Do this with submissions, too. Or at least put some indicator that it's AI generated.
Those low value complaints add nothing to the conversation, and the content didnt make it to the front page because it was bad. If the sole objection is "AI bad", keep it to yourself....its boring.
Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47122272
You have to scroll a few pages before the actual article is discussed.
"This was LLM generated" is likely to float to the top of an article. That's where the best comments about the article deserve to go, not an off topic comment. An AI label should be much less obtrusive.
Or you could collapse the one thread containing those comments.
1. Your guess is not always correct
2. Over time, AI content will get harder to guess until it is indistinguishable from human content
3. You're not helping anyone by posting "this is AI". Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but it's not helpful. It just adds to the noise.
Ideally there could be a label on the submission that states it's AI
A lot of people tried for #politics and that didn't work. I doubt you'll get #ai.
If anything should be banned, it's low-effort "This is AI" commentary. It adds absolute zero to the conversation.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
The number of comments I see complaining about "it's not this, it's that" and other "LLMisms" definitely frustrates me more than the original content.
Blogging, sharing blog posts, reading them, commenting on them--these are all acts of human communication. Farming any of these steps out to an LLM completely breaks down the social contract involved in participating in an online forum like this. What's the point?
It's the exact same effect that's playing out in many other areas where LLMs are encroaching: bypassing the "human effort" step has negative side effects that people who are only looking at the output are ignoring.
I actually find your opinion so infuriating that it's taking all my composure to not reply with something nastier. If you guys want to spend your time reading shitty LLM spam posts with shitty LLM comments, why don't you find another site to do it on instead of destroying this one.
A lot of blogging is essentially self-expression and that stuff won't be taken over by LLMs (it defeats the whole point). Other blogging is done with some kind of sales/promotional/brand purpose and the extent to which LLMs will dominate this will depend on how we as a society react to it (see the AI art battles) since if people react negatively to it it becomes counterproductive.
I understand where you're coming from. I've been posting complaints about LLM-written articles almost as long as I've been here. (My analysis is definitely more complex than a search for blacklisted Unicode characters or words.)
But I've let off on that, partly because I agree the guideline is meant to encompass that kind of criticism (same with my comments about initial page content not rendering with JavaScript, honestly) but largely because it just seems futile. It's better material for a blog post than HN comments (and would be less repetitive).
In its worst form I've seen now many times in other communities users claim submissions are AI for things that are provably not, merely to dismiss points of view the poster disagrees with by invoking calls to action from knee-jerk voters who have a disdain for generative AI. I've also seen it expressed by users I expect feel intimidated by artwork from established traditional artists.
Thankfully on HN it hasn't reached that level but I have seen some here for instance still think use of em dashes with no surrounding spaces is some definitive proof by pointing to a style guide, without realizing other established style guides have always stated to omit the spaces (eg: Chicago Manual of Style). This just leads to falsely confident assessments and more unnecessary comment chains responding to them.
What one hopes for with curated communities is that people have discriminating taste at the submission and voting level. In my own case I'm looking for an experience from those who have seen a lot of things and only finds particular things compelling and are eager to share them. Compared to some submission that reaches the front page of say popular programming language docs that just provide another basis for rehashed discussion (and cynically since the poster knows such generalized submissions do this and grow karma).
It is welcome though. Being on the front page regularly is evidence that people enjoy it or find it informative.
You may feel that others shouldn't be ALLOWED to enjoy it, but that's just your opinion and is almost always tangential to the actual topic.
Worse, you seem to believe that it needs to be labeled to help you identify it. Why? If its good enough that you need help to spot it then its obviously of sufficiently high quality.
What makes you think that it's people who get it to the front page anymore? Or that most people aren't simply fooled by technology designed to mimic humans?
> Worse, you seem to believe that it needs to be labeled to help you identify it. Why?
Why not? Would adding a label and providing filtering capabilities hurt anyone else's experience?
Some people object to this content based on principle, not on its quality, or on how closely it resembles content authored by humans.
Its's OK to have political opinions, even the ones that I disagree with. It's not OK to ruin every unrelated conversation ranting about them. Some folks around here have turned into that one uncle nobody likes inviting around to dinner anymore.
If a label would stop that I might be in favor of it. However, I'm certain it would instead be used to remove otherwise high quality content and ultimately reduce the utility of this place.
> Blogging, sharing blog posts, reading them, commenting on them--these are all acts of human communication.
Not anymore. Bots are now the majority of producers and consumers of all content on the internet. The social contract you mention has been broken for years, and this new technology has further cemented that.
Those of us who value communication with humans will have to find other platforms where content authorship is strictly regulated, or, at the very least, where tools are provided to somewhat reliably filter out machine-generated content. Or retreat from public spaces altogether.
FWIW I have very little hope that this issue will be addressed on HN, considering [1].
Incidentally I foresee similar issues to this training data pollution arising with LLM coding taking over software engineering--which it inevitably is going to continue to do, at least in the short term. If LLMs torpedo human engineering, who is going to create the new infrastructure (tools, frameworks, programming languages, etc) that LLMs are making such good use of today? It feels to me like we risk technological stagnation as our collective skills atrophy and the market value of our skills plummets. Kind of like airplane pilots forgetting how to debug planes or handle edge cases because they just rely on autopilot all the time.
As for "AI" companies, their only interest is increasing their valuation. Historically speaking, most companies prioritize short-term profits, but during a bull market the incentives are even more skewed towards it. So poisoning the well of training data is seen as a future problem for someone else to figure out, or not. In the meantime, carpe pecuniam.
> If LLMs torpedo human engineering, who is going to create the new infrastructure (tools, frameworks, programming languages, etc) that LLMs are making such good use of today?
LLMs, of course. :) I don't think the people building these tools haven given these topics any serious thought. Whatever concerns they claim to have, regarding safety and otherwise, are merely performative.
Formats, name collisions or back-button breakage are tangential to the content of the article. Being AI generated isn't. And it does add to the overall HN conversation by making it easier to focus on meaningful content and not AI generated text.
Basically, if the writer didn't do a good job checking and understanding the content we shouldn't bother to either.
Low value content is still content, written by a human being with a specific point. I would argue that LLM written content is even worse than that, because what value does it add when you or I can just ask the LLM itself for it? Its existence is solely that of regurgitation.