5 ms·

I hope HN doesn't get into moderating the politics of articles. I can see a grim future (present?) where "AI generated" turns into a slur, warranted or otherwi

• matheusmoreira 3mo ago
  You've accurately described the current state of Lobsters.
  • archagon 3mo ago
    As opposed to wonderful old HN, where about 95% of the front page is now AI, AI-related, or AI-generated.
    • matheusmoreira 3mo ago
      There's significant overlap between the front pages of HN and Lobsters. Almost every time I try to submit the interesting articles I see on Lobsters here, I just get redirected to the existing discussion thread. The massive 1000+ comments/upvotes AI model release threads only show up on HN. Lobsters doesn't accept "business" articles like that. You're quite likely to find reactionary articles that are critical of AI on the front page though. There are several on the front page right now, in addition to the ones derisively tagged vibecoding.
      • mmastrac 3mo ago
        There's a bot user that seems to crosspost every lobsters story here if it isn't already.
    • dang 3mo ago
      That's a high exaggeration of course, but in the wonderful old HN tradition of perceiving the site as dominated by $badness, where everyone has their own perception of $badness. I'm not picking on you - it's practically a universal response, so much so that it must be driven by human hard-wiring. I've written about this so many times that for once I don't even know what to link to. Perhaps https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098. Or maybe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48427800 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48427800
      • mh- 3mo ago
        (Apologies if you've commented on the following already, but I've not seen it.) The most concerning growing trend I see is comments that don't violate any guidelines, but are flagged to dead. I'm not talking about posters that are shadowbanned, but about comments that engaged thoughtfully on a topic but the rest of the thread disagreed emphatically with. I also don't even mean controversial takes on hot-button issues like vaccines. Just plain old bucking the trend in a thread about AI, transit, housing, layoffs, etc. I've been browsing with showdead on for as long as I can remember, and I'm seeing this accelerate. Comments from folks both you and I respect as high quality contributors here. I don't know what the solution is, but it discourages me (and I'm sure others) from having the kind of thought-provoking dialog I've gotten used to reading here for the last 15 years.
        • defrost 3mo ago
          > comments that don't violate any guidelines, but are flagged to dead. Vouch them and/or email to hn@ycombinator.com and say why you think they deserve to be [undead]. I see that a lot, some have been erroneously caught by the real time AI detect filter (which actually isn't too bad at slicing out the actual AI gen comments) others have gone hard against the zeitgeist. I've had the mods reinstate comments that I've thoroughly disagreed with but were making their best case for an opposing view - the threads are better with the best arguments forward for all sides of the elephant.
          • mh- 3mo ago
    • grahamburger 3mo ago
      And the remainder is people complaining about all the AI
    • IsTom 3mo ago
      My memory is pretty spotty, but wasn't it similar with other hype-cycle topics like cryptocurrencies?
    • Cthulhu_ 3mo ago
      This happens all the time, depending on the trend of the time. It was Rust for a while, then cryptocurrencies, machine learning, starups / unicorns / enormous funding rounds, etc. It'll pass when the next cool tech comes around.
    • ed_elliott_asc 3mo ago
      It is understandable why so much content is ai-related, so many people are using it
  • deleted 3mo ago
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• asdff 3mo ago
  Why would humans ever be trained to talk like an AI? If they are working in some capacity where there is strong incentive to write llm-slop adjacent content, might as well use the llm slop generator.
  • minimaxir 3mo ago
    That's just LinkedIn.
    • asdff 3mo ago
      Scrolling the general feed there makes me want to put a pencil in my eye
      • genxy 3mo ago
        Just detox by heading over to youtube logged out.
  • Barbing 3mo ago
    "You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with." Now if one’s a language model… (Subconscious training like when we pick up an accent, though eventually folks might automatically code switch - so that’s hopeful.)
  • unholiness 3mo ago
    Are you maybe misunderstanding this point? > It's a fascinating arms race right now: the AIs are training on the humans but the human hivemind is also training on the AIs. Readers are developing allergic sensitivities to language that sounds like an LLM produced it. Humans are training to detect AI content. Humans writing more like AIs is an unrelated (and slower) phenomenon.
• satisfice 3mo ago
  “AI generated” is already a slur.
  • dang 3mo ago
    It's sometimes used that way, sometimes a fact, and sometimes both. It's all unclear because we're still in the early stages of this working itself out.
    • minimaxir 3mo ago
      And then there's clanker (which has fortunately tapered off a bit): https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=clanker&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
      • dang 3mo ago
        This is a nested-enough subthread that I can say whatever I want because no one will ever link to it because if they do no one will care. The class of comments you're talking about—not just ones that say "clanker" literally but the more general category—is particle-wave undecidable right now. If the commenter is right—i.e. if the commenter they are castigating actually did post LLM-generated text—then it's a community immune system response. If the commenter is wrong—i.e. they are castigating a sincere human and hauling them to court on false charges—then it's the kind of attack that we tell people not to post here. They can't know for sure whether what they're saying is true or false, and we can't know for sure how we should moderate it. Both questions depend on information that is unavailable. This is what I mean when I say that the whole question is in a chaotic state right now, and it's too soon to know which way it will stabilize.
        • minimaxir 3mo ago
          That's a fair response.
        • not-a-llm 3mo ago
• fzeroracer 3mo ago
  'humans trained to talk like an AI' is just LinkedIn and I would hope that the last thing anyone wants is for HN to become the utter void that is LinkedIn posts.
• MisterSandman 3mo ago
  Hacker News is already in the business of policing articles though. This is a curated list of articles that people share, and a lot of unrelated articles are automatically deleted or just downvoted out of existence. This isnt Reddit. It’s okay to have an opinionated website. Not every corner of the internet needs to be a bastion of free speech
• sph 3mo ago
  Honest question, why would it be a grim future for people to be allergic to what, in 99% of the cases, is effortless slop? Personally that is the future I hope to see. Hence my continuous protestations at the lazy excuses for articles that get posted these days, and the lazier excuses given by their authors for avoiding using their brain.
• bryanrasmussen 3mo ago
  >in a world where the difference between human trained to talk like an AI and AI masquerading as human I was once accused of using AI for writing in the voice of a depressed character because the character had a certain emotional detachment that to the person lodging the accusation indicated AI. In short it is not just specific phrasing or words but also aesthetic effects that mean one is AI nowadays.
• freehorse 3mo ago
  AI has a distinct, low-quality and unnecessarily sensational writing style, which signals low effort post first of all. If you use AI and you put the effort to make it not look like AI it means that at least you put some effort into it. I am not sure how the future may be, but the direction of AIs has been to solidify their distinct writing style rather than assimilate to humans. So we can start addressing what we are dealing with now. I doubt HN tagging/flagging can put enough pressure to affect how llms will evolve anyway in the future, while the llm speech becomes more and more ubiquitous and unhinged.
  • Cthulhu_ 3mo ago
    > AI has a distinct, low-quality and unnecessarily sensational writing style, which signals low effort post first of all Yes, but what if it doesn't? Anyone can create a model or prompt to adjust the tone, remove the tells that people are now on the lookout for, etc. And it's self-reinforcing, because the people that are on the lookout will always consider themselves to be right in their judgment, also because of survivorship bias - they won't know if they missed an AI generated comment/post unless it's revealed. This is one reason why I'm in favor of tagging AI generated posts, because at one point we can't tell. If we can't tell, does it still matter? I don't know, but I'd like to know anyway. Of course, it can't be mandated, so if the submitter doesn't tag it and the readers can't tell the difference, it's futile.
    • tripzilch 3mo ago
      people could do this, but they don't. and if they did spend that effort, it would be better. but as it is now, the vast majority of AI written text, especially "documentation" of software projects, has this style signifying communication was outsourced to an AI. we are not at the point where "we can't tell", and if we actually couldn't tell we wouldn't be complaining about it