4 ms·

In every single article's comments now, there's always someone coming out of the woodwork to post "This article is written by LLM." These comments are about as

In every single article's comments now, there's always someone coming out of the woodwork to post "This article is written by LLM." These comments are about as useless as "The website's color scheme is annoying" and "The website breaks the [back button | scrollbar]." (which, by the way, are not allowed per the HN guidelines[1]) If anything should be banned, it's low-effort "This is AI" commentary. It adds absolute zero to the conversation. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting. I'd argue that: whether or not the article (or reply) was written by AI is a tangential annoyance at this point.

rkomorn 8mo ago
I very much agree. The number of comments I see complaining about "it's not this, it's that" and other "LLMisms" definitely frustrates me more than the original content.
tayo42 8mo ago
I was thinking he same thing but didn't want to post my complaint about other commenters becasue I think that's against the rules too?
- ryandrake 8mo ago
  I generally don't but I think it's defacto-allowed in these "meta HN rules discussion" threads.
fubdopsp 8mo ago
It's much more than a "tangential annoyance" and it adds a lot to the conversation--among other things, it establishes a norm that AI-generated blogspam is, well, spam and unwelcome. Blogging, sharing blog posts, reading them, commenting on them--these are all acts of human communication. Farming any of these steps out to an LLM completely breaks down the social contract involved in participating in an online forum like this. What's the point? It's the exact same effect that's playing out in many other areas where LLMs are encroaching: bypassing the "human effort" step has negative side effects that people who are only looking at the output are ignoring. I actually find your opinion so infuriating that it's taking all my composure to not reply with something nastier. If you guys want to spend your time reading shitty LLM spam posts with shitty LLM comments, why don't you find another site to do it on instead of destroying this one.
- ryandrake 8mo ago
  Hey, I'm not a fan of LLM slop articles and blogspam either and if I could hold back the tide, I'd try to. But I'm just saying that pointing it out each and every time is just going to become its own form of spam. We're quickly entering a world where 99+% of what is written online, be it blogs, amateur news, or actual professional journalism, is LLM generated. You hate it, I hate it, but it's coming. The state of journalism is already in shambles and line must go up, so "everything written by AI" is sadly inevitable. Posting every time to remind people of that? I mean by the end of 2026 you might as well have a bot commenting on every article that it's probably LLM generated. I argue it adds no signal to the conversation.
  - fubdopsp 8mo ago
    I still think it has strong normative value. Maybe at some point when norms have become firmly established these comments will be pointless and spammy but I don't think we're anywhere close to that point yet. A lot of blogging is essentially self-expression and that stuff won't be taken over by LLMs (it defeats the whole point). Other blogging is done with some kind of sales/promotional/brand purpose and the extent to which LLMs will dominate this will depend on how we as a society react to it (see the AI art battles) since if people react negatively to it it becomes counterproductive.
    - zahlman 8mo ago
      Perhaps it would be better to have comments that praise apparently human-written text? I understand where you're coming from. I've been posting complaints about LLM-written articles almost as long as I've been here. (My analysis is definitely more complex than a search for blacklisted Unicode characters or words.) But I've let off on that, partly because I agree the guideline is meant to encompass that kind of criticism (same with my comments about initial page content not rendering with JavaScript, honestly) but largely because it just seems futile. It's better material for a blog post than HN comments (and would be less repetitive).
- Springtime 8mo ago
  To provide a heads up to others for who feel similarly for whether something is worth spending time with there isn't a problem speculating if something is produced by AI if there are indicators of insufficient human authorship but that's a big if. If incorrect such comments themselves become noise. In its worst form I've seen now many times in other communities users claim submissions are AI for things that are provably not, merely to dismiss points of view the poster disagrees with by invoking calls to action from knee-jerk voters who have a disdain for generative AI. I've also seen it expressed by users I expect feel intimidated by artwork from established traditional artists. Thankfully on HN it hasn't reached that level but I have seen some here for instance still think use of em dashes with no surrounding spaces is some definitive proof by pointing to a style guide, without realizing other established style guides have always stated to omit the spaces (eg: Chicago Manual of Style). This just leads to falsely confident assessments and more unnecessary comment chains responding to them. What one hopes for with curated communities is that people have discriminating taste at the submission and voting level. In my own case I'm looking for an experience from those who have seen a lot of things and only finds particular things compelling and are eager to share them. Compared to some submission that reaches the front page of say popular programming language docs that just provide another basis for rehashed discussion (and cynically since the poster knows such generalized submissions do this and grow karma).
DevelopingElk 8mo ago
I have commented once or twice on articles being AI generated. I don't put them when I think the writer used AI to clean up some text. I added them when there are paragraphs of meaningless or incorrect content. Formats, name collisions or back-button breakage are tangential to the content of the article. Being AI generated isn't. And it does add to the overall HN conversation by making it easier to focus on meaningful content and not AI generated text. Basically, if the writer didn't do a good job checking and understanding the content we shouldn't bother to either.

rkomorn 8mo ago

I very much agree. The number of comments I see complaining about "it's not this, it's that" and other "LLMisms" definitely frustrates me more than the original content.

tayo42 8mo ago

I was thinking he same thing but didn't want to post my complaint about other commenters becasue I think that's against the rules too?

ryandrake 8mo ago
I generally don't but I think it's defacto-allowed in these "meta HN rules discussion" threads.

fubdopsp 8mo ago

It's much more than a "tangential annoyance" and it adds a lot to the conversation--among other things, it establishes a norm that AI-generated blogspam is, well, spam and unwelcome. Blogging, sharing blog posts, reading them, commenting on them--these are all acts of human communication. Farming any of these steps out to an LLM completely breaks down the social contract involved in participating in an online forum like this. What's the point? It's the exact same effect that's playing out in many other areas where LLMs are encroaching: bypassing the "human effort" step has negative side effects that people who are only looking at the output are ignoring. I actually find your opinion so infuriating that it's taking all my composure to not reply with something nastier. If you guys want to spend your time reading shitty LLM spam posts with shitty LLM comments, why don't you find another site to do it on instead of destroying this one.

ryandrake 8mo ago
Hey, I'm not a fan of LLM slop articles and blogspam either and if I could hold back the tide, I'd try to. But I'm just saying that pointing it out each and every time is just going to become its own form of spam. We're quickly entering a world where 99+% of what is written online, be it blogs, amateur news, or actual professional journalism, is LLM generated. You hate it, I hate it, but it's coming. The state of journalism is already in shambles and line must go up, so "everything written by AI" is sadly inevitable. Posting every time to remind people of that? I mean by the end of 2026 you might as well have a bot commenting on every article that it's probably LLM generated. I argue it adds no signal to the conversation.
- fubdopsp 8mo ago
  I still think it has strong normative value. Maybe at some point when norms have become firmly established these comments will be pointless and spammy but I don't think we're anywhere close to that point yet. A lot of blogging is essentially self-expression and that stuff won't be taken over by LLMs (it defeats the whole point). Other blogging is done with some kind of sales/promotional/brand purpose and the extent to which LLMs will dominate this will depend on how we as a society react to it (see the AI art battles) since if people react negatively to it it becomes counterproductive.
  - zahlman 8mo ago
    Perhaps it would be better to have comments that praise apparently human-written text? I understand where you're coming from. I've been posting complaints about LLM-written articles almost as long as I've been here. (My analysis is definitely more complex than a search for blacklisted Unicode characters or words.) But I've let off on that, partly because I agree the guideline is meant to encompass that kind of criticism (same with my comments about initial page content not rendering with JavaScript, honestly) but largely because it just seems futile. It's better material for a blog post than HN comments (and would be less repetitive).
Springtime 8mo ago
To provide a heads up to others for who feel similarly for whether something is worth spending time with there isn't a problem speculating if something is produced by AI if there are indicators of insufficient human authorship but that's a big if. If incorrect such comments themselves become noise. In its worst form I've seen now many times in other communities users claim submissions are AI for things that are provably not, merely to dismiss points of view the poster disagrees with by invoking calls to action from knee-jerk voters who have a disdain for generative AI. I've also seen it expressed by users I expect feel intimidated by artwork from established traditional artists. Thankfully on HN it hasn't reached that level but I have seen some here for instance still think use of em dashes with no surrounding spaces is some definitive proof by pointing to a style guide, without realizing other established style guides have always stated to omit the spaces (eg: Chicago Manual of Style). This just leads to falsely confident assessments and more unnecessary comment chains responding to them. What one hopes for with curated communities is that people have discriminating taste at the submission and voting level. In my own case I'm looking for an experience from those who have seen a lot of things and only finds particular things compelling and are eager to share them. Compared to some submission that reaches the front page of say popular programming language docs that just provide another basis for rehashed discussion (and cynically since the poster knows such generalized submissions do this and grow karma).

DevelopingElk 8mo ago

I have commented once or twice on articles being AI generated. I don't put them when I think the writer used AI to clean up some text. I added them when there are paragraphs of meaningless or incorrect content. Formats, name collisions or back-button breakage are tangential to the content of the article. Being AI generated isn't. And it does add to the overall HN conversation by making it easier to focus on meaningful content and not AI generated text. Basically, if the writer didn't do a good job checking and understanding the content we shouldn't bother to either.