4 ms·
All the weak excuses posted here are just making me lean more towards a hardline policy. No I don't want to read a human-generated summary of your llm brainstor
by bondarchuk 7mo ago
All the weak excuses posted here are just making me lean more towards a hardline policy. No I don't want to read a human-generated summary of your llm brainstorming session. No I don't want to read human-written text with wording changes suggested by an llm. No I don't want to read an excerpt from llm output even if you correctly attribute it.
I acknowledge this is partly just my personal bias, in some cases really not fair, and unenforceable anyway, but someone relying on llms just makes me feel like they have... bad taste in information curation, or something, and I'd rather just not interact with them at all.
- strangattractor 7mo agoAccording to Citizens United corporations have free speech. LLMs are made by corporations. Are LLMs entitled to free speech?
- filoleg 7mo agoTo answer your question: LLMs don't have free speech, because they aren't companies/businesses, they are a tool (that is used by companies/businesses). Whether a company/business uses an LLM or a real human to write a particular piece of text, that piece of text is entitled to free speech protections on the basis of the company signing off on it. Not on the basis of how that piece of writing was produced.
- strangattractor 7mo agoI appreciate the answer and the open minded thoughtful answer.
- resters 7mo ago[flagged]
- SilentM68 7mo agoYou's correct :)
- gleenn 7mo agoI think we can be a little more nuanced than calling this sentiment outright stupid. A top HN article is about Scientific publications being overwhelmed with LLM trash. LLMs do pose a very real challenge to modern discourse. 10 years ago we could know that if we read something that sounded intelligible that at least some minimum effort had been put forth by a huma to be coherent. That bar is now completely gone. Now all internet users have to become adept AI-sniffers to know if some random bot isn't wandering themnoff a mental cliff with perfect formatting and eloquent prose. Having visceral reactions to that aren't unfounded in my opinion. We've lost real signal and having a forum like this be polluted will be a big casualty if we aren't careful and deliberate about our reaction to AI.
- resters 7mo agoI think it's similarly stupid to open source projects not accepting ai-generated code or pull requests. If the code is good, review it and accept it, if it's not, then don't. Same with HN comments. Reading is not such hard work that a literate person has to strain under the weight of ai-generated spam -- at least I haven't seen any concerning trends and I read HN often.
- fouronnes3 7mo agoI feel you. I don't think I've ever finished reading a sentence that started with "I asked <LLM> and he said..."
- unreal6 7mo agoI find the consistent anthropomorphization to be grating as well
- minimaxir 7mo agoThe "I asked <LLM>" disclosures vary between a) implying the LLM is an expert resource, which is bad, and b) disclosure that an LLM was referenced with the disclosure being transparent about it, which is typically good but more context dependent. Unfortunately (a) is more common, and the backlash against has been removing the communinity incentive to provide (b).
- xpe 7mo agoMy take is orthogonal. Overall, I've become less tolerant of token-generators of all kinds (including people) of bad quality (including tropes, bad reasoning, clunky writing, whatever). But I digress. If we want human "on the other end" we gotta get to ground truth. We're fighting a losing battle thinking that text-based forums can survive without some additional identity components.
- dormento 7mo agoThis is usually an "auto-skip" for me as well.
- strbean 7mo agoThese are the worst. I'm fine with you dumping your own half formed thoughts into an LLM, getting something reasonably structured out, and then rewriting that in your own voice, elaborating, etc. But the "This is what ChatGPT said..." stuff feels almost like "Well I put it into a calculator and it said X." We can all trivially do that, so it really doesn't add anything to the conversation. And we never see the prompting, so any mistakes made in the prompting approach are hidden.
- throwaawy12390 7mo ago
- juleiie 7mo agoLook, you can make all the rules you want but in the end vibe check is the only way to have any sort of quality. Look at Reddit… abundance of rules do not save that place at all. It’s all about curating what kind of people your site attracts. Reddit of course is a business so they don’t care about anything other than max number of ad views. Small non profit forums should consciously design a site to deter group(s) of people that they do not want.
- gleenn 7mo agoI feel like you are being a bit contradictory: the suggestion is to dissuade AI content - isn't that "design[ing] a site to deter group(s) of people that they don't want"? I personally don't want to vibe check every HN comment if I can avoid it, I don't even think you can quantify that in any meaningful way. We can engender a site like that at least in spirit. It may be equally as difficult but it's still worth fighting for.
- juleiie 7mo agoRules aren’t known to be a. Easily enforceable in case of AI b. Very dissuading I don’t think most people read any sort of TOS, site rules, end license agreements, when was the last time you ever did? Besides, sometimes it’s worth it to keep a rule breaking user if they are interesting and have worthwhile things to say despite their… theoretical conflict with the site intended use. Rules are too crude of a tool. Especially in case of AI they are quite nebulous even in a world where detection would be perfect (it isn’t). What you want is to design a site that pulls people that value genuine human interaction. Niche sites are already immune to commerce and adversary bots because no one cares/knows about them. Well this site isn’t that niche I guess, some corporate astroturfing happens. I am on one niche subculture social media and it has suprisingly well made design that is paramount to who it caters and who it dissuades. The result is lack of text ai content even though it isn’t obvious at first glance. LGBT flags are everywhere to dissuade the chuds. Israel flags are present to dissuade the annoying politics ppl from reddit. Lots of artsy stuff to speak to the genuine creativity. It looks stupid but it isn’t stupid. It’s actually quite ingenious. HN is probably already dead as it is too high profile in certain circles to avoid mainstream adversarial AI content.
- jmuguy 7mo agoBeyond folks for whom English is a second language, I agree with you. I don't understand why people are immediately trying to find some loophole in this with spelling, grammar, etc checks. We just want to communicate with you, and if you sound like an idiot without the help of an LLM then maybe work on that rather than pretending to be Hemingway.
- gbear605 7mo agoTraditional translation tools still work, and they're pretty darn good still.
- Barbing 7mo agoI've seen this comment but can't square it with the LLM-induced outcry from translators over job loss. We've all pasted news articles into 2022 Google Translate and a modern LLM, right, and there was no comparison? LLMs even crushed DeepL. Satya had this little story his PR folks helped him with (j/k) even, via Wired June '23: --- STEVEN LEVY: "Was there a single eureka moment that led you to go all in?" SATYA NADELLA: "It was that ability to code, which led to our creating Copilot. But the first time I saw what is now called GPT-4, in the summer of 2022, was a mind-blowing experience. There is one query I always sort of use as a reference. Machine translation has been with us for a long time, and it's achieved a lot of great benchmarks, but it doesn't have the subtlety of capturing deep meaning in poetry. Growing up in Hyderabad, India, I'd dreamt about being able to read Persian poetry—in particular the work of Rumi, which has been translated into Urdu and then into English. GPT-4 did it, in one shot. It was not just a machine translation, but something that preserved the sovereignty of poetry across two language boundaries. And that's pretty cool." --- edit: this comment has some comparisons incl. w/the old Google Translate I'm referring to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40243219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40243219 Today Google Translate is Gemini, though maybe that's not the "traditional translation tool" you were referencing... but hope there's enough here to discuss any aspect that might be interesting! edit2: March 2025 comparison- https://lokalise.com/blog/what-is-the-best-llm-for-translation https://lokalise.com/blog/what-is-the-best-llm-for-translati... "falling behind LLM-based solutions", "consistently outperformed by LLMs", "Not matching top LLMs"
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- layman51 7mo agoI had a couple of experiences where I suspected I was hearing LLM-generated/edited text being read aloud. It was at two different webinars about that were about roadmaps or case studies about some products that I use. It was a bit uncanny because I could detect the stylistic patterns ("It's not X, it's Y" and "No X, no Y, just Z"), but it was kind of jarring to see them spoken by a person on a video call. It makes me think this kind of pattern might be engaging, but for a lot of people, it now sticks out for the wrong reasons. Once LLM generated speech or content start getting into the live answers of Q&A sessions, that would be sad. I know some people try to get through interviews, but I think that might be a bit harder to not detect.
- yellowapple 7mo ago> It was a bit uncanny because I could detect the stylistic patterns ("It's not X, it's Y" and "No X, no Y, just Z"), That's just marketing-speak. LLMs sound like that because LLMs were trained on marketing-speak.
- tavavex 7mo agoNot just bad taste. I have yet to see a post that attributes its text to an LLM ("I asked ChatGPT and here's what it said...") that doesn't come off as patronizing. "Hey, so I don't really have any knowledge or experience of my own with this topic, but here, let me ask an LLM for you. Here, read the output, since you apparently can't figure out how to ask it yourself. Read it. Aren't you interested in what my knowledge machine has to say? Why don't you treat it like how you'd treat me if I shared my own opinion?"
- fluffybucktsnek 7mo agoDare I say, it is mostly your bias. I get not wanting to read raw or poorly reviewed LLM slop, but AI-edited comments? I thought the point was about having interesting discussions about unique ideas we come up with, not the surpeficial wording around it. If someone manages to keep the core of their idea mostly intact while making the presentation more readable, does it really matter that it was post-processed by an AI?
- dang 7mo agoWhen you put the question that way, the answer is naturally no. However, there are other factors. I wrote about this here if you want to take a look: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47342616 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47342616.
- fluffybucktsnek 7mo agoThe perspective of protecting user from flaming is interesting, but I agree with @edanm. That said, I believe that LLMs' "unique" writing style may be useful ability to protect anonymity against stylometric attacks, although that still ought to be checked. If true, that would be a case where LLMism would be desirable by the author.