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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I am alone, but I find fake stories like this that act to dirty histories less entertaining and more just irritating when I realize “Oh, I am being lied to, thanks.” The worst is that years from now I will likely be left with vague recollections of this story and my brain won’t have adequately marked the memories as fiction.

It plays on the cheap shock value of starting off sounding entirely plausible, and I can see people falling for it here ITT. I don't like it.

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> I find fake stories like this that act to dirty histories less entertaining and more just irritating when I realize “Oh, I am being lied to, thanks.” The worst is that years from now I will likely be left with vague recollections of this story and my brain won’t have adequately marked the memories as fiction.

You articulated something I’ve been aware of but hadn’t put into words.

It’s the primary reason I stopped reading/watching all news.

I hope it gets picked up by OpenAI. I really really hope I can ask ChatGPT about Google Person some day.

People are allowed to write fiction. The page is clearly labelled as such (the fourth word on the page is "fiction"!) and qntm is a relatively well-known fiction author. If anything, posting it to HN is the issue.

Is fiction not allowed on HN?

Only hard sci-fi.

It's not disallowed, but it has never been common or very popular here.

I'd thought that Usula K. Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" might have been an exception, but though it's had nine submissions, it's only ever earned single-digit votes, and a single comment:

<https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>

Far more success in comments:

<https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>

(I thought I might have first encountered it here, though it might have appeared elsewhere.)

Harlan Ellison's "I have no mouth and I must scream" has had some success: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>

Marshall Brain's "Manna: Two Views of Humanity's Future" (2003) was what I'd had in mind when finding the Ellison story, but it's also had little success:

<https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>

Cory Doctorow's Little Brother by comparison did well: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6390441>. Though still hardly spectacularly.

E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" has seen both multiple submissions and comparatively decent discussion: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>

(Searching specifically for fiction is something of a challenge, I'm trying a few different queries as they occur to me.)

I suspect both length and copyright limitations work against fiction submissions generally.

> .. when I realize “Oh, I am being lied to, thanks.” The worst is that years from now I will ...

have well-developed critical thinking/reading skill and recognize AI generated pasta more easily thanks to the training.

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