5 ms·
How much of HN is AI?
- cj 8mo agoI haven't really noticed. Doesn't seem like HN has changed very much. Edit: Clearly the topics have evolved over time (AI, crypto, there will always be some topic taking up the majority of attention), but the type and worthiness of content seems unchanged.
- giancarlostoro 8mo agoCompared to two years ago? HN was never this overstimulated on AI. It's pretty high. Even when Crypto was at its peak I don't think it ever dominated the HN front page to this extreme.
- 1attice 8mo agoIn terms of dollar magnitude, AI is in a class of its own. The investments make crypto look like softball. Attention around here follows the dollars, for good and ill.
- kylecazar 8mo agoMaybe add a category for posts and comments about AI on HN :) "Stories about AI" is not offensive to me. Its influence on the industry is undeniable and if I'm feeling tired of that content I just won't engage with it. AI-writing is another story, but yeah -- HN is downstream of that problem. You can encourage people not to submit articles that seem to be LLM authored, but it won't work.
- tptacek 8mo agoPart of the ethos of HN is that we don't do content/subject silos; it's a way in which HN is very distinct from Reddit. I don't think this will happen and I think if it does it's a bad idea (not least because I don't think a site dominated by software developers is going to separate itself from AI, any more than it will separate itself from programming language discussions), but I understand the impulse. They're not the funnest stories to comment on.
- kylecazar 8mo agoCouldn't agree more -- I meant a category in this post's chart :) I'll admit it was snarky.
- tptacek 8mo agoSorry, I'm knee-jerk about the thing I said because it comes up constantly as a suggestion for how to fix things.
- csande17 8mo ago/ask and /show are sort of HN's version of content/subject silos; posts there can technically appear on the front page but are comparatively less likely to. I imagine they could add a /slop section for AI posts, and then tweak the ranking logic for the main /news page to prevent too many from showing up at once.
- tptacek 8mo agoI understand the suggestion to be moving all posts about AI, agents, etc to a silo. Generated posts are generally already off-topic here (I gather they're about to add a new flag for that). I think it's going to be really difficult to segregate discussions about AI from discussions about software development over the next few years.
- manwds 8mo ago[dead]
- flowerthoughts 8mo agoI enjoy most of the "AI" posts on HN nowadays. I was really fed up with the MCP/Anthropic PR machine of a year ago, after just a month of that. There's much more actual content today, though I guess we also see less of stable diffusion in favor of transformer LLMs.
- ljhsiung 8mo agoOne of many things that bums me out about AI is whether content I create will be truly appreciated by humans, or will just be fed back into the algorithm. I often wonder how exactly you'd mitigate this. Further, as a user, I wonder what incentive there is for me to write anything at all online, let alone commenting on forums, if it will just be fed back into an LLM. Is paywalling or forcing user accounts the solution? That feels antithetical to the reason for the internet at all. Just musings.
- altairprime 8mo agoSimply putting up a basic auth wall that says “Enter any password to proceed” would stop all modern crawlers dead in their tracks, afaik. You could make it more defensible to the trivial overcome by putting a rotating / per-source password in the basicauth message, but honestly, I think they’re all coded not to invite a CFAA hacking lawsuit by trying random passwords on password-protected sites :)
- onetokeoverthe 8mo ago[dead]
- dyauspitr 8mo agoIf it’s on here it will probably be read by a human. It may also then be fed back as training data but why do you care?
- zacklee1988 8mo ago[dead]
- _pdp_ 8mo agoThere is no doubt there is a lot of AI generated content. We do it too - code, tutorials, etc. It is just too convenient and useful to ignore. The question that I have is this. Is it possible the language will converge towards AI mannerism when writing - i.e. most people will naturally write like AI because they will pick up on the subtleties of language from ChatGPT, Claude, etc? In other words there is an exposure effect at play. I just found out about Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) which makes me think that the answer is probably "yes".
- 8bitsrule 8mo agoNo doubt there will sho as hail cum too pas lingo wot am un-clanker-lock. Betcha bottum dolah.
- vonunov 8mo agoIf it has any regularity to it, then LLMs will, so to speak, figure it out. Maybe if you do it like a game of Mao¹ you could make it a little bit harder for them. 1. https://everything2.com/node/e2node/How%20to%20play%20Mao https://everything2.com/node/e2node/How%20to%20play%20Mao
- 8bitsrule 8mo agoI'm reminded of how adults struggle to keep up with urban-dictionary-speak. I doubt they'll keep-up wif teen-speak-on-steroids. 6-7.
- calebelac 8mo agoGreat question posed. Headed to read up on CAT now
- vova_hn2 8mo ago> Is it possible the language will converge towards AI mannerism when writing As a non-native English speaker leaving in a non English-speaking country I thought about this too, but in a more selfish and practical manner: what if my English in particular converges towards AI mannerisms? You see, if you live in an English speaking country and your family speaks English you still have some amount of guaranteed-to-be-human language input from taking to people face-to-face in real life. But for me, 99.9% of English input I receive is online. So I wonder, how much of it is already AI and how much has the non-artificial neural network inside my brain has retrained itself to mimick AI. This is scary, because before I was absolutely sure that consuming content online improves my ability to understand and use English. Now I'm not so sure anymore.
- deepsquirrelnet 8mo ago> I tapped into Pangram. Pangram is a remarkably good, conservative model for detecting LLM-generated text. These detectors have a bad rep among techies, but the objections are often based on outdated assumptions Turing test is really in the rearview, huh? Humans need machines to detect if a machine wrote the text, because humans aren’t sure.
- xigoi 8mo agoIn the Turing tent, you converse witt the other side instead of just reading static text. This makes a huge difference.
- est 8mo ago> I tapped into Pangram. Pangram is a remarkably good, conservative model for detecting LLM-generated text I tried it against some of my AI generated articles. It says 100% human Turns out if one manually write a structure and a core idea first, nobody think it's AI.
- marysminefnuf 8mo agoToo much
- webprofusion 8mo agoFor a HN front page article this is light on content. Should have used AI.
- delichon 8mo agoI'm afraid that we're in an interregnum. A few years ago AI could not pass a Turing test. A few years from now AI will better at Turing tests than we are. We're now in this strange middle zone where we are dazedly grasping for solutions. But what happens next, when we just fail at the task of recognizing ourselves in cyberspace? Where LatestClaw is just plain better at mimicking you than you are? What happens to the living we used to claw out of the ether for ourselves? Do I need to learn to farm?
- pastel8739 8mo agoMaybe we get off all these useless websites and stop doing our useless jobs and go back to the real world
- nine_k 8mo agoWelders? Car mechanics? Nurses? Cooks? Cleaners?..
- ryandrake 8mo agoWhatever real-world jobs they expect knowledge workers to take on after we are all replaced by AI... we at least know they will pay less than our current "useless jobs".
- georgemcbay 8mo ago> we at least know they will pay less than our current "useless jobs". ...and they will also likely pay less than they do now because there will be more labor supply, which the people currently doing those jobs won't be happy about.
- bluefirebrand 8mo agoReally optimistic to assume such jobs will exist in the volumes needed to absorb all of the knowledge workers
- halfcat 8mo agoThat’s a great question and a very realistic thing for us to answer. There is definitely no increase in AI here. If you’d like, I can walk you through how the best posters arrive at this conclusion in the normal human way. Just say the word.
- senectus1 8mo agoI'm more interested in how much of the comments are AI
- grebc 8mo agoi’d wager 95% of the green names definitely are bots.
- iso-logi 8mo agoNot all of us are 100 years old.
- grebc 8mo ago[flagged]
- newsy-combi 8mo agoI don't see a lot of agenda behind them though, they don't sell or advertise anything. Are they personal armies? Vote bots farming points to gain downvote privileges? Early versions of bots prompted to be as undetactable as possible before they're unleashed on tougher policed platforms?
- ramon156 8mo agoHaving a botnet to control the conversation between (part of) SV? That sounds like a good enough motive. They just have to be hidden well enough
- rob 8mo agoTime to switch to a $10 one-time fee like Something Awful Forums. No crypto.
- tptacek 8mo agoAnd never get a serendipitous first-time comment from the subject of an interesting or important story again. Sounds like a bad tradeoff.
- bluefirebrand 8mo agoNo, if the tradeoff is that I never have to read a comment online written by an AI ever again, that's a great trade
- marysminefnuf 8mo agoI think we should allow users to add a set of like 5 tags personally on our account to content. And we can see what people are also tagging stuff as at large. So if a blog thats written with ai is something you want to ignore you can just tag that url and it wont show and you can see what people tagged that blog as too.
- nunez 8mo agoHN cargo-cults heavily for sure. That's more of a reflection of SV culture than something unique to HN. 2016-2018 was Docker and Kubernetes. 2020 was COVID. 2021-2022 was WFH good, RTO bad...and lots of Web3 and crypto stuff. 2023 was the dawn of AI, and it hasn't let up since. These are vibes and likely inaccurate.
- CharlesW 8mo ago> Pangram is a remarkably good, conservative model for detecting LLM-generated text. These detectors have a bad rep among techies, but the objections are often based on outdated assumptions or outright misconceptions. Pot, kettle, black. "Remarkably good" drastically oversells the reliability of it and other AI detectors. It means very little that Pangram did better than other competitors in this snake-oily category in one 2025 benchmark.
- water9 8mo ago[flagged]
- ramon156 8mo ago[flagged]
- nickthegreek 8mo agoWhere do you fall on the percentage of people here that think they can actually do something? So far you seem to failing at your only stated goal of, checking notes, owning the libs…