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Comment by layer8 | Hacker News Reader

If it can no longer be distinguished from real, why would it make people leave?

Problem at scale. Doesn't matter if someone is consciously able to identify individual bot accounts or comments. There can still be a strong general feeling that something is very wrong. Leading to more and more frustration and unhappiness.

"Popular" reddit posts and subreddits are a good example of this.

It might be hard to recognize an individual user or post as AI, but it's not hard to recognize the negative effect in aggregate

If AI can't be distinguished from real people, why would real people stay? If they want to talk to AI bots, they can do so without joining a "community".

It's a market for lemons [1]. The issue is that if AI slop can't be readily distinguished from real human content, the real human stuff will get less and less attention over time. With less attention, people lose interest in writing, and eventually abandon the community altogether. As genuine human writers leave the community, the concentration of AI slop increases, and readers begin to realize that there isn't anything of value left to read, so they depart as well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

As genuine human writers leave the community, the concentration of AI slop increases, and readers begin to realize that there isn't anything of value left to read, so they depart as well.

How will they realize if AI content is indistinguishable?

Because it’s not 100% indistinguishable. It’s practically indistinguishable for the purposes of moderation (or at least moderation at scale), but recognizable because it provides no value to the reader. It’s empty calories for readers in search of content with real substance.

Underrated take.

Yeah, the “blast radius” for social media AI slop is 80%-99% of humanity. There’s many times even I cannot make out if something is slop.

Hell, AI slop is going to be even better than reality for a portion of humanity, so it’s More likely they will stay online.

A sufficient number of people are satisfied with human slop. That the new slop comes from LLMs makes no difference.

In the same direction, if you can't cell the AI slop from the low-quality human output, does the source matter?

The problem is quantity. Has been for a while, the robots are only making it more obvious.

I used to deal with what you call human slop, and had many ways to identify and curtail it. However, with AI slop, I can’t distinguish between assisted posts, thoughtful posts, human posts, effort posts, or crap posts.

The direction matters. Yes Quantity is its own quality.

Communities are intended for human interaction - we encode far too much in the social affordances we use. Criticism, votes, lack of attention, all of it is feedback for people to learn and adapt from.

Bots are one way comms. Anyone trying to communicate with a bot is no longer having a conversation, they’re doing some interpretive dance.

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