
agreed.
For me, the issue I have is that a vocal group seems to despise AI-edited content and they can't manage to take their disgust eleswhere.
AI-editing is another tool, just like spellcheck.
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.
"bad faith"? As in, that the person posts the accusation while actually believing the opposite? I would think the far, far more common reason for posting that incorrectly is that they legitimately thought it was slop. Of course such low-effort wrongful accusations are bad to post for multiple reasons, but I don't think people frequently post such things falsely
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/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist
https://github.com/Stevoisiak/Stevos-AI-Blocklist/
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.
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
Being carelessly overzealous with flags/blocking is a reliable way to kill a community by making it overly toxic, speaking from experience.
I am skeptical YC frequency of "AI" related content is representative of actual users interest. Yet I agree there are a lot of cultural differences in this world that don't often translate well for some users. Some folks will assume because they disagree about some subject, that it is some sort of personal slight.
Even scoring posts does provably change peoples behavior, and studies showed it tended to make people more punitive in their conduct with strangers.
At bare minimum, YC should have bot CAPTCHA protection on posts. As unleashing chat bots on users is often disrespectful, and just cows people out of participating in conversations in good faith. =3
> I am skeptical YC frequency of "AI" related content is representative of actual users interest.
Are you implying the front page is botted/manipulated?
Not sure why it has gravitated to a narrow scope subject, but compared to the diverse interests most technical people had in the past. LLM weights now seems like an oddly over-represented topic even when its unrelated to actual use-cases.
Throwing up a bot challenge would probably improve signal-to-noise ratios, but who knows for sure. =3
NO.
Quoting myself: 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?
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.
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.
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).
I'd be curious if you'd read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48887149 and let me know (once I've finished editing the damn thing) how this changes, or doesn't change, your response.
I think that is really reasonable. I’ve always felt weird with flagging too because there’s no reason attached. Even if it’s not displayed in the UI, it would be nice to have something in the html if a link gets enough flags for ai. Would let people css filter them out.
It didn’t change my opinion, which matches OP’s.
Perhaps you could explain why?
> Considering YC invests in AI I doubt you’ll get anything of the sort.
Conspiracy minded responses are low value, and yours is especially so considering HN bans AI comments.
Investors want to see their investment grow. What is the conspiracy? HN also hosted a likely war criminal to talk about his experiencing killing children in gaza. You think these people have morals or ideals?
> HN also hosted a likely war criminal to talk about his experiencing killing children in gaza.
WTF? What do you mean by "hosted"?
I know it's the internet's happy place to blithely accuse others of monstrosity and then derive from that how nobody other then themselves has any "morals or ideals", but this one sticks in my craw.
I don't know what rsoto2 was referring to, but it's not at all hard to believe that YC (which I acknowledge is somewhat separate from HN) would happily host and support war profiteers. YC helped found a way profiteering company directly[1], eagerly brags about the NFT scam companies they helped start[2], and its founder managed to stomach publishing this utter garbage[3] under his name in order to establish himself as a friend and ally to America's growing fascist movement. The folks running YC may not be as openly evil as the people running Google and Facebook and X and OpenAI, but that's only a difference in scale and opportunity.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/17f16071-87e0-4675-a152-6d6285b97...
[2] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/industry/nft
[3] https://paulgraham.com/woke.html
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.
I asked for this a month ago: 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.
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.
> 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)
Only care that an article is informative, grounded in facts, unbiased, etc. How it was composed doesn’t matter to me.
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!
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.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_bit
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.
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.
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?
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
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 :/
An article is either great or it isn't.
I don't care if a human, an AI or a cat wrote it.
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
Have you made your blocklist public? I would like it please.
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.
Might be more appropriate to add a "not AI" flag at this point.
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.
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.
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)
>increasingly I lean towards communities where that is a given for any legitimate shares.
I have a hard time finding these communities
Mastodon, but the hard part is discovery for sure.
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.
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.
This makes me fear for the ability to easily dismiss or silence a particular human viewpoint just by insinuating it is “AI-generated”.
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.
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.
Tried to say similar thing here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48039702
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.
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.
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
Yes, it absolutely should!
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.
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].
Maybe just adding down-vote to submissions would do?
We have “flag”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
There is no longer a downvote on submissions.
Do you know the reason? Allowing down voting on comments but not on submissions?
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.
Shouldn’t that be the case for comments too then?
As for the ability to downvote comments, my understanding is that the only requirement is having at least 500 karma.
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
No, because every article will devolve into a discussion on if AI generated or not, and to what degree. Let content speak for itself.
Personally I just use Pangram's chrome extension, which is amazing for spotting AI generated text.
Nobody likes reading straight unfiltered chatbot output, but it's also impossible to detect
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?
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.
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.
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.
> My entire position: I'm not interested in reading text that sounds like it was written by AI.
I think this is a fair position - if the author did not even take the time to read their own article, why should they expect others to read it?
If they did read it, they would have spotted instantly how AI it sounds.
It seems like we get a post like this every other day or so...
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.
the flag should have a third option: 'human-written but I wish an AI had stopped them'
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.
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.
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)?
Asking questions like that nearly got me kicked out of Lobsters.
How about if you did part of your research with AI, then typed the text yourself?
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.
Ask HN: add a flag for articles about AI?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why would you no longer feel welcome?
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.
> my work be classified as "slop" because a few months ago I subscribed to and started using Claude
Wait I'm not sure I understand the cause and consequence here if you're saying you use an LLM but your articles aren't slop (note that those are rough synonyms). Do you mention in your submissions you subscribed to or used Claude? The mere existence of the subscription and using it for unrelated things won't be why people flag, I can only assume they notice the quality level and/or style
> you're saying you use an LLM but your articles aren't slop
Not a single word of my articles was written by LLMs. I used them for proofreading and critique.
Writing articles by hand is useful for me since it allows me to crystallize my knowledge. Writing it down for my own future reference essentially prevents me from forgetting in the first place. LLMs accelerated me so much I'm actually trying to slow down so I can let my recent achievements sink in a bit. Writing is how I do that.
> Do you mention in your submissions you subscribed to or used Claude?
I don't use Claude for my articles. I use Claude for code review and design. Implementation is almost a footnote, and even that gets significantly rewritten during my numerous human review passes. I still write code by hand too.
That's for the projects I actually care about. I do have some explicitly vibecoded projects, and I never made a secret out of it. Projects that wouldn't exist at all were it not for LLMs making it easy to execute. I personally review those too, just not as often.
I don't add AI models as co-authors to commits of my own repositories. I'm not in the business of providing free advertising to trillion dollar corporations. If other projects require it, I do so as per their rules.
> The mere existence of the subscription and using it for unrelated things won't be why people flag
It will. They will zero in on things like CLAUDE.md and dismiss your entire project as slop the second they see it.
I know because I asked people directly. Response? If an LLM touched your project, then your project is slop. Verbatim. And that's the polite reply.
Trying to establish some simple criteria for sloppy vs good work nearly got me kicked out. People came at me with literal "I know it when I see it" nonsense. Even Claude does a better job of defining "slop" than that. I find it hilarious how these rules are based on vibes. People just get LLM vibes out of other people's projects, and then dismiss them.
> I can only assume they notice the quality level and/or style
I'm not sure they even saw my project. It's just pure prejudice. AI detected? Slop, no need to even read it. If they actually read my work and thought it sucked, fine. In fact I'd be very interested in knowing why so I can improve. I refuse to accept these predetermined judgements though.
Getting outright called "LLM pusher", "slop fetishist" and "clanker lover" is pretty fun too. It's not the overt racism-tier insults that bother me, it's the fact not a single person seems to have gotten banned over this. One could be forgiven for thinking they opened a 4chan tab.
Sounds like the point is getting across to you a little bit.
The prejudice? You bet.
More that people want to deal with the real you.
There absolutely needs to be stigma surrounding LLM generated work that is masquerading as creativity.
AI slop is AI slop.
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”.
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.
>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.
Great so I can use a CSS rule to hide anything with the flag.
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.
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.
False equivalence, text processor leaves the authors intention completely in tact and is deterministically controlled completely by the author. Not true for gen ai
You might as well try tagging stupid articles. That would be a useful feature, by the way.
> 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.
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?
My original account dated to 2010 and even then he wasn't very active
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.
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?
A problem for us to deal with when we encounter it.
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.
Similar discussion on the other site: https://lobste.rs/s/ktew3s/who_does_anubis_actually_stop#c_c...
+1, I would love to stop reading AI slop.
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.
Just ban anything AI.