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.

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.

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?

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.

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/

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.

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

I find LLM-isms to be exactly the same as grammatical errors, but worse. At least when writing before you had to take the effort to type every word, so there was a minimum amount of effort you’d need to expend. If you aren’t catching obvious things like “the honest part” then that likely says bad things about your attention to detail elsewhere.

But then again, there’s always reddit :)

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.

It's definitely not universal. I've seen articles that seem clearly AI-generated, but still get upvoted because the community likes the title/thesis.

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.

I can confirm. Most LLM-written content is low effort, low value. This is somewhat by construction. You get the blandest takes in the blandest language.

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.

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]...

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.

Congratulations on your recursive ascension, too

Some people already dismiss genuinely useful content solely based on the use of AI to assist in writing it - i am not sure what flagging would do other than to reinforce that prejudice.

I posted a couple of my articles here, and the one that got traction was generally well received (and also received some constructive feedback from those who acknowledged that is was AI assisted) - but it is evident across HN there is a vocal minority who outright dismiss content solely because it was "AI generated" completely disregarding the content itself. I appreciate this is personal taste, or LLM fatigue, or whatever, but its not really constructive.

If what you want to do is target the slop while not targeting the quality content, then that is what the voting mechanism already does. If people don't like something they can downvote it. Flagging content as AI generated is just a dogwhistle to those who want to downvote AI generated content. If anything, id rather see a rule that stops people commenting on stuff just to dismiss it as "LLM slop".

Its already trivial to avoid detection with fine-tuned humanisers [i] built on non-instruction-tuned models. That makes the flag mostly useless - or worse - a way of penalising any content you disagree with. I'd rather not hide what I am doing and have something that I feel reads well than hide it and sacrifice the message to satisfy a vocal minority.

[i] https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19516

EDIT: downvotes, as expected. hope you see this anyway @dang. Downvotes kind of make my point for me.

just for a while :)

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?

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48887942

> They can't know for sure whether what they're saying is true or false, and we can't know for sure how we should moderate it.

(Regarding people identifying text as genai).

You could moderate like another widespread but hard to prove problem: Propaganda and dis/misinformation campaigns. It's easy to see lots of people repeating well-crafted talking points (too well-crafted for an ordinary person), shouting down those who disagree. Yet users are forbidden from identifying it as such in comments; we're told to email hn@ycombinator.com. You could do that for genai suspicions too (assuming you have unlimited time to review such things).

It seems like a witch hunt to me; I have little reason or evidence to believe people know - because people speaking with no evidence is never reliable, because the angry mob is prone to witch hunts, because genai's are trained on human writing making it harder to distinguish, because some factors people target (e.g., em dashes) have been widely used, and because a highly disruptive technology at this stage of adoption is highly prone to strong emotional reaction and misunderstanding.

I'm not sure it matters: As a rule, we should hold the human who puts their name on it fully responsible. If their assistant, their genai software, or their dog writes it, it doesn't matter. Their name is on it. Speakers don't blame their speechwriters - the speaker said it.

I'm not sure it matters because right now it seems like a big reactionary over-response. I doubt we'll care much in a few years.

The automated spam potential, in posts and in comments, is a problem. One solution is somehow raising the standard of posts and comments: if it's that easy to generate middling crap, it makes better content more valuable and available and it may raise the standard naturally.

Thanks!

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.

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

(I already flag submissions I think were written by AI.)

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...

Is Paul arguing that there will be people who can’t write because of AI? People have been crap at writing before AI, and much of Gen Z (and Alpha) literally don’t know how to write (not just how to write well) at ages where previous generations could.

That’s not his prediction, and not a prediction about technology, as claimed at the top of the post. School teachers could have told him that years ago.

It’s frankly dangerous that so many people lap up Paul’s words, when his world view is so distorted and out of touch with reality and devoid of understanding of regular people. He’s been rich and of high status for too long for his own intellectual good.