Ask HN: How do you feel about the increasing amount of AI comments on HN? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you feel about the increasing amount of AI comments on HN?

3 pointsGooblebrai10 comments

There are AI comments now? I think ZERO is the appropriate amount of AI comments on this site but I'm just one person.

The AI comments that I've seen seem mostly about keeping the bubble inflated which just makes feel rage at stock bulls. I'm trying really hard not to dislike / truly hate stock bulls but they make it really hard. Everywhere they go, everything they do, they seem to degrade the world for those around them and make it much harder for everyone else to have good human experiences.

dang made a comment on an Ask HN whose topic was "Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?" a couple years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33945628) that said "They're already banned—HN has never allowed bots or generated comments. If we have to, we'll add that explicitly to https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, but I'd say it already follows from the rules that are in there." So it seems that submissions and posts that are clearly LLM generated without any content of value can, if I understand it correctly, be legitimately flagged as not being allowed the HN guidelines.

That's great to know. I'll start flagging them without feeling I'm being too harsh

I have been trying to take a break for the last few days, but in seeing this I am glad I am not the only one. Slashdot/Twitter-esque comments have seemed more frequent here from suspiciously new users (think last few months, but some post-2023). It could be an increase in the popular consciousness but this theory is chilling to think about. This place is one of the few on the internet left without some mediating algorithm, and with (mostly) polite and curious users. The moderation is good, but one's mind can drift to chaos in times of relative serenity...

How do you identify them?

by the em dashes /s

usually (no offense to yours) the join date and if they are making simple/ragebait comments I would presume. Didn't even cross my mind we'd have AI commenters here as the ones I've seen on Twitter are more egregious with comments that seemingly have de-formatted headings like "I'm unsure of the future of $THING [...] the takeaway:" no human I know says "the takeaway" in a 3 sentence long post

I have had people in the past accuse my comments of coming from AI. I get the impression that many of those accusers make such claims only when they encounter a challenge to a position they agree with and simultaneously lack the ability to write a more qualified defense.

I've taken to calling this the ad machina fallacy.

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