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jorvi | on: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
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.

minimaxir | parent | next
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

nojs | root | parent | next
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.
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jorvi | root | parent | next
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.

| root | parent | next
{"deleted":true,"id":48887497,"parent":48887405,"time":1783913080,"type":"comment"}
dang | root | parent
Your post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47493096) might also have been downvoted for saying "Be better", which is an internet putdown trope.
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jorvi | root | parent
[flagged]
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kordlessagain | root | parent
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.
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jdw64 | parent | next
to be honest, I hope you'll also recognize that non-native English speakers have limited vocabulary and phrasing when participating in HN.
ryandrake | parent
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.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

WD-42 | root | parent | next
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.

tayo42 | root | parent | next
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

asdff | root | parent | next
Flagged as AI is useful as it would mean I skip the article.
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Diogenesian | root | parent | next
It is very useful when the LLM-generated article is full of inaccuracies. Look how confused people were in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48873424 A disclaimer on HN saying "AI generated" would have cleared things up instantly.
lelanthran | root | parent | next
> 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.

archagon | root | parent | next
I am exclusively interested in the remaining 5% that is not AI slop, so yes, I always want to see that information.
Ferret7446 | root | parent
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.