Ask HN: Why submit your AI-written article? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why submit your AI-written article?

8 pointsblinkbat9 comments

genuinely, who do you think wants to read it? why do some of you wait to disclose that it's AI-written until the footer? what kind of internet are you interested in creating or experiencing, or do you just not even think about this?

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I have a simple heuristic: If it wasn’t worth your time to write it, it’s not worth my time to read it.

I think the people who do this fall into two categories:

1. The genuinely naive. This is new technology and the social expectations haven’t been figured out yet. Some people still think this is helpful / useful.

2. People who don’t care as long as they generate traffic to their site. AI-written articles are the new zero-effort promotion and SEO strategy.

Coming from the other side - you write down some idea you had, and then if you ask AI for a review/rewrite - it does all sorts of fixes and clarifications that make you think, “Oh, this is so much better. Oh, that grammar was really bad,” etc. And then you share the sloppified version because it looks like a better writer wrote your idea...

So it's very hard to realize the value of not passing AI on everything. As a reader, I hate it, of course.

I get it. But information is the backbone of this forum, so I personally don't stress about it. Maybe just a note that says "AI generated"? Perhaps soon people will just post "prompts" so we can look it up or generate it ourselves. AI is probably going to be around a long time. What solutions would you offer--specifically for HN?

put a big red banner up top on the blog -- "This post was written by AI!" and also tag your HN posts as such.

AI content is against the rules, so I'd say the solution is not post it.

>Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans.

> Perhaps soon people will just post "prompts" so we can look it up or generate it ourselves.

With AI being non-deterministic, this wouldn’t be very useful. Everyone in the comments would be trying to talk, all having read a different article, with sometimes wildly different content.

Posting a prompt also seems like the laziest way to post. Someone thought of an idea or a question, and instead of interrogating that idea, answering that question, or even trying to form an option… they ship the prompt off to the community and expect other people to run the prompt for them and nerd snipe them into doing all that mental work that they couldn’t be bothered with.

It’s not much different than telling people they should Google “Roman aqueducts” and talk about it.

The prompted response is far from the finished piece of writing. You'd probably want to share the full edit tree and include subsequent refinement prompts in the commit messages.

As a reader (not as someone who is posting the articles), the AI prose generally doesn't bother me. I'm usually more concerned about what the article says than how it says it.

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