4 ms·

Sorry, do people not immediately see that this is an AI bot comment? Why is this allowed on HN?

by nubg 8mo ago

Maxion 8mo ago
> Why is this allowed on HN? 1) The comment you replied to is 1 minute old, that is fast for any system to detect weird comments 2) There's no easy and sure-fire way to detect LLM content. Here's wikipedias list of tells https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
bilekas 8mo ago
> Sorry, do people not immediately see that this is an AI bit comment? How do you know that ? Genuine question.
- f311a 8mo ago
  > isn't just "high demand", but "contractual lock-out." The "isn't just .., but .." construction is so overused by LLMs.
- hakanderyal 8mo ago
  It has Claude all over it. When you spend enough time with them it becomes obvious. In this case “it’s not x, it’s y” pattern and its placement is a dead giveaway.
  - bayindirh 8mo ago
    Isn't this ironic to use AI to formulate a comment against AI vendors and hyperscalers. It's not ironic, but bitterly funny, if you ask me. Note: I'm not an AI, I'm an actual human without a Claude account.
    - nubg 8mo ago
      Yes I found this ironic as well lmao. I do agree with the sentiment of the AI comment, and was even weighting just letting it slide because I do fear the future tht comment was warning against.
    - phatfish 8mo ago
      I wonder what the ratio is of "constructive" use of AI is, verses people writing pointless internet comments. It seems personal computing is being screwed so people can create memes, ask questions that take 30 seconds to find the answer to with Google or Wikipedia, and sound clever on social media?
      - bayindirh 8mo ago
        If you think AI as the whole discipline, there are very useful applications indeed, generally in pattern recognition and regulation space. I'm aware a lot of small projects which rely on AI to monitor ecosystems, systems or used as nice regulatory mechanisms. Also, same systems can be used for genuine security applications (civilian, non-lethal, legal and ethical). If we are talking generative AI, again from my experience, things get a bit blurry. You can use smaller models to dig data you own. I personally used LLMs, twice up to this day. In each case it was after very long research sessions without any answers. In one, it gave me exactly one reference, and I followed that reference and learnt what I was looking for. In the second case, it gave me a couple of pointers, which I'm going to follow myself again. So, generative AI is not that useful for me, uses way too much resources, and industry leading models are well, unethical to begin with.
  - A_D_E_P_T 8mo ago
    > “it’s not x, it’s y” ChatGPT does this just as much, maybe even more, across every model they've ever released to the public. How did both Claude and GPT end up with such a similar stylistic quirk? I'd add that Kimi does it sometimes, but much less frequently. (Kimi, in general, is a better writer with a more neutral voice.) I don't have enough experience with Gemini or Deepseek to say.
- Maxion 8mo ago
  To be fair, it is blindingly obvious from the tells. OP also confirms it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47045459#47045699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47045459#47045699
- lsp 8mo ago
  The phrasing. "It's not just X, it's Y," overuse of "quotes"
  - dspillett 8mo ago
    The problem with any of these tells is that an individual instance is often taken as proof on its own rather than an indicator. People do often use “it isn't X, it is Y” like constructs¹ and many, myself included sometimes, overuse “quotes”², or use m-dashes³, or are overly concerned about avoiding repeating words⁶, and so forth. LLMs do these things because they are in the training data, which means that people do these things too. It is sometimes difficult to not sound like an LLM-written or LLM-reworded comment… I've been called a bot a few times despite never using LLMs for writing English⁴. -------- [1] particularly vapid space-filler articles/comments or those using whataboutism style redirection, which might be a significant chunk of model training data because of how many of them are out there. [2] I overuse footnotes as well, which is apparently a smell in the output of some generative tools. [3] A lot of pre-LLM style-checking tools would recommend this in place of hyphens, and some automated reformatters would make the change without access, so there are going to be many examples in training data. [4] I think there is one at work in VS which I use in DayJob, when it is suggesting code completion options to save typing (literally Glorified Predictive Text) and I sometimes accept its suggestion, and some of the tools I use to check my Spanish⁵ may be LLM based, so I can't claim that I don't use them at all. [5] I'm just learning, so automatic translators are useful to check what I'm written isn't gibberish. For anyone else doing the same: make sure you research any suggested changes preferably using pre-2023 sources, because the output of these tools can be quite wrong as you can see when translating into a language you are fluent in. [6] Another common “LLM tell” because they often have weighting functions especially designed to avoid token repetition, largely to avoid getting stuck in loops, but many pre-LLM grammar checking tools will pick people up on repeated word use too, and people tend to fix the direct symptom with a thesaurus rather than improving the sentence structure overall.
    - notanastronaut 8mo ago
      Much like the epidemic we're going through of "everything is fake", every comment that even has a whiff of these tells will automatically be dismissed at "AI". I've find myself doing it, a time or two.
bombela 8mo ago
It reads almost too AI to the point of being satire maybe?
olavgg 8mo ago
It is my text, enchanced by AI. Without AI, I would never have used the word "Monopsony". So I learned something new writing this comment.
- lpcvoid 8mo ago
  This behavior is part of the problem that got us here, using LLMs for everything.
- smcl 8mo ago
  Come on man, you're a "founder" and you can't even write your own comments on a forum?
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
- bilekas 8mo ago
  The irony is lost on you ...
  - dang 8mo ago
    Please don't cross into personal attack.
    - bilekas 8mo ago
      Sorry dang, didn't intend it to seem personal!
- badpenny 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - dang 8mo ago
    Yikes, that's not good. Please don't cross into personal attack.
oytis 8mo ago
LLMs learned rhetorical negation from humans. Some humans continue to use it, because it genuinely makes sense at times.
dang 8mo ago
Generated comments are not allowed on HN, and this has been the case for a long time: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20%22generated%20comments%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... Identifying generated comments is not always easy, as others have pointed out, plus we don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted. If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com. With LLM comments, there's an important distinction between legit users (who may have no idea that they're breaking a rule, especially because it isn't explicit in the guidelines yet) and accounts that appear to be posting nothing but gen-AI text. If you (anyone and everyone!) see a case of the latter, definitely please email us because we've been banning those accounts. Even in more borderline cases, though, it's still helpful to email us because sometimes we contact the user, if we can, to let them know that we've been getting such reports. Or we might tell them we've suspended their account until we hear from them that they won't post LLM-generated or processed comments.

Sorry, do people not immediately see that this is an AI bot comment? Why is this allowed on HN?

by nubg 8mo ago

Sorry, do people not immediately see that this is an AI bot comment? Why is this allowed on HN?

> Why is this allowed on HN? 1) The comment you replied to is 1 minute old, that is fast for any system to detect weird comments 2) There's no easy and sure-fire way to detect LLM content. Here's wikipedias list of tells https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

bilekas 8mo ago

> Sorry, do people not immediately see that this is an AI bit comment? How do you know that ? Genuine question.

f311a 8mo ago
> isn't just "high demand", but "contractual lock-out." The "isn't just .., but .." construction is so overused by LLMs.
hakanderyal 8mo ago
It has Claude all over it. When you spend enough time with them it becomes obvious. In this case “it’s not x, it’s y” pattern and its placement is a dead giveaway.
- bayindirh 8mo ago
  Isn't this ironic to use AI to formulate a comment against AI vendors and hyperscalers. It's not ironic, but bitterly funny, if you ask me. Note: I'm not an AI, I'm an actual human without a Claude account.
  - nubg 8mo ago
    Yes I found this ironic as well lmao. I do agree with the sentiment of the AI comment, and was even weighting just letting it slide because I do fear the future tht comment was warning against.
  - phatfish 8mo ago
    I wonder what the ratio is of "constructive" use of AI is, verses people writing pointless internet comments. It seems personal computing is being screwed so people can create memes, ask questions that take 30 seconds to find the answer to with Google or Wikipedia, and sound clever on social media?
    - bayindirh 8mo ago
      If you think AI as the whole discipline, there are very useful applications indeed, generally in pattern recognition and regulation space. I'm aware a lot of small projects which rely on AI to monitor ecosystems, systems or used as nice regulatory mechanisms. Also, same systems can be used for genuine security applications (civilian, non-lethal, legal and ethical). If we are talking generative AI, again from my experience, things get a bit blurry. You can use smaller models to dig data you own. I personally used LLMs, twice up to this day. In each case it was after very long research sessions without any answers. In one, it gave me exactly one reference, and I followed that reference and learnt what I was looking for. In the second case, it gave me a couple of pointers, which I'm going to follow myself again. So, generative AI is not that useful for me, uses way too much resources, and industry leading models are well, unethical to begin with.
- A_D_E_P_T 8mo ago
  > “it’s not x, it’s y” ChatGPT does this just as much, maybe even more, across every model they've ever released to the public. How did both Claude and GPT end up with such a similar stylistic quirk? I'd add that Kimi does it sometimes, but much less frequently. (Kimi, in general, is a better writer with a more neutral voice.) I don't have enough experience with Gemini or Deepseek to say.
Maxion 8mo ago
To be fair, it is blindingly obvious from the tells. OP also confirms it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47045459#47045699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47045459#47045699
lsp 8mo ago
The phrasing. "It's not just X, it's Y," overuse of "quotes"
- dspillett 8mo ago
  The problem with any of these tells is that an individual instance is often taken as proof on its own rather than an indicator. People do often use “it isn't X, it is Y” like constructs¹ and many, myself included sometimes, overuse “quotes”², or use m-dashes³, or are overly concerned about avoiding repeating words⁶, and so forth. LLMs do these things because they are in the training data, which means that people do these things too. It is sometimes difficult to not sound like an LLM-written or LLM-reworded comment… I've been called a bot a few times despite never using LLMs for writing English⁴. -------- [1] particularly vapid space-filler articles/comments or those using whataboutism style redirection, which might be a significant chunk of model training data because of how many of them are out there. [2] I overuse footnotes as well, which is apparently a smell in the output of some generative tools. [3] A lot of pre-LLM style-checking tools would recommend this in place of hyphens, and some automated reformatters would make the change without access, so there are going to be many examples in training data. [4] I think there is one at work in VS which I use in DayJob, when it is suggesting code completion options to save typing (literally Glorified Predictive Text) and I sometimes accept its suggestion, and some of the tools I use to check my Spanish⁵ may be LLM based, so I can't claim that I don't use them at all. [5] I'm just learning, so automatic translators are useful to check what I'm written isn't gibberish. For anyone else doing the same: make sure you research any suggested changes preferably using pre-2023 sources, because the output of these tools can be quite wrong as you can see when translating into a language you are fluent in. [6] Another common “LLM tell” because they often have weighting functions especially designed to avoid token repetition, largely to avoid getting stuck in loops, but many pre-LLM grammar checking tools will pick people up on repeated word use too, and people tend to fix the direct symptom with a thesaurus rather than improving the sentence structure overall.
  - notanastronaut 8mo ago
    Much like the epidemic we're going through of "everything is fake", every comment that even has a whiff of these tells will automatically be dismissed at "AI". I've find myself doing it, a time or two.

bombela 8mo ago

It reads almost too AI to the point of being satire maybe?

olavgg 8mo ago

It is my text, enchanced by AI. Without AI, I would never have used the word "Monopsony". So I learned something new writing this comment.

lpcvoid 8mo ago
This behavior is part of the problem that got us here, using LLMs for everything.
smcl 8mo ago
Come on man, you're a "founder" and you can't even write your own comments on a forum?
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
bilekas 8mo ago
The irony is lost on you ...
- dang 8mo ago
  Please don't cross into personal attack.
  - bilekas 8mo ago
    Sorry dang, didn't intend it to seem personal!
badpenny 8mo ago
[flagged]
- dang 8mo ago
  Yikes, that's not good. Please don't cross into personal attack.

oytis 8mo ago

LLMs learned rhetorical negation from humans. Some humans continue to use it, because it genuinely makes sense at times.

dang 8mo ago

Generated comments are not allowed on HN, and this has been the case for a long time: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20%22generated%20comments%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... Identifying generated comments is not always easy, as others have pointed out, plus we don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted. If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com. With LLM comments, there's an important distinction between legit users (who may have no idea that they're breaking a rule, especially because it isn't explicit in the guidelines yet) and accounts that appear to be posting nothing but gen-AI text. If you (anyone and everyone!) see a case of the latter, definitely please email us because we've been banning those accounts. Even in more borderline cases, though, it's still helpful to email us because sometimes we contact the user, if we can, to let them know that we've been getting such reports. Or we might tell them we've suspended their account until we hear from them that they won't post LLM-generated or processed comments.