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Comment by ddtaylor | Hacker News Reader

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I am not so paranoid, and I haven’t been working with AI, so my AI-dar is bad. But I keep reading technical writeups like this, then getting frustrated at the writing style or incomplete explanation – this one was more complete than most, though it was repetitive. Then I come read the HN comments, and I see that it was LLM-generated.

(To be fair, this one says so up top. Even so my eyes skipped over it.)

So I find the reaction helpful. I want to read posts in the best human style, but if the angry mob can’t motivate those, at least I can notice the pitchforks and torches, slap my forehead, and say, “Oh, that explains it.”

Ooh, the disclaimer is new, it wasn't there originally: https://web.archive.org/web/20260712212920/https://scrapfly....

Damn I literally came here to say "it's nice to see an actual disclaimer!"

And the other half of the community seems fixated on upvoting AI slop.

Sounds needlessly divisive.

Why not criticize the content instead of the source or medium?

The medium is the message, which is especially true when it exists as content-marketing for their anti-anti-scraping product for AI companies to use to improve their ability to emulate blogs, among other things.

Those are closer to real objective analysis. Much better than hand waving near LLMs and dismissing the content without articulating why. My guess is that a comment that directly says that doesn't get as much traction and depending on how straight-faced it was could be violating the guidelines on accusing someone of manipulating HN, etc.

I'm happy with how much I said in my original comment, too. It's mostly subtext.

Why's that bad? It's valuable to discuss whether a presentation should have been a blog post, a video, or a tech talk. The same logic applies to LLM text.

If people consistently describe LLM text as having low information density or irritating to read, perhaps there's something to it?

"The content is AI slop and not worth reading"

None of that is specific to the actual content. Might as well just say "I don't like it" which is also not objective analysis.

This article was about math functions, chrome, etc. If the author got something wrong, mention that, or if you don't like the pacing or how the content was divided into pieces, etc.

All of the issues with AI generated content can be explained further and in-depth because it has such a unique fingerprint in the pacing, verbosity, long-winded explanations, etc.. It also shows lack of effort. Just give me the prompt and the findings, I can write the article.

AI slop is a category and is categorically irritating to read, and not worth reading.

We all want signal and no noise, but complaining about whether or not it's noise is just more noise.

It's a signal to those who haven't read it yet that it isn't worth reading

My 8 year old nefew can come into random HN threads and post "this is trash yo" and that would also be the same signal I suppose.

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