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Comment by electric_muse | Hacker News Reader

It’s a mixture. But yeah, today I pushed the boundary further.

A few days ago I flagged a piece someone else had written with ai. It has a specific cadence and some typical patterns. But many people seemed to buy it before I commented.

So I’ve been running a bit of an experiment lately where I write posts and LLM-ify them in varying amounts to see if an LLM actually produce something more upvotable and when people start to notice.

I started out just saying “rephrase this so it sounds tighter” and moved recently towards just jotting rough notes and saying “make an HN comment out of this” and then editing.

Today was the most AI-influenced set of posts, and people clearly noticed, so that’s definitely the threshold. Fascinating.

Check my post history to see the evolution. Using gpt-5.

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Please don't do this. HN is a community, not a laboratory. As a sibling commenter asked: [do you] consider whether or not the people you interact with here want to be experimented on?

People have been doing “experiments” with trying to sneak LLM-generated content onto HN since at least 2020. It's not new or clever. Yes, sometimes it will slip through our defences. After a while the community figures out. We give a collective groan and eyeroll, kill all the comments, ban the account if it’s egregious, and move on.

We have been asking the community not to publicly accuse commenters of posting generated comments, because sometimes the accusations are false and we think the negative consequences of false accusations outweigh the positive consequences of valid accusations.

But if we're going to ask that of the community, we also have to be very insistent that people do not exploit the community’s trust with experiments or stunts like this.

did you ever stop to consider whether or not the people you interact with here want to be experimented on, or whether or not it was right to betray the confidence of folks here and degrade the experience even further for people that come here to seek real human discourse?

not a criticism, I just want to know whether or not it ever crossed your mind.

Yeah I thought a lot about this.

I was super hesitant at first but thought that this might be the most accepting place of any. For the most part, my comments were getting tons of upvotes and replies and so I thought “wow this is furthering the conversation. I should keep going!”

I wasn’t outsourcing the entire process after all. I moved from asking it to rephrase things I wrote (I’m sure plenty of people use grammarly and the like) to asking it to give me some drafts with a specific opinion and viewpoint, and then I would edit to my liking.

Anyway, this totally blew up and now I regret it. But it was an interesting ride because it really opened some interesting questions about the fact that these were some of the comments I made that the community upvoted the most, which to me is a sign of contributing value.

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