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Comment by frereubu | Hacker News Reader

I really wish there was an HN guideline that I could point to which says that you shouldn't complain about LLM writing, in the same way that's there's guidance on site annoyances:

"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."

LLM-written content is now too common to be interesting and complaining about it does not make it stop, it just derails comment sections. The reptitive complaints are getting as annoying as the LLM-written content!

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Why do you give up so easily? Human culture and the already low quality bar of writing should be allowed to fall even further because you are annoyed by those that want to protect it?

Why should your opinion be worth more than those who would like to retain a semblance of meaning in what we use to convey ideas? LLM writing is sheer trash. It comes off like a coke-addled car salesman who is making a pitch to VCs about his latest scientific discovery that will 200x their investment.

Poorly written LLM content is NOT a tangential annoyance. If this is too much, maybe you should simulate HN using

Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03442

> Why do you give up so easily?

Because it's like trying to hold back a tidal wave with a few sandbags.

Maybe people in their 20s and early 30s have enough energy for this and everything else that life demands, and I applaud their effort. But I have nothing left to give after this industry has already taken so much.

Wait isn’t there actually the opposite HN guideline? In that LLM generated content is not allowed here?

Comments are for humans but I don't think there is any reason for HN to police the submissions as a policy. If any article lacks credibility or merit to the extent that one can't even finish reading it then just ignore it and move on. Vote for something else. If "LLM aversion" is your rationale, so be it.

Personally, I usually check the comments before deciding to read something so I appreciate that others have saved me the trouble of reading this article in particular. If the author doesn't care enough to use human time to write it then I am not going to use human time to read it.

Wow. That's outsourcing a lot of thought, overriding your individual interpretation. I guess it's pretty common here.

This also applies to reading restaurant reviews before visiting. Or for that matter, reading any published book you outsource judgement to the publishing house (what books they pick up). Or, if you are easily convinced by jargon: Exploration has a non-zero opportunity cost.

This is HN where we discuss specific things such as articles, blog posts and tweets. There is often good insight in the comments but mostly it’s people talking about their opinions. I’d rather review the item myself first and then come for the extra nuggets that might be in the comments.

Likening this to restaurant reviews and publishing houses is disingenuous. One is nothing like this and the other is not helpful in that it’s such a generalization of influence as to be not useful. Everything is an influence doesn’t mean anything.

> overriding your individual interpretation

Presumptuous.

Ok, influencing

Or perhaps: correct.

LLM-generated content is not allowed in HN comments, but it doesn't mention submitting links to LLM-generated content. This is the only mention in the guidelines: "Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans."

But is it really? Low effort content might be the majority, but does that make it common enough to be a cosmetic annoyance like website styling? I'm not sure it does anyway because the content is the issue, not the styling or annoyances. A human written article with an idiot neon scrolling, blinking title would be fine. A plain text LLM article would not. One is objectively more annoying than the other.

If the "author" didn't feel like taking the time to write the text why should I take the time to read it? LLMs are great for summarizing, if you are going to slop 100% of a document make it a summary and save us all the time.

Fine, don't read it, but also don't comment about not having read it!

I really wish there was an HN guideline that banned AI generated content outright. Until then all we can do is flag slop.

Indeed.

I LOVE reading LLM content. I find that they tend to present things in a way that keeps my attention - something I have struggled with my whole life. I also use LLMs to assist with managing my own thoughts and helping make things coherent overall.

Sure, there is a LOT of slop out there, but the promotion of quality content is what crowd-sourced curation like HN tends towards. Much of the LLM assisted content here has a high signal to noise ratio, and is clearly a lot more involved than simply prompting "write an article on X" - despite what the haters say.

LLM content immediately distracts my attention to the fact that it is LLM content, and I focus immediately on that "meta" issue to the exclusion of whatever the content is.

And generally I find that the content isn't that high quality. You're getting someone who superficially appears like an expert and looks like they've thought through the problem, but if you know anything about the problem, you'll find that the articles are usually weak (Gell-Mann Amnesia).

> LLM content immediately distracts my attention to the fact that it is LLM content

That sounds like a you problem. Develop the mental discipline to reduce your response to negative thoughts and you'll lead a more content life.

you are inverse to basically everyone with an education, is the problem. LLM content is the polar opposite - it immediately drains anyone with even a modest amount of attention span or intelligence due to the way it phrases and does linguistic gymnastics for absolutely zero benefit to anyone. All in an attempt to look impressive, like humans used to do by using words they don't understand.

I get you are trying to make a point but LLM generated comments aren’t permitted on HN

My point has landed, or whatever an LLM would say.

This is a breathtakingly dumb idea

Thanks for the constructive feedback.

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