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I furthermore wish that "posting an LLM-generated comment (i.e. and passing it off as your own)" was worthy of an instant ban, because I see this sort of behavi
by BalinKing 7mo ago
I furthermore wish that "posting an LLM-generated comment (i.e. and passing it off as your own)" was worthy of an instant ban, because I see this sort of behavior from non-green accounts as well.
EDIT: I meant (but totally forgot) to qualify that my "proposal" would only apply when the LLM-ness is self-obvious—idk, make up a "reasonable person" standard or something. Presumably, the moderators would err on the side of letting things slide. Even so, many comments I've seen are simply impossible for any reasonable person to claim as "human-written"—the default ChatGPT style is simply too distinct.
- delichon 7mo agoThe moderators are supposed to just know it when they see it? It's that black and white to you? Or are lots of false positives a price we have to pay?
- lokar 7mo agoIt’s only going to get harder has people continue to model their writing on LLM style.
- bluefirebrand 7mo agoI guess it's been fun but the internet is well and truly dead If not already, then soon
- robotresearcher 7mo agoYou're absolutely right.
- rpcope1 7mo agoYou know it's bad when reading "you're absolutely right..." causes you to oscillate between wanting to laugh and also violently destroy the computer.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- Rapzid 7mo agoYou are viewing this through exactly the right lens. But here is the kicker..
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- rrgok 7mo agoI laughed so hard. It has been a long time. Thanks!
- Gabrys1 7mo agoCan use AI to detect that
- andai 7mo agoYeah it's weird, there was one case where I thought it was AI but wasn't sure. Several other comments pointed it out, too. Author claimed he wrote it manually. (Which is honestly even more concerning!) Maybe there can be a dedicated 'flag botspam' button? Then again it's a nuanced issue. I see AI used in a large percentage of writing now, so would this rule apply to the article as well?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- xpe 7mo ago> Yeah it's weird, there was one case where I thought it was AI but wasn't sure. Several other comments pointed it out, too. Author claimed he wrote it manually. (Which is honestly even more concerning!) I find the above comment concerning, so I ask: to what degree is the above commenter calibrated to ground truth? How would they know? How would we know? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calibrated_probability_assessment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calibrated_probability_assessm... It seems to me comments like the above are overconfident in the worst ways.
- andai 7mo agoHe was using a dozen obvious ChatGPT-isms. So either he was lying about writing it manually (the comforting option), or he actually writes like that, which is what I meant being concerning. But yeah, there isn't a way to prove it one way or the over, even when it's "obvious". I saw in some schools they're using systems where you have to type the essay in a web app, and the web app analyzes your keystrokes to determine if you're human.
- xpe 7mo agoThanks for sharing. / Speaking of keystroke analysis, have you read "Fall" by Neal Stephenson? A fun read; there is a generalization of this idea therein.
- layer8 7mo ago
- BalinKing 7mo agoSorry, updated my original comment—I meant to qualify it to only those cases where it's blatantly obvious. Obviously a lot of ambiguous comments will slip through as a result, but I agree with you that false negatives are better than false positives.
- vel0city 7mo agoYour comments use em dashes. Many would claim those are vastly overrepresented in AI language and thus an account overly using them are blatantly AI. I don't think your account is AI just by these few comments, but I would like to point out that most rubrics one might use to determine what is obviously AI might end up including the way you talk. If there was a truly accurate tell, some algorithm you could feed a few sentences in and it could tell you "yep, this is 100% AI", then yeah sure use that. I don't know you could realistically build that machine, especially when it comes to the generation of text.
- mroche 7mo agoYour comments use em dashes. Many would claim those are vastly overrepresented in AI language and thus an account overly using them are blatantly AI. I've always found this funny. Doesn't macOS' default text substitution enable (annoying to me) things like em-dash, smart quotes, etc?
- scratchyone 7mo agoFor what it's worth, there are modern LLM detectors with extremely low false-positive rates. The tech has advanced quite a bit since the ZeroGPT days. Personally I've gotten very good results from Pangram Labs. Still can't directly ban people though because false positives are always possible.
- zahlman 7mo agoIs that false-positive rate from your own testing, or the author's claims? What is the source of ground truth?
- 7mo ago
- shimman 7mo agoSomething we need to remember that AI was trained on every public internet comment, the vast majority of which are legit terrible. The biggest tell that someone is using AI is having multiple paragraphs saying the same point over and over again. Even trolls are more succinct.
- jimnotgym 7mo agoDammit, am I going to get banned for rambling?
- Marsymars 7mo agoHuh, this is what specifically drove me to complain about LLM-generated tickets at work - multiple paragraphs rewording and emphasizing the same point, all of which was topically relevant, but not necessary. (i.e. it was obvious in the first place, think along the lines of a ticket about a screen loading slowly, and then multiple paragraphs explaining the benefits of faster-loading screens.)
- zahlman 7mo agoIn some fraction of cases, it's really obvious. I would argue that those cases are really the ones that cause an LLM-specific harm, i.e., which make people feel like they aren't exclusively among fellow humans. If someone posts something that doesn't clearly read LLM-ish, but is otherwise terrible, it's not really different from if the same terrible thing had been written by hand. I don't think anyone who objects to LLM comments is really demanding a super-low false negative rate. Just get rid of the zero-effort stuff. For example, recently I've seen a lot of comments from new accounts that are just sycophantic towards TFA and try to highlight / summarize a specific idea or two, but don't really demonstrate any original thought (just, like, basic reading comprehension and an ability to express agreement). And they'll take a paragraph to do so, where a human with the same level of interest in the material might just say "good post" (granted, there's an argument to be made for excluding that, too).
- ThrowawayR2 7mo agoThe guidelines haven't even been updated to say that AI generated posts and submission aren't permitted even though it's been the policy for a couple of years now if one searches for postings by the moderators. So outsiders and new HN users have no reason to know that it's not allowed. I'm sure there are reasons for it but the inaction is all very mysterious from an outsider perspective.
- i_think_so 7mo agoThis obviously should have been done years ago. @dang is there a reason it hasn't?
- i_think_so 7mo ago..so updating the guidelines is beyond the pale and suggesting it is downvote worthy? How very interesting.
- dang 7mo ago"Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dang 7mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated (@dang doesn't work and it took me a long time to find this comment again so I could reply!)
- heavyset_go 7mo agoDo this with submissions, too. Or at least put some indicator that it's AI generated.
- mapontosevenths 7mo agoI am more annoyed by the anti-AI luddites filling the comments with low value complaints than I am by quality content written partially by an LLM. Those low value complaints add nothing to the conversation, and the content didnt make it to the front page because it was bad. If the sole objection is "AI bad", keep it to yourself....its boring.
- heavyset_go 7mo agoWithout engaging in more ad hominem, that are wrong by the way, what's the issue with labeling AI content with what it is?
- bryanlarsen 7mo agoIt's one thing to have an AI-label. It's another to completely derail a conversation with a likely false AI accusation. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47122272 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47122272 You have to scroll a few pages before the actual article is discussed. "This was LLM generated" is likely to float to the top of an article. That's where the best comments about the article deserve to go, not an off topic comment. An AI label should be much less obtrusive.
- tasuki 7mo agoI think your comment was generated by an LLM and hereby vote for your immediate and permanent instant ban.
- MikeTheGreat 7mo agoI think that your comment was generated by Eliza, and hereby vote for you to get a karma boost for being Legit Old School, then an immediate and permanent instant ban. I'm joking, of course. If your comment was generated by Eliza it would have started with "How do you feel about 'I think your comment...'" :)
- layer8 7mo agoCan you elaborate on that?
- atoav 7mo agoEliza was one of the first chatbots from the mid to late 60s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- skeeter2020 7mo agothat's interesting, tell me more about one of the first chatbots from the mid to late 60s
- MarsIronPI 7mo agoBTW, what ELIZA implementation are y'all using? The Emacs Doctor?
- layer8 7mo ago
- rerdavies 7mo agoI think all submissions to HN should be submitted via snail-mail, and must be handwritten. That would solve the problem. /heavy sarcasm That being said, my mother used to insist on hand-written cover letters from job applicants. Her rationale: it takes effort, so it weeds out all the applications from people who are just randomly spraying out applications for jobs they are not qualified for.
- layer8 7mo agoUnfortunately I don’t think that it would solve the problem: https://www.google.com/search?q=handwritten+mail+service&udm=web https://www.google.com/search?q=handwritten+mail+service&udm...
- brewdad 7mo agoFirst interview question is to submit a handwriting sample.
- i_think_so 7mo agoI taught myself to type because most people can't read my handwriting. I would be so screwed. :-(
- rjh29 7mo agoMarking the sarcasm here really ruins your humour.
- jacquesm 7mo agoFor now there is already a pretty effective mechanism in place, downvote and/or flag those comments that you think are across the line in that sense. But in principle I agree with you, the rule for me is 'if it wasn't worth your time to write then it certainly isn't worth 1000x times other people's time to read'.
- AnimalMuppet 7mo agoExactly. If your LLM wrote it, then my LLM can read it. I don't want to.
- i_think_so 7mo agoGod help us if we get to the point where we need an LLM agent to do the reading and filtering of all our social content for us. I am completely certain that is a downward spiral that ends with the collapse of our society and I give it 50/50 odds for killing off the entire species.
- jacquesm 7mo agoThis is a SNR discussion, the N has just gone up an order of magnitude and may well go up multiple orders of magnitude more to the point that communication between people will be drowned out by non-people attempting to communicate with people. It's the spam problem all over again. I predict the outcome will be roughly the same: a more or less working set of LLM filters that allow you to filter out LLM output at the price of some false positives and some false negatives. Coming soon to a browser near you: the Bye AI Plugin.
- dmix 7mo agoPeople accuses everything of being LLM generated these days. That'd be a tough rule to enforce.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- rpcope1 7mo agoOther than this being probably challenging to enforce fairly, I think I agree that if you had strong proof of an account largely or completely posting comments/stories/whatever that was adulterated by an LLM, that is really probably ban worthy like you said.
- lich_king 7mo agoMany HNers strongly argue that it's absolutely impossible to distinguish between AI text and non-AI text. Some of it seems to be a knee-jerk reaction to some of the occasional, one-sided stories of people who were accused of using LLMs and fired from their jobs. And some of it seems to be just hedging so that we don't develop a culture that could penalize their LLM-generated posts or code. We had people defending the fired Ars Technica guy, even though he admitted to using an LLM in some sort of a contrived non-apology along the lines of "I did it because I had a cold". My main problem with that is that you can just generate an infinite supply of LLM op-eds about LLMs, and is this really what we want to read every day? If I want to know what ChatGPT thinks about the risks or benefits of vibecoding, I'll just ask it.
- wolvoleo 7mo agoHmm, some LLM text is hard to detect, sure. Some is also horribly easy. If the text is full of: - Overly positive commentary and encouragement - Constant use of bullet point lists, bolding and emoji - This quaint forced 'funniness', like a misplaced attempt at being lighthearted - A lot of blablah that just missed the point - Not concise and to the point, but also not super long Then that really screams ChatGPT to me. I think it's because this seems to be the default styling of ChatGPT. When people tailor their prompt to be more specific about style it's a lot harder to detect but if they just dump a few lines of instructions about the content into it, this is what you'll get. So the low-effort slop is still pretty easy to detect IMO.
- withinboredom 7mo agoLOL. You just described your own comment!
- AnimalMuppet 7mo agoI think you need (at least) one exception to that rule. We have many people here whose first language is not English, and this is an English-only forum. For at least some of those people, an AI translation may give better clarity than their own attempt at writing in English. So I would propose that, in the ideal world where we could perfectly enforce the rules that we chose, that the rule would be "AI for translation only". If it wrote your content, your comment is gone. If it translated content that you wrote, your comment is still welcome.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- edanm 7mo agoI disagree with this policy. Some people can really benefit from using LLMs to help them write. E.g. non-native speakers. LLM-assisted-writing doesn't have to be low effort, it can help people express themselves better in many cases. I'd argue that someone who spent their time doing multiple passes with an LLM to get their phrasing just write, has taken obviously more care than the majority of people on HN take before commenting. And if you don't like the way something is written? Just down vote it. That's true whether or not it's partially/wholly written by an LLM.
- christofosho 7mo agoAren't down votes on this forum restricted to 500+ karma? And how would those compare to flagging? I'd hate for people under 500 karma to think they need to flag a post in order to have it get any attention by moderation. And, with your idea that LLMs help folks write, wouldn't that make the community worse for them? And what about users like this, whose comment are very much entirely LLM generated and possibly even a bot? https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=BelVisgarra https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=BelVisgarra
- edanm 7mo agoI should clarify — I disagree with disallowing any comments that used LLMs in the writing. I think comments should be judged on their quality, not on how they were written. I might agree (don't know) with the idea of limiting new accounts more heavily.
- i_think_so 7mo ago> I disagree with disallowing any comments that used LLMs in the writing. I think the point here is that the community doesn't want to read AI slop, not that using an LLM to clean up your writing contains some inherent evil that prevents quality. I don't want to accuse you of strawmanning the argument, but honestly, where did you ever see someone advocating the latter?
- lovich 7mo ago
- tomhow 7mo ago> I furthermore wish that "posting an LLM-generated comment (i.e. and passing it off as your own)" was worthy of an instant ban It pretty much is. It’s not hard and fast (sometimes we’ll warn people or email them to ask if it’s not certain) and it takes time for us to see things and act, especially when people don’t email us when they see these comments. But as a general rule, accounts that post generated comments get banned.
- Razengan 7mo agoHow ironic, a comment advocating for banning LLM comments using em dashes What if someone used an LLM to just translate?
- throwaway2037 7mo agoWhen I read comments like this, I think about the average Joe who says: "Most people are terrible drivers." Then, someone asks them: "Are you a terrible driver?" They respond: "Of course not. I am an excellent driver." A few people roll their eyes. > worthy of an instant ban First, it is not always possible to identify an LLM-generated comment. There are too many false-positives. Imagine if this system was implemented, and one of your comments was identified as LLM-generated and you were instantly banned. How would you feel about it?
- cindyllm 7mo ago[dead]
- i_think_so 7mo agoMaybe we need a reverse Turing test and award -- humans write things that are indistinguishable from AI slop. I have no idea what that could be useful for, but since the Turing test is now essentially beaten maybe its usefulness has come and gone too. > Imagine if this system was implemented, and one of your comments was identified as LLM-generated and you were instantly banned. How would you feel about it? It sounds like a fast, efficient, inexpensive and foolproof recipe for destroying a community. Let's use that as a future test: anyone who advocates for it is undeniably trying to destroy HN, so they get downvoted to 1 karma and permanently blocked from voting on anything else.
- throwaway2037 7mo agoAnother thing that I have raised multiple times on HN: I had a roommate a few years ago that was a non-native English speaker doing research as a post-doc. He would use ChatGPT to improve his writing in scientific papers. He was producing the first draft, then would discuss with ChatGPT about how to improve the grammar. At the time, I thought it was genius. He said it acted like an English tutor for him. When you see the reactionary anti-LLM comments on HN, never once do they mention LLM-assisted -- only all human or all LLM.