Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48886741

by levkk • 10 days ago

1099 444 10 days ago

news.ycombinator.com

Should HN add the ability to flag articles as AI-generated? This doesn't have to act as a regular flag, i.e., it won't de-rank the article; it could just show up as an indicator, allowing others (like myself) who don't like reading AI-generated text, to skip it.

Open questions:

1. Why is the regular voting system not enough?

2. Should HN change in response to the gen AI era? It has been successful not changing fundamentals.

ranger_danger2• 10 days ago

Similar discussion on the other site: https://lobste.rs/s/ktew3s/who_does_anubis_actually_stop#c_c...

edoceo• 10 days ago

Maybe just adding down-vote to submissions would do?

jagged-chisel3• 10 days ago

We have “flag”

bakugo3• 10 days ago

As far as I understand, "flagging" is intended for things that break the guidelines. AI-generated content is explicitly banned, but only in comments, not submissions.

I think it would be great if AI-generated submissions were outright banned as they fundamentally break the balance of effort that HN was built upon, but as was already stated by another user, YC is heavily invested in AI so there's a conflict of interest there.

JimsonYang3• 10 days ago

Hn rarely allows people to downvote,only after you become an active member for many years

And im sure this was designed in order to encourage positive discussion

jagged-chisel3• 10 days ago

There is no longer a downvote on submissions.

ranger_danger2• 10 days ago

As for the ability to downvote comments, my understanding is that the only requirement is having at least 500 karma.

dawnerd3• 10 days ago

Considering YC invests in AI I doubt you’ll get anything of the sort. Too many people here also think you just have to give in and accept (abuser mentality IMO).

dang32• 10 days ago

I'd be curious if you'd read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48887149 and let me know (once I've finished editing the damn thing) how this changes, or doesn't change, your response.

TimorousBestie2• 10 days ago

It didn’t change my opinion, which matches OP’s.

dawnerd3• 10 days ago

I think that is really reasonable. I’ve always felt weird with flagging too because there’s no reason attached. Even if it’s not displayed in the UI, it would be nice to have something in the html if a link gets enough flags for ai. Would let people css filter them out.

xdennis• 10 days ago

Considering YC invests in AI I doubt you’ll get anything of the sort.

Conspiracy minded responses are low value, and yours is especially so considering HN bans AI comments.

rsoto27• 10 days ago

Investors want to see their investment grow. What is the conspiracy? HN also hosted a likely war criminal to talk about his experiencing killing children in gaza. You think these people have morals or ideals?

wartywhoa235• 9 days ago

Conspiracy minded responses are low value

Tagging an opinion different from yours with a 1967 CIA axiom is of even lower value.

JimsonYang3• 10 days ago

why is the regular voting system not enough

Voting systems can be gamed and as HN becomes bigger and bigger it'll start to attract unsavory audiences who have an agenda.

Arubis• 10 days ago

Setting aside that this is subjective, I think it’s safe to say that from the POV of most of this site’s target audiences, that “start” happened a long time ago. PG’s essay on submarine articles didn’t come out of nowhere, and he hasn’t been active here in…a decade? Ish?

stackghost2• 10 days ago

My original account dated to 2010 and even then he wasn't very active

CqtGLRGcukpy• 10 days ago

A problem I see is that what someone may consider to be AI-generated actually isn't. And the AI checkers aren't reliable enough to definitely enough say something is AI-generated.

bakugo3• 10 days ago

If something like this was implemented, the benefit of the doubt would have to be given in ambiguous cases, but I don't think it's that hard to tell most of the time.

The latest codemaxxed models all tend to write in very distinct, instantly recognizable ways unless carefully instructed otherwise (honestly a good thing if you want to avoid wasting time reading AI text). A great example is this submission that's currently #1 on the front page (which is also just a thinly veiled advertisement): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48884853

esjeon• 10 days ago

Yup, and calling out a human-written article as AI-generated would be a serious insult. AI-flagging would incur bigger damage to the community than just having AI-generated contents around.

jaredcwhite2• 10 days ago

I'm of the deepest conviction AI-generated text should not show up at all. Proving that however can be difficult (obvious LLM tells aside). Requiring evidence of authentic human authorship is also difficult, though increasingly I lean towards communities where that is a given for any legitimate shares.

stackghost2• 10 days ago

increasingly I lean towards communities where that is a given for any legitimate shares.

I have a hard time finding these communities

dawnerd3• 10 days ago

Mastodon, but the hard part is discovery for sure.

ldoughty• 10 days ago

What qualifies as AI generated? If a human writes it then has AI improve/fix it, does that count?

How do you tell which is the case?

If we don't allow AI help at all, is that perhaps discriminating against those who don't feel comfortable posting with imperfect English?

I agree in principle, but am concerned in implementation... I'm not sure we can be fair without high risk of discrimination

Edit: typo fix

Edit: or am I AI?! And making edits looks more legit.... (To be clear: I'm not, I play by rules)

jaredcwhite2• 9 days ago

This is starting to veer into "smoking bans in the restaurants is discrimination against smokers."

It's not discrimination to ban a practice which has been proven to be harmful. AI slop is harmful to readers, as well as being harmful to produce. Whatever issues one might raise, for instance someone who is not a native English speaker, we can find alternative solutions which are better for the environment and better for human minds.

simonreiff2• 10 days ago

The recent rule addition to the Guidelines says this: "Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans." And I think that covers comments, but I'd be happy to see it also cover articles that are blatantly and primarily if not exclusively AI-generated. But how much AI is permitted? For instance: I'm writing a blog post now. It's all mine. If I include an AI-generated cartoon at the end, just to illustrate something, but not to be the whole or primary point of the article, is that AI-generated? Would the rule be conservative in nature to the extent that mostly human but clearly also AI-enhanced might get flagged but it's in the discretion of the moderators? How would you propose enforcing as to articles (versus comments which are usually quite obvious and thankfully have pretty much stopped being AI-generated since the rule was implemented, for the most part)?

matheusmoreira8• 10 days ago

Asking questions like that nearly got me kicked out of Lobsters.

visarga2• 10 days ago

How about if you did part of your research with AI, then typed the text yourself?

simonreiff2• 10 days ago

That's a good question. My view is that AI-assisted research is an important and valid use, and getting human-written articles and papers is (I think) the whole point of this thread.

However, a lot of the academic or technical posts on this site have turned out to include AI hallucinations (a problem that is not just on HN, in fairness). If an article or paper contains nonexistent or obviously, blatantly wrong citations, then I feel very strongly that such content is disrespectful to the HN audience, certainly to me, because I've just wasted my time trying to take the author seriously only to discover that the argument was founded on a hallucination. In a sense, it doesn't matter to me whether the hallucination was due to AI or not -- if a person puts in bogus citations, AI-generated or otherwise, my view is that their article or paper fully deserves to be flagged so that we don't waste other people's time.

matheusmoreira8• 10 days ago

That will only further increase the stigma surrounding LLMs. On Lobsters it actually got to the point where I no longer felt welcome on the site, even though I don't use LLMs to generate articles. The constant "this is AI slop" commentary is noisy and tiresome as well.

tadfisher• 10 days ago

Why would you no longer feel welcome?

matheusmoreira8• 10 days ago

Saw three years worth of my work be classified as "slop" because a few months ago I subscribed to and started using Claude. Had someone describe me as a slop fetishist, as though I was some kind of exhibitionist. Got flagged so much I became the second most flagged user on the site according to their own statistics. Got told to delete my account by the website itself. Got directly told to leave by other users. I think the only reason I didn't is enough people messaged me privately to ask me to stay.

It got to the point I'm sitting on reviewed and tested patches for Mesa that I'm too ashamed to submit because of Claude's participation in their making.

mattoxic• 10 days ago

There absolutely needs to be stigma surrounding LLM generated work that is masquerading as creativity.

AI slop is AI slop.

Retr0id4• 10 days ago

Regarding 1, I think a) a sizeable fraction of voters are not able to recognize AI-generated text b) many who notice don't care, or are willing to overlook it if the premise is interesting enough. (The latter is true for me, on occasion)

Maybe we need a two-dimensional voting system: good/bad, ai/human. I think the second axis could cut down on meta-discussions over how much of the article was AI-generated.

DaiPlusPlus2• 10 days ago

many who notice don't care, or are willing to overlook it if the premise is interesting enough

I imagine the set of articles that are somehow both interesting-enough-to-read but not interesting-enough-to-write is smaller than you'd think.

Retr0id4• 10 days ago

In most cases the bar is not "is it worth reading" but "is it worth discussing"

andrewmutz2• 10 days ago

Why do we need anything more than good/bad?

If there is a great post on a topic and the author used AI when generating it, what’s so bad about that?

Retr0id4• 10 days ago

Different people weight the slop factor differently, which is the main source of pain at the moment. (For example, another top-level comment in this thread suggests banning AI-generated content outright)

hallman76• 10 days ago

a) a sizeable fraction of voters are not able to recognize AI-generated text b) many who notice don't care, or are willing to overlook it if the premise is interesting enough.

agreed.

For me, the issue I have is that a vocal group seems to despise AI-edited content and they can't manage to take their disgust eleswhere.

AI-editing is another tool, just like spellcheck.

ryandrake2• 10 days ago

If what people here say is right, and AI usage online is growing and accelerating, then by the end of the year, the vast, vast majority articles posted to the internet (and linked by HN readers) are going to be AI slop, at which point it is not going to matter. "This article is AI" is going to add about as much insight to the conversation as "The author used a spell checker."

archagon9• 10 days ago

A good link aggregator should strive to select the <1% of articles that are actually high quality. Who cares what “everyone” is doing?

kgwxd• 10 days ago

Sounds like a good job for AI. Why should humans have to waste their time on it? Accounts that post any should just get banned and deleted.

user3939382• 10 days ago

Great so I can use a CSS rule to hide anything with the flag.

jeremyjh2• 10 days ago

The regular voting system is not enough because posts can't be downvoted and for some reason many people are not bothered by the notion of reading something no one bothered to write.

The issue is complicated by the fact that there can be substantial effort invested in a process outside of the writing itself - and so AI written does not guarantee that the content will not valuable. But I'm inclined to punish it anyway to establish a norm of valuing genuine human communication. I think this norm has always been present but we didn't know until we'd really explored the alternatives.

I spend a LOT of time reading AI generated content because I use AI a lot for various purposes - maybe I'm more sensitive to its voice than some. AI voice always bothers me and its been getting more annoying the more I notice it, but there is a huge difference in reading responses to my own prompts and in reading the response to a prompt I haven't seen, when I don't know how many revisions there were, when I don't know if a human mind reviewed it at all before clicking send.

It becomes an unacceptable distraction because I don't know if I'm investing more time in the content than the author did, when in normal written communication the author would be putting in at least 5x the work.

visarga2• 10 days ago

I get annoyed when I see AI telltale signs too, but for example in my case I type 10x more than the final piece, is it really AI generated or just reworded? I don't use AI to fix my comments, just when I want to format article size pieces I post on my blog.

jeremyjh2• 10 days ago

People keep asking this but I don't see how this is even a consideration - it isn't going to have AI voice if AI didn't write it. To some extent humans have picked up some of these tells but part of the writing process involves reading your own work, noticing things that are awkward, and rewriting them. If you aren't investing in the writing process even that much, I don't really want to read it anyway.

My entire position: I'm not interested in reading text that sounds like it was written by AI.

mattas• 10 days ago

Might be more appropriate to add a "not AI" flag at this point.

wxw• 10 days ago

+1, I would love to stop reading AI slop.

deadbabe2• 10 days ago

This makes sense if AI articles are bad or low quality, but what if one day, the AI generated content is actually good? As good or even better than what any human creates?

Is it purely just a "human supremacist" desire that fuels the motivation to ban or block such articles?

unsungNovelty• 10 days ago

Imagine you writing in your style. Now imagine 1000s of you writing. That's LLM. Just like you don't like eating the same thing everyday, it gets boring very easy. It irritates even more easily.

It's not about the end output. End output is already good IMO. Now, the sentiment is "if you don't give a damn about writing what's on your mind, why should we give a damn about reading it?"

It doesn't matter how bad your writing is. You have a flavour to it. You write and make it better.

Not to mention, everytime I write something, my thoughts get clearer and clearer. Vibing an article kills this process. It's about the unknown unknowns. You don't even know what you don't know until you start writing. LLM doesn't help you here. It might help you get some likes.

tom_2• 10 days ago

A problem for us to deal with when we encounter it.

deadbabe2• 9 days ago

In a few months

minimaxir14• 10 days ago

This is something that works better on paper in practice. Namely, there are a hell of a lot of false positives of AI use which frequently causes shitstorms on social media where someone says "AI?" in bad faith and now the OP has to defend themselves and in the case of writing a blog post there aren't as concrete ways to defend yourself. (no, demanding the edit history of the post is not reasonable)

Hacker News adopting such a feature would likely do more harm than good.

Joel_Mckay4• 10 days ago

uBlock Origin users already filter a large portion of "AI" slop sites. Saves a lot of time when searching for something specific. =3

https://github.com/alvi-se/ai-ublock-blacklist

https://github.com/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist

https://github.com/Stevoisiak/Stevos-AI-Blocklist/

minimaxir14• 10 days ago

Just from looking at the sites in the BlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist blocklist, it blocks anything tangent to AI such as Hugging Face and other model developers like Mistral/Z.ai, not sites that actually post AI slop.

That's a good example of the exact problem with such a broad stroke rule.

Aachen8• 10 days ago

"bad faith"? As in, that the person posts the accusation while actually believing the opposite? I would think the far, far more common reason for posting that incorrectly is that they legitimately thought it was slop. Of course such low-effort wrongful accusations are bad to post for multiple reasons, but I don't think people frequently post such things falsely

minimaxir14• 9 days ago

they legitimately thought it was slop

The issue is that label has expanded to anything that's weird/unusual, and the consequences of being accused of AI are far more severe than the consequences of a false accusation so people do it frequently. It is absolutely a vector for harrassment/trolling.

One subreddit I follow now bans people if they make an accusation of AI-generation that's weak/disproven, which is a rule I like.

152334H2• 10 days ago

Most parsimonious explanation IMV: site staff can't see most AI slop. Reasons unimportant, but moderation systems are guaranteed to break down when the moderators themselves have poor classification ability.

A simple beneficial step that would lead to modest improvements and little downside: partner with Pangram. Either adding it as an automated spam filter, or by simply attaching the detection % to all posts.

dang32• 10 days ago

We don't allow genai text on HN itself - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079. How to enforce it is a separate question, of course, but the rule exists.

We don't have a similar rule yet about article content but my sense is that the community mostly doesn't want to read it—or, to put it more conservatively, discounts it. This is why we see so many "just show me the prompt" responses, along with others like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/genai-pushback. I built that list so I have something to send to users who email about why their genai articles got flagged.

It's a fascinating arms race right now: the AIs are training on the humans but the human hivemind is also training on the AIs. Readers are developing allergic sensitivities to language that sounds like an LLM produced it. The AIs will adapt to this, but the humans will adapt in turn. Where it ends up is anyone's guess.

For the present, there is an emerging class distinction between writing (and writers) that use genai vs. writing that does not. As soon as the "this sounds like an LLM" allergy kicks in, the writing instantly gets relegated to a low-status bucket in the reader's mind. That doesn't mean it won't still get looked at - but it is now under a stigma.

(I was rather pleased with the originality of this until I remembered pg had come up with "writes and write-nots" in https://paulgraham.com/writes.html. Oh well, it's the point that matters.)

This has the happy flipside that anyone who would like readers to classify their article as high-status rather than low-status can apply the judo move of simply writing it themselves.

Now I need to add the disclaimer that none of this is a dismissal of LLM technology per se. We rely on it heavily, and there's no question that it's useful. The question is how to use it (pg again: https://x.com/paulg/status/2058871512451412457) and whether one should use it on writing that one publishes to other humans.

To turn to OP's questions:

Should HN add the ability to flag articles as AI-generated? [...] it could just show up as an indicator

Flagging-as-just-an-indicator would be tagging, which we've always resisted adding to HN, but I wouldn't rule it out.

What I do think we'll (finally) add is a "please give a reason why you flagged this post" step, and "because I think it's genai" will be one choice among several (spam, offtopic, mean, etc.)

Why is the regular voting system not enough?

The regular voting system is never enough. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Should HN change in response to the gen AI era?

To this I am tempted to reply with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48887149 in homage to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742902.

avaer• 10 days ago

I hope HN doesn't get into moderating the politics of articles.

I can see a grim future (present?) where "AI generated" turns into a slur, warranted or otherwise, in a world where the difference between human trained to talk like an AI and AI masquerading as human becomes increasingly difficult to discern, and some hidden cabal passes judgement.

That is wholly different from taking a stance on HN being a place for humans to comment on articles.

matheusmoreira8• 10 days ago

You've accurately described the current state of Lobsters.

asdff10• 10 days ago

Why would humans ever be trained to talk like an AI? If they are working in some capacity where there is strong incentive to write llm-slop adjacent content, might as well use the llm slop generator.

satisfice3• 10 days ago

“AI generated” is already a slur.

fzeroracer• 10 days ago

'humans trained to talk like an AI' is just LinkedIn and I would hope that the last thing anyone wants is for HN to become the utter void that is LinkedIn posts.

MisterSandman• 10 days ago

Hacker News is already in the business of policing articles though. This is a curated list of articles that people share, and a lot of unrelated articles are automatically deleted or just downvoted out of existence. This isnt Reddit.

It’s okay to have an opinionated website. Not every corner of the internet needs to be a bastion of free speech

sph8• 10 days ago

Honest question, why would it be a grim future for people to be allergic to what, in 99% of the cases, is effortless slop?

Personally that is the future I hope to see. Hence my continuous protestations at the lazy excuses for articles that get posted these days, and the lazier excuses given by their authors for avoiding using their brain.

bryanrasmussen• 10 days ago

in a world where the difference between human trained to talk like an AI and AI masquerading as human

I was once accused of using AI for writing in the voice of a depressed character because the character had a certain emotional detachment that to the person lodging the accusation indicated AI.

In short it is not just specific phrasing or words but also aesthetic effects that mean one is AI nowadays.

freehorse7• 10 days ago

AI has a distinct, low-quality and unnecessarily sensational writing style, which signals low effort post first of all. If you use AI and you put the effort to make it not look like AI it means that at least you put some effort into it.

I am not sure how the future may be, but the direction of AIs has been to solidify their distinct writing style rather than assimilate to humans. So we can start addressing what we are dealing with now. I doubt HN tagging/flagging can put enough pressure to affect how llms will evolve anyway in the future, while the llm speech becomes more and more ubiquitous and unhinged.

jorvi2• 10 days ago

The times I've pointed point out pretty blatant AI comments, I get nuked with downvotes. So often that I've stopped pointing them out.

Before you say I'm just falsely calling them out, it's typical ChatGPT style of either very amicable or Nobel Laureate tone, lots of formatting, with a couple of paragraphs and then a clever one-line punchline at the end. If you look at those commenters their history, it's all like that. Either generated or assisted. For older accounts you can see the steep increase of it around 2025ish.

Seems like the HN crowd absolutely adores AI comments and the rule banning them is (sadly) unnecessary. Or at least not what 'the people' want.

ryandrake2• 10 days ago

IMO posting "This article is AI" does not add anything to the conversation.

The HN guidelines[1] include:

    Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage.

and

    Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken.

I'd argue pointing out that you think an article is AI is very similar in value to pointing out any of the above. None of us like AI slop. But I wouldn't be surprised if, by the end of 2026, 90-95% of articles posted online are AI slop. Pointing it out is useless. As useless as pointing out that the article breaks the scrollbar (which happens often) or that the article is formatted badly or has poor text contrast, or that an article is Chinese propaganda. Probably true, but posting about it adds nothing to the discussion, and is not allowed on HN.

All we really need is to add "Don't complain that an article is AI" to the guidelines.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

minimaxir14• 10 days ago

Out of curiosity I looked through your post history to find an example of a time you got downvoted for calling out AI comments. The first one I could find was 3 months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47493096), where you got downvoted for calling out an AI comment...to a comment that had zero common signs of AI writing.

The OP then replied:

Not AI. Not sure how I feel getting my writing style called out like that though :D

jdw64• 10 days ago

to be honest, I hope you'll also recognize that non-native English speakers have limited vocabulary and phrasing when participating in HN.

aabhay2• 10 days ago

Community generated tags seems like the obvious solution to all of this. You could easily give a setting to turn them off, breaks no existing systems, and allows for a broad emergent taxonomy. Only surface tags above X community upvotes except to superusers who are allowed to propose tags.

But then again, there’s always reddit :)

tptacek3• 10 days ago

It breaks a central goal of HN, which is a non-siloed experience where the entire community is exposed to the same feed.

clickety_clack• 10 days ago

The tricky thing about tags is that we get a tag for genai this year, what about next year’s thing and the year after that? We’d end up with a list of tags attached haphazardly all over the place. Flagging with a box to add a reason sounds like an excellent idea.

Terr_• 10 days ago

I dunno, certainly some tags are justified, such as distinguishing submissions which are publicly-readable versus ones which require an account--or worse, payment.

That's not a value-judgement of the true content of an article or piece of media, but a fairly objective facet which impacts the HN participant's experience.

It's kind of like how, back in the day, people really wanted to know the filesize of something before they clicked, to avoid a blind-investment of their dial-up bandwidth for indeterminate minutes of waiting (and opportunity-cost of other things not downloaded) that might be more than they really wanted for whatever-it-was.

cr125rider• 10 days ago

Great response. Thanks for weighing in and all the moderation you do!

152334H2• 10 days ago

lots of things happening in this post

1st: the presumption that AI generated text is actually unsuccessful, rather than proliferating broadly unchallenged today

2nd: the disposition that negative attitudes towards AI text are unjustified discrirmination, rather than working as a strong latent predictor of low-effort content

3rd: the assumption that human writing is reliably doled benefits, rather than some poor proxy of it (winning the social contest for claiming authenticity)

Operationally, only a very small minority of humans actually successfully identify AI generated text at rates ≥ Pangram. People discriminate against the label of "AI", but mostly fail to vote accurately. It's not uncommon to see bots abusing this gap for their own success -- accusing humans, sympathizing with generated profiles... FUD environment where people routinely get away with dismissing true accusations.

For someone who is mediocre at detection, this would structurally feel like an unhinged, unjustified bias: look at all these good posts, these honest people, getting undermined by discrimination...

dang32• 10 days ago

Interesting points! though I don't follow them all.

1st: the presumption that AI generated text is actually unsuccessful, rather than proliferating broadly unchallenged today

I can only talk about HN. If you think this is proliferating broadly on HN itself, I'd like to see such links. Assuming it's "broadly", they should be easy to find.

2nd: the disposition that negative attitudes towards AI text are unjustified discrirmination, rather than working as a strong latent predictor of low-effort content

I don't understand this bit.

3rd: the assumption that human writing is reliably doled benefits, rather than some poor proxy of it (winning the social contest for claiming authenticity)

Sorry, but I don't understand this either.

only a very small minority of humans actually successfully identify AI generated text at rates ≥ Pangram.

That's not what we seem to be seeing. I do agree that there's a wide spectrum and a lot of wrong guesses.

It's not uncommon to see bots abusing this gap for their own success

I'd like to see specific links of this on HN itself. Again, if it's not uncommon, those should be easy to find.

bakugo3• 10 days ago

The AIs will adapt to this

I don't think this is true, at least not right now, and in a way I'm actually thankful for it.

The frantic rush to chase the only potentially profitable use case for LLMs found so far (writing code) and the resulting focus on coding RLHF means models are actively becoming worse at sounding like humans.

This is my favorite example, and it's already relatively outdated: https://progress.openai.com/?prompt=10

tptacek3• 10 days ago

A fixed dropdown list of flag reasons would be a very good change, I think, because it would somewhat counteract strategic flagging of stories as a downvote. I think you'd want to keep the list pretty tight, because it seems like a huge source of meta drama.

brudgers2• 10 days ago

The problem with fixed lists is that what is in the spirit of HN evolves.

Single page info-graphics and Awesome-Lists come to mind.

Hell, one or more of PG’s books has one or more baysian generated texts presented as poems.

bhaney• 10 days ago

What I do think we'll (finally) add is a "please give a reason why you flagged this post" step, and "because I think it's genai" will be one choice among several

Does that mean that an article being AI-generated is a flaggable offense? Should we be flagging suspected AI-generated articles already, or should we wait for the flagging system to support reasons first?

dang32• 10 days ago

Damn you people for asking good questions that go straight to the fuzzy areas!

I don't know for sure yet. But you're right that that would follow from what I said.

What I do know is that users should flag articles that they think don't belong on HN. But this should rely on their reading of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not just be based on a like/dislike reaction. That is, users should flag articles that they think break the site guidelines, not just ones they dislike.

bigcityslider• 10 days ago

If AI-generated comments are disallowed, why are AI-generated articles allowed? Seems like they have the same issues.

philipswood• 10 days ago

I can live with well-composed articles that have a huge chunk of AI in their generation.

Stuff interesting enough to get upvoted (i.e. not slop), but I'm so irritated and triggered by pointless, human, comment threads moaning about "this is AI generated".

dang32• 10 days ago

It's a fair question and I don't have a good answer yet, other than to say that comment content and article content are two very different spheres.

brudgers2• 10 days ago

What I do think we'll (finally) add is a "please give a reason why you flagged this post" step

Do you believe adding friction to flagging will reduce the quantity of low quality articles?

Or is the flagging of high quality articles a bigger and more pressing problem?

Or is the problem simply too-many-damn-flags?

Just curious.

dang32• 10 days ago

Another good question I don't know the answer to! Which is probably why we haven't done it yet.

I guess the idea is that if lots of people flag a comment for the "genai" reason then we can treat that a more precise community signal than "flagged in general". But this argument seems weaker to me as soon as I write it out.

abnercoimbre2• 10 days ago

This has the happy flipside that anyone who would like readers to classify their article as high-status rather than low-status can apply the judo move of simply writing it themselves.

I really really hope more people take up pen and paper! My last blog post [0] came with proof-of-work attached.

[0] https://abner.page/post/are-we-harold-bloom/

bluefirebrand5• 10 days ago

I was just thinking about this, the proof of work angle. Maybe written blogs need to come with recordings of the process now too, otherwise they will be suspicious.

What a goofy situation to imagine. I hope we can figure out a way though. I personally have no interest in reading anything spat out by an LLM, so if anything can be used to prove that an author wrote something themselves, I'm interested

gruez2• 9 days ago

proof-of-work attached.

Doesn't seem too hard to fake now, now that AI can generate convincing videos. Failing that, it's definitely within the realm of possibility for AI to create fake pages for a notebook, then generate a blender/unreal engine project to render it.

1bpp• 10 days ago

I would love to see a 'flag as AI' coupled with a profile setting to hide posts that have had a certain number of AI flags. Allow people who don't want to see likely AI content to filter it silently.

slg2• 10 days ago

This is why we see so many "just show me the prompt" responses, along with others like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/genai-pushback.

This is totally tangential to your point, but what is that page? It's not your usual link to an algolia search. Is this already part of some sort of manual tagging system? Clicking on the first one, these comments don't seem to be moderated. Are you using these complaints to help detect AI generated content? I think the existence of that page just leaves me confused on whether you actually want people to comment like this or not.

mh-9• 10 days ago

It's just a collection of comments pushing back on LLM-generated prose. 'dang sends it in replies to emails that ask him why their comments were flagged when that's the reason. He's offering examples of the broad community sentiment on the matter, to the commenter who was flagged.

dang32• 10 days ago

It's just a list of posts that we tagged manually and then defined a URL endpoint for. We do that sometimes, but rarely enough that I can understand the confusion.

Keep in mind that we have a REPL over here and can make any link do anything!

dcow• 10 days ago

My only thought is that "good" genai authors/articles will easily get through the filter while "generic" ones will fail. So the outcome won't be all genai articles getting flagged (unless people self-report), just the low quality ones. I'm guessing that's okay and I'm one of those people who discounts genai writing the second I read one of the tells, so the flag would save me time.

Ultimately though this is the same debate as "should we allow genai code in codebases". High quality code lands naturally while slop is slop. Not much value in banning AI outright--the desire is predominantly to ban the slop.

Maybe the tag should be [slop] rather than [genai]...

dang32• 10 days ago

There have definitely been cases of "good" genai articles that led to quite good HN threads. (Don't ask me for links - alas but my sandblasted memory doesn't retain anything.)

I guess my response to that is we want the most interesting threads.

ryukoposting2• 10 days ago

This is why we see so many "just show me the prompt" responses, along with others like this

Many are quite a bit more subtle, like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48844062

The more subversive undercurrent is interesting to me. People intentionally fucking with someone's bot, burning tokens for the lulz.

Barbing3• 10 days ago

If someone were so dumb they didn’t understand the method used in the link… mind explaining?

grayclhn5• 10 days ago

I think classifying it as an allergy or a status thing is a little too glib. I’ve read and reviewed, conservatively, hundreds of AI generated documents for work, and “written”/commissioned a bunch too. My biggest issue is that it’s impossible to engage with and give feedback on an AI written document, because it’s impossible to know whether misconceptions or gaps are because the author doesn’t understand the material deeply enough or the author does but the AI doesn’t and the author’s not proofreading carefully enough. Or if a surprising idea is raised — is it the authors insight, can they elaborate on it, where did it come from, etc?

Hackernews isn’t work, obviously, but “it’s impossible to engage deeper with the material because the author doesn’t really exist” is sort of a problem for a discussion site. If the human coauthor puts in enough work, they can make sure the doc really reflects their views and their understanding, but in my experience that’s much less common.

dang32• 10 days ago

That's interesting, thank you! My only pushback is that my bit about "allergy" and "status" is about the audience response here, whereas you seem to be talking on a somewhat different level.

woolion• 10 days ago

My biggest issue is that it’s impossible to engage with and give feedback on an AI written document, because it’s impossible to know whether misconceptions or gaps are because the author doesn’t understand the material deeply enough or the author does but the AI doesn’t and the author’s not proofreading carefully enough.

FWIW, same problem with PRs or PoC that I have to work on; now my first question is, "did you know about his behaviour?". The first step, getting a decent spec, is delayed to after a first draft implementation is already pushed...

tripzilch4• 10 days ago

This exactly. Whenever someone shows me their (or someone else's) AI-assisted-coded (vibe coded) thing, I can only ever engage with it on a very superficial level, saying "oh cool".

You can't have a discussion about it, how it was done, because for 80% of cases it's "the AI did it".

I don't think this is that interesting or useful for HN, because indeed it's a discussion site.

It would be different if the vibe coded thing didn't come as a "look what it made and its vibe written README" but instead as a human written blog article about "how I made this thing using AI, what models, prompts and harnesses, how the experience was etc etc etc" --- again that would be something interesting to have a discussion about.

But otherwise what is there to say except "yeah cool that's cool that the AI made you that thing"

it’s impossible to know whether misconceptions or gaps are because the author doesn’t understand the material deeply enough or the author does but the AI doesn’t and the author’s not proofreading carefully enough. Or if a surprising idea is raised — is it the authors insight, can they elaborate on it, where did it come from, etc?

tlb• 10 days ago

You can engage with an AI-written document! Simply paste the document into the AI (same or different as the AI that wrote it) and ask questions. You can get an answer in seconds compared to an hour (if it's a blog post by an HN reader), days (if it's a professional blogger), or never (if it's by a journalist).

Perhaps AI-written articles should include the prompt as hidden text on the page. Or include a link with the prompt embedded, that causes the AI to spit out the same article that you could then ask questions about.

thevinter• 9 days ago

My biggest issue is that it’s impossible to engage with and give feedback on an AI written document

Thanks for giving shape to a general annoyance, in my case with code, that I only recently started noticing.

When discussing code with my colleagues, especially with those that I do not know particularly well, I often relied on the quality of the code they produced to modulate how technical the conversation ought to be be.

Now, instead, I often see very complex code from people that I know wouldn't have been able to produce it themselves, and I have no clue how to engage with it, how to review it with them, how detailed can my comments be etc.

It's pretty annoying.

baubino• 9 days ago

it’s impossible to know whether misconceptions or gaps are because the author doesn’t understand the material deeply enough or the author does but the AI doesn’t and the author’s not proofreading carefully enough

It doesn’t matter. The human responsible for the written piece is … responsible for the written piece. If someone is willing to use AI to supplement their own intellect and/or writing abilities, then they need to take ownership of the mistakes, misconceptions, etc., that come along with that, the same as an author who does all the work themselves. The problem you’ve identified here is that the human responsible for the writing is not fully taking responsibility for the writing.

hoppp• 11 hours ago

Status thing sounds correct because humans have a subconscious filter that checks what is the status of the person emitting the information to evaluate if it should be accepted or not.

This is well researched in both neuroscience and cognitive psychology.

But you are correct that it's also a feedback issue.

I don't read AI articles because if the writer didn't spend mental energy on it then why should I.

ludicrousdispla2• 10 days ago

I don't rely on LLMs and I don't find them useful, hence I don't use LLMs and everything about them deserves to be questioned.

dang32• 10 days ago

LLMs are unquestionably useful. The number of things I've used them to accomplish on HN—things that I've wanted to do for over a decade—is mind-blowing. Performance optimizations, log file anlaysis, tracking down race conditions—it's quite incredible.

Springtime2• 10 days ago

The current picture is that there is an emerging class distinction between writing (and writers) that use genai vs. writing that does not. As soon as the "this sounds like an LLM" allergy kicks in, the writing instantly gets relegated to a low-status bucket in the reader's mind.

It's not a purity test, it's as the author is communicating they don't care whether the reader has any signals of what is accurate vs inaccurate information, which puts the burden of investigating how much is accurate on the reader at every step when there's some minimum expectation that should be an author's role (outside of topics where there is some expectation of ulterior motives/biases and one would naturally engage more critically minded).

When people complain here it's more often than not when an article has no disclaimer about AI use or what has been human-reviewed, so the burden again falls on the reader who is now even more skeptical. That is more to ask of a reader than when it's coming from say a known expert and the reader is receptive to engage and learn.

That's the reason tired cliches and turns of phrase (overused by LLMs) have become a heuristic for whether to pay attention, because it's a sign that there's some unknown quantity of of the article that hasn't had human review and it's easier to put in the bucket of 'maybe worthwhile but would need a fully human analysis of this' or just outright rejection (as we've seen from comments).

Edit: I see a sibling comment has raised the same observation.

dang32• 10 days ago

I'm afraid I don't understand this - can I ask what was the sibling comment? Maybe that will help me triangulate.

xeyownt2• 10 days ago

I find PG's article so dismissive.

I know several people that have difficulty writing but are still f*cking smart. So what, they should refrain from using AI to help them because the AI police says so?

But yeah, let's continue classifying people based on their outer qualities and habits... History showed us were this leads us to.

And here an em dash -- to freak out the AI police.

dang32• 10 days ago

I agree with your second paragraph - in fact I posted something pretty sympatico a couple hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48887812. But I have such a different reaction to pg's article that I can't fathom why you say that.

dwroberts• 10 days ago

I know several people that have difficulty writing but are still f*cking smart. So what, they should refrain from using AI to help them because the AI police says so?

Do what other people do when they cannot do something: don’t do it?

I can’t draw or do art and I don’t have an AI generate art for me so I can LARP as an artist.

You can just… not do things? Nobody is putting a gun to your head to make you write blog posts and post them on HN.

freehorse7• 10 days ago

A judgement on the content (product of writing) is not a judgement on people. I dont care if a person uses LLMs in their life – heck, I myself do. But I care if I want to spend my time reading an LLM-written/assisted article or not.

PS that's not an em-dash – this is.

Debugreality2• 10 days ago

I strongly agree. Humanity only benefits from having more smart ideas published.

Better is simply don't publish slop. If someone spends time refining and editing their idea with AI assistance and are happy with the quality of the finished product then I say go for it.

It's not like all human writers produce content that is worth reading.

Planktonne• 9 days ago

I know several people that have difficulty writing but are still f*cking smart. So what, they should refrain from using AI to help them because the AI police says so?

The issue is that AI doesn't actually help them; it corrects grammar and removes voice. If you're trying to sound more professional/convincing/engaging, AI usage undermines that.

djeastm• 9 days ago

They should refrain from using AI if it turns more people off to their ideas than it turns people on to them. There's no need to invent "AI police" as a big baddie here.

A strategy for people who feel they can't write is to just keep it short and sweet. Intelligence is such a potent force. It shines through.

What humans want most is to hear the voices of other humans.

Leynos2• 10 days ago

I'd prefer a tag to the mounds of "this looks like it is AI generated, I can tell from the pixels and from having seen quite a few AIs in my time" comments. That way the people who reject AI content can filter it out rather than having to argue about it in the comments.

neya• 10 days ago

I think the problem space needs to be divided into two - AI generated articles (which the OP's question is about) and AI generated content/comments. The articles - honestly, normal flagging just works. If the content and the information in it is worthwhile, I don't think people would flag it. Isn't this the whole point of flagging?

However, the second part of the problem - the AI comments, that's really what kills the discussion and eventually the community. If I have trust issues that I'm talking to a bot but not a real user, I am not going to engage further. I might or might not flag the account, but at some point, I'm going to be tired of reporting if everywhere around me it's just bots pretending to be humans. I think this is the more serious problem that needs focus.

In my experience, sloppy AI content almost always, sometime instantly even gets flagged out.

keepamovin• 10 days ago

Let's make flags public, too. Flagged_by link.

Congratulations on your recursive ascension, too

dang32• 9 days ago

That would just supply ammunition to the kind of users who like to go after other users. We want to discourage that, not encourage it.

Also, votes and flags are personal, even intimate data. I can't imagine publishing it.

jillesvangurp• 10 days ago

Sensible policy. I think with mainstream news publications now obviously using LLMs in their day to day workflows, it's going to be hard to take a purist stance here. Some do this more responsibly than others. But I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing if it is done responsibly. It's only a problem if it is done poorly.

Poor writing is not a new thing, of course. Most of the moderation mechanisms that it uses were perfected a quarter century ago when sites like Slashdot were popular as a defense mechanism against bad user behavior. Bad user behavior impacts commenting, article submissions, and moderating itself. While bad users now have AI to abuse, the problem of a large volume of low quality content is is largely the same. The moderation mechanisms end up targeting the problem at the source: identifying good and bad users. So, the same amount of bad users generating a lot more garbage isn't that big of a deal. Getting good karma still is a lot of work and it makes identifying all the garbage created by users without that relatively straightforward.

Using LLMs to tag, flag and filter content might not be a bad thing to experiment with. There are a lot of low quality AI generated opinion pieces that somehow make it to the front page. Same for political and controversial stuff, which of course is against the HN guidelines for content. Auto flagging things that obviously violate guidelines should not be that hard. It's just a matter of having good guard rails. @dang might actually already be doing that. I know I would be if staying on top of piles of generated garbage was part of my job description. It might also be done to give good content a little boost.

The new articles section has a very low signal to noise ratio currently and the window for good content to make it past that is very short. Often articles on the front page will have many duplicate submissions that never made it past that. IMHO duplicate submissions should just count as upvotes on the original. Auto de-duplicating based on canonical URL should not be that hard.

jcgl• 9 days ago

Poor writing is not a new thing, of course. Most of the moderation mechanisms that it uses were perfected a quarter century ago when sites like Slashdot were popular as a defense mechanism against bad user behavior. Bad user behavior impacts commenting, article submissions, and moderating itself. While bad users now have AI to abuse, the problem of a large volume of low quality content is is largely the same.

I respectfully disagree on almost all counts (beyond poor writing not being new, of course!).

Moderation mechanisms have not been perfected. They're certainly not perfect, and, given that, I don't know what would make one call them perfected. Humans have probably gotten more accustomed to being moderated, but it'd take a lot to convince me that we have even reached a decent place for moderation at moderate scale, let alone something that is good-to-perfect.

Most importantly, the problem of low quality content is now not the same. Magnitudes matter, and a difference in degree eventually becomes a difference in kind. LLMs have escalated the problem of garbage content beyond what would've previously been conceivable.

To illustrate: How do you dispose of several trash bags at once? Take them to the trash can. How do you dispose of several tens of trash bags at once? Need to rent a dumpster.

Or a classic: If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem.

Bringing it back to written content: doing human-driven moderation on hundreds of submissions a day is tractable with (idk) a couple of people. For thousands or tens of thousands? Intractable. And bear in mind that human-driven moderation is one of the things that keeps HN a better place on the net than many (most) others.

sixhobbits• 10 days ago

We already have tags for PDF and Video so I could definitely see one for [LLM] working!

Generally I'd appreciate a top level comment from the submitter saying this is LLM generated but I read it and found it interesting because x,y,z because I'd rather read slop someone vouches for than slop someone hasn't

Wowfunhappy• 10 days ago

Can we just make it official in the guidelines that "Articles written by genai" should generally not be submitted to HN? (And by extension, that they are okay to flag?)

(I already flag submissions I think were written by AI.)

ChrisMarshallNY• 9 days ago

This is a real conundrum.

For example, if I quote a GenAI response –even in criticism– (See what I did, there?), it can get flagged, and result in a shadowban (has happened to me -lesson learned).

But a good use for LLMs, is as a copyeditor. They do a great job. Some unedited stuff is so bad, I'd rather read slop, any day.

The problem is, what's the threshold? If they just fix a few typos and misspellings, that's fine, but what if they offer more substantial changes? How much text must change, before we can legit dismiss as "slop"?

Also, what if there's a significant GenAI component, but the article really is something that we want on the HN frontpage, because of its content?

Razengan• 9 days ago

We should try replacing forum mods with AI

just for a while :)

dang32• 8 days ago

I wish!

supermatt3• 9 days ago

Some of us use genAI as an accessibility tool. It enables people to write and publish work that otherwise wouldn't exist.

Some people already dismiss genuinely useful content solely based on the use of AI to assist in writing it - i am not sure what flagging would do other than to reinforce that prejudice.

I posted a couple of my articles here, and the one that got traction was generally well received (and also received some constructive feedback from those who acknowledged that is was AI assisted) - but it is evident across HN there is a vocal minority who outright dismiss content solely because it was "AI generated" completely disregarding the content itself. I appreciate this is personal taste, or LLM fatigue, or whatever, but its not really constructive.

If what you want to do is target the slop while not targeting the quality content, then that is what the voting mechanism already does. If people don't like something they can downvote it. Flagging content as AI generated is just a dogwhistle to those who want to downvote AI generated content. If anything, id rather see a rule that stops people commenting on stuff just to dismiss it as "LLM slop".

Its already trivial to avoid detection with fine-tuned humanisers [i] built on non-instruction-tuned models. That makes the flag mostly useless - or worse - a way of penalising any content you disagree with. I'd rather not hide what I am doing and have something that I feel reads well than hide it and sacrifice the message to satisfy a vocal minority.

[i] https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19516

EDIT: downvotes, as expected. hope you see this anyway @dang. Downvotes kind of make my point for me.

Hendrikto2• 9 days ago

I'd rather not hide what I am doing

So why are you doing that by sloppyfying your own writing? If you want people to take interest in your writing, it should probably actually be your own writing.

umanwizard2• 9 days ago

It enables people to write and publish work that otherwise wouldn't exist.

Why is that a good thing? If you aren't going to bother to write something, other people shouldn't have to bother to read it, so please don't put it in the world at all.

Gatekeeping based on skill and motivation is good!

Hendrikto2• 9 days ago

my sense is that the community mostly doesn't want to read it

I can confirm. Most LLM-written content is low effort, low value. This is somewhat by construction. You get the blandest takes in the blandest language.

gruez2• 9 days ago

We don't have a similar rule yet about article content but my sense is that the community mostly doesn't want to read it—or, to put it more conservatively, discounts it.

It's definitely not universal. I've seen articles that seem clearly AI-generated, but still get upvoted because the community likes the title/thesis.

rappatic• 9 days ago

The quality of HN articles has degraded rapidly in the last year. It seems a meaningful fraction of articles posted here, especially most blog posts, are now AI generated. (Of course, this is the case for the rest of the internet too, but HN has always been a haven from the rest of the internet.)

johnfn• 9 days ago

I think of LLM tells like grammatical issues. If you read an essay full of grammatical mistakes you’d immediately start thinking less of the author, even if the essay isn’t about grammar. You wonder if someone who doesn’t pay close enough attention to catch a mistake “their” from “they’re” took attention to the rest of their work. This isn’t necessarily fair because the content of the essay might still be good. But on the internet I don’t have the time to evaluate the quality of every piece of writing I come across. It is very much the burden of the author to, as fast as possible, prove to me that the rest of the article will not waste my time. There is already so much content to read, and in some sense the amount of time to evaluate if an article is well-founded can be unbounded (imagine how long it would take to tell if an article about why a programming language is thoughtful without going out and also learning that language).

I find LLM-isms to be exactly the same as grammatical errors, but worse. At least when writing before you had to take the effort to type every word, so there was a minimum amount of effort you’d need to expend. If you aren’t catching obvious things like “the honest part” then that likely says bad things about your attention to detail elsewhere.

croisillon• 9 days ago

i love the allergy hall of fame and i was expecting to find many comments of mine

shomp• 9 days ago

Why resist tagging?

dang32• 9 days ago

A few reasons I guess: (1) it adds complexity; (2) it has always been HN's design to show the same site to everyone rather than shard; (3) there's a quality of pre-digestion about it which conflicts with the principle of curiosity.

It seems better if HN users poke around and decide for themselves what the articles and threads are about, and which are interesting or not.

mmooss• 9 days ago

I'm going to 'detach this comment and move it to' the second level because I'm late to the party and the chance you'll see it will drop from slim to almost none (unless you have a reply detector?).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48887942

They can't know for sure whether what they're saying is true or false, and we can't know for sure how we should moderate it.

(Regarding people identifying text as genai).

You could moderate like another widespread but hard to prove problem: Propaganda and dis/misinformation campaigns. It's easy to see lots of people repeating well-crafted talking points (too well-crafted for an ordinary person), shouting down those who disagree. Yet users are forbidden from identifying it as such in comments; we're told to email hn@ycombinator.com. You could do that for genai suspicions too (assuming you have unlimited time to review such things).

It seems like a witch hunt to me; I have little reason or evidence to believe people know - because people speaking with no evidence is never reliable, because the angry mob is prone to witch hunts, because genai's are trained on human writing making it harder to distinguish, because some factors people target (e.g., em dashes) have been widely used, and because a highly disruptive technology at this stage of adoption is highly prone to strong emotional reaction and misunderstanding.

I'm not sure it matters: As a rule, we should hold the human who puts their name on it fully responsible. If their assistant, their genai software, or their dog writes it, it doesn't matter. Their name is on it. Speakers don't blame their speechwriters - the speaker said it.

I'm not sure it matters because right now it seems like a big reactionary over-response. I doubt we'll care much in a few years.

The automated spam potential, in posts and in comments, is a problem. One solution is somehow raising the standard of posts and comments: if it's that easy to generate middling crap, it makes better content more valuable and available and it may raise the standard naturally.

Thanks!

latexr2• 9 days ago

I was rather pleased with the originality of this until I remembered pg had come up with "writes and write-nots" in (…)

Is Paul arguing that there will be people who can’t write because of AI? People have been crap at writing before AI, and much of Gen Z (and Alpha) literally don’t know how to write (not just how to write well) at ages where previous generations could.

That’s not his prediction, and not a prediction about technology, as claimed at the top of the post. School teachers could have told him that years ago.

It’s frankly dangerous that so many people lap up Paul’s words, when his world view is so distorted and out of touch with reality and devoid of understanding of regular people. He’s been rich and of high status for too long for his own intellectual good.

senectus1• 10 days ago

how are we detecting AI gen text?

Humans? We're not particularly effective at this as a whole...

AI service ? We'd probably have to pay for that AI to detect that AI and well.. Its also not particularly effective

Effectiveness is important, because we dont want real human produced data to be accidentally removed from view, just as much if not more so than having AI gen data being left on the site.

IgorPartola4• 10 days ago

Nobody wants to label their stuff as AI generated because they removed credibility. Communities can flag posts as AI generated based on speculation and telltales but it won’t be 100% and will take extra work.

I think the era of the blog is simply dead now and that’s mostly ok. Blogspam and corporate blogs had killed quality bogs ages ago even before AI was a thing. The real question is what replaces it.

Oh and of course the $64k question is this: if an AI generated article is indistinguishable from a human written article and it is accurate and interesting, do you care who wrote it? We want to avoid low quality, not AI generation, right?

archagon9• 10 days ago

Pretty trivial for a writer to say “no AI used on this blog.”

minimaxir14• 10 days ago

And what's stopping a AI-written article from also doing that?

asdff10• 10 days ago

Put it this way, if the ai article is indeed so good, why store the article in a dusty long form output mode from a soon to be obsolete model? Just give us the prompt, and in 6 months with some newer, bigger, better model, we can feed that prompt and get an even better article out of it.

maxaw2• 10 days ago

to play devils advocate - i doubt the articles that end up on the front page are one shotted (theres probably a sequence of back and forward refinement). and in any case, i feel the avg reader would actually not prefer to read the prompt, which would be very information dense

having said that, i'd still much prefer a norm of including prompt history with the article, or the codebase for that matter, so people can choose for themselves :)

petesergeant• 10 days ago

The fallacy here is that you can't reduce the wide range of things that “AI generated” means into a single flag. As for why not “show us the prompt”: https://sgnt.ai/p/prompt-is-not-the-work/

hamandcheese• 10 days ago

A lot of my PRs are the result of hours of back and forth between an AI and myself. In many cases the sum total of my prompts is much larger than the final output.

Leynos2• 10 days ago

You'd need the whole edit tree along with all the prompts used along the way, which most people are not yet set up to capture.

spopejoy• 9 days ago

Just give us the prompt

Two showstopper problems with this:

1. Many of "us" don't like interacting with LLMs more than we have to, and view reading as a pleasure that would be extinguished instantly at a chat prompt.

2. It lazily implies that the essence of an article is so easy to communicate that it can be compressed into a prompt. There's a reason for titles, subtitles, open sentences, hero images, paragraph openers, etc etc: they pull you in, establish tone and voice and so forth. Where are the prompts that can entice a reader to even skim it much less plug into their favorite chatbot?

satisfice3• 10 days ago

If counterfeit or stolen cash is indistinguishable from real or honest cash, should you accept it? Should you spend it? No. Why? Because doing so erodes and potentially destroys society.

Whether you agree that a con artist is only a criminal if he gets caught, or you think he’s a criminal the whole time, surely you can see why many people might want to know if they are dealing with a friend and not something simulating a friend.

not-a-llm3• 10 days ago

bullshitting has never been a crime

if it were, 90% of startups would be illegal and they founders jailable

Sateeshm• 10 days ago

I think the era of the blog is simply dead now

The era of people caring about knowledge/learning seems to be dead. At least in the way we used to, because a lot of what we needed that for can now be done by the LLMs.

IgorPartola4• 9 days ago

Similar to the era of when people could calculate logarithms on paper or remember exact years of when each Roman emperor ruled? Or is that different?

agnishom• 10 days ago

it is accurate and interesting, do you care who wrote it?

Yes, because I have an interest in traces and mechanisms of human connections being preserved.

nearlyepic• 10 days ago

Thank you. I swear to god, it’s like half of the people on this site are fucked in the head socially.

Like, of course it matters who wrote it - an author imparts parts of themself onto their work. That’s what makes writing that’s worth reading.

throwaway2194502• 10 days ago

Oh and of course the $64k question is this: if an AI generated article is indistinguishable from a human written article and it is accurate and interesting, do you care who wrote it? We want to avoid low quality, not AI generation, right?

Right now, in mid 2026, many of believe that LLM prose is not as good as human output.

The deception is one aspect. AI for spellcheck and proofreading is one thing; AI writing the content wholesale in the first person, which you pass off as your own, is another. I also don’t care for the Tailwind-styled demo sites that have flooded Show HN.

The sort of content that people react viscerally to (as slop) is rarely that subtle. Again, no problem with careful and subtle use (see CGI in movies), but when I see Claude-isms and snappy section headings that nobody used to use, I close the page.

You can/should write for you, to get experience writing, to present a portfolio, to share things you find interesting, a photo a day, whatever. Why does that have to die?

derdi4• 10 days ago

Nobody wants to label their stuff as AI generated because they removed credibility.

I don't think this is true. I think most of the people who post LLM content without editing and without even style guidelines are simply of the opinion that the resulting text is genuinely of an acceptable quality.

Agreed with the rest of your post. We should think of this in terms of quality of the result, not the process.

dspillett2• 10 days ago

I think most of the people who post LLM content without editing and without even style guidelines are simply of the opinion that the resulting text is genuinely of an acceptable quality.

I don't disagree with that assessment, with one extra detail: for many of them their bar of “an acceptable quality” is too low. No higher than “sod it, it'll do” and often lower. To too many, generated content is seen as a gateway to maybe accidentally becoming some sort of influencer, a way to get themselves out there with little or no care about whether their contribution is actually useful overall just as long as it garners a bit of attention.

I don't want to waste time hunting through the extra piles of “it'll do” or worse to find the remaining nuggets of actually good writing, be they entirely human made or created by humans using LLM assistance. There are at lease a few people of agree with me on the matter.

The problem with judging on quality is that you often have to at least start reading the slop to realise and move on to the next thing. Rating systems and flags may help somewhat, but they will all eventually be gamed so it will become yet another battle of attrition: people and systems trying to filter out the crap while other people and their systems finding it more profitable to spend time breaking the filtering mechanisms instead of producing content good enough to not actually be filtered by them.

IgorPartola4• 9 days ago

What upside is there to labeling your content as AI generated (except when you are showing some novel way to use AI)?

dspillett2• 10 days ago

Blogspam and corporate blogs had killed quality bogs ages ago even before AI was a thing.

That was a two-pronged thing. As well as the blog-spam drowning out what good blogs there were, a lot of people that used to output that way moved to centralised platforms that then either tried to lock their content in, or surrounded it with ad-tech bothers, or both.

if an AI generated article is indistinguishable from a human written article…

Quite a bit of AI generated output is indistinguishable from crap human writing, often mediocre human writing, and that is actually part of the problem. A lot of people bang something out of their LLM/agents of choice and not bother taking the time needed to lift to good or excellent, so there is a bulk of mediocre or worse stuff flooding the medium because it is so easy to produce. But do we really need 100+ mediocre articles and a few good ones on a subject where there would previously have been a few mediocre ones and still a few good+ ones? It makes the genuinely worthwhile content much harder to stumble upon, especially as the ones taking the lazier approaches to writing seem to be making greater efforts in self-promotion with the time they have saved!

if an AI generated article is […] is accurate and interesting, do you care who wrote it?

Firstly: maybe not, or at least less so. But I'm not convinced they can be trusted to be that accurate. I don't trust the average human that much either, they are often authoritatively wrong too (which doesn't help the LLMs, which have been at least partially trained on authoritatively wrong content), but I trust good human writers (who may be assisted by LLMs these days, like they've been assisted by spelling & grammar checkers for decades) above other human writers and content almost entirely drawn from LLMs.

Secondly: Yes. I care. I'm still smarting that after years of people being fined heavily, banned from things, and even imprisoned, for copying content, we seem fine with the big companies pirating whatever they want for training purposes⁰. Yes, some fines have been paid, but a few hours worth of income isn't even a slap on the wrist given how much funny money is being sloshed around the sector ATM, and do you know any content makers who got a share of those fines? I'm still trying to avoid being a part of that, to the point of being willing to commit career suicide¹, so yes, I do care who/what made most effort on creating the article. Given a choice between human, human with LLM assist, LLM with minimal human editing, and purer slop, I would morally prefer something from as close to the “just humans” end of the scale over anything else, even if the quality is practically identical.

--------

[0] I wonder how the corporates would take the “we only downloaded and used it ignoring the licence for model training purposes” point being used about their output. After all, I'm only using it irrespective of your licence to train the intelligence model that sits between my ears!

[1] The current corporate overlords have as much said “get with AI or be left behind”, and I'm sure being left behind will involve being PIPed out to pasture. I might be able to argue “the difference is enough to be considered a material change in roll, so you can't force that under UK employment law nor sack me for not playing ball”, but the same change-of-roll argument just opens up the possibility of redundancy instead², which is only marginally better. In either case I'm done for working in development with my current attitudes.

[2] this interpretation, if not legal pigswill entirely, also makes “we need less legacy developers and more agenic developers, your legacy roll is therefore redundant, do you want to change to an agent-based job or do you want to leave?” perfectly legal.

freehorse7• 9 days ago

Blogspam and corporate blogs had killed quality bogs ages ago

One of the main reasons that I (and I assume others) am here is because I can discover interesting content. It is true that there is a lot of spam in the internet but if I wanted that I would be in x, linkedin or sth. My problem with AI right now is that I consider machine generated content low quality one, and I would like to be able to decide if I want to read such an article without having to waste time before I realise it is ai generated.

if an AI generated article is indistinguishable from a human written article and it is accurate and interesting, do you care who wrote it

Ideally I would like to know regardless. Practically in such a hypothetical future scenario it may be impossible, but I think that not doing sth right now because of some hypothetical future that may or may not happen is not a very good argument. Right now the AI content is pretty distinguishable, and if one took the time and effort to make it not seem like AI then at least that text contains some more human effort.

wartywhoa235• 9 days ago

do you care who wrote it?

I do.

We want to avoid low quality, not AI generation, right?

We want to avoid further dehumanization of the already semi-dehumanized humankind.

sidkh• 9 days ago

I think the era of blogging is pretty alive. I find most of the signal on agentic coding in articles (Armin Ronacher, Simon Willison, etc.). It's just harder to find because of all the noise.

zaik• 9 days ago

I think the era of the blog is simply dead now and that’s mostly ok. Blogspam and corporate blogs had killed quality bogs ages ago

I simply instruct my RSS Reader to fetch articles only from blogs which I believe to be high quality.

stronglikedan• 9 days ago

if an AI generated article is indistinguishable from a human written article and it is accurate and interesting, do you care who wrote it?

Well, yes, because of that "accurate" part. Humans, in general, actually attempt to validate what they publish. I don't feel the need to treat literally everything as a possible hallucination when I read an article published by a human. Less cognitive overhead makes for a more pleasant reading experience. In other words, I trust a human to be accurate most of the time, and I trust an AI to be accurate only some of the time, so there's much more to verify.

erikerikson• 9 days ago

https://xkcd.com/810/

I can't believe no one had posted this yet.

dgellow2• 9 days ago

if an AI generated article is indistinguishable from a human written article and it is accurate and interesting, do you care who wrote it?

I care about the fact that I’m interacting with a human. If an LLM generates content that reads like a human and it isn’t disclosed it is deceptive by nature. It doesn’t matter to me that a human typed the words on their keyboard, they could use text to speech or whatever. But I care that a human crafted the content. A LLM doesn’t just type the words, it takes style, tone, voice decisions, in addition to the choice of framing. That’s everything that matters about human to human communication

nickandbro• 10 days ago

Even if you did, how would you even enforce it? Say it was a pure text article, do you count the number of em dashes? Even AI detection scanners purpose built for this are extremely faulty.

smallerfish• 10 days ago

The voting system could be enough if downvoting was added.

AI writing is not the problem - low effort is the problem. Low effort AI articles are full of tics which are obvious, if you've done a lot of AI writing. To write well with AI you need to spend a good deal of time editing.

If you submit something that's low effort but has a clickbait headline that appeals to HN, you may well make the front page even if the article is lightweight (it does happen!) This is true both for AI and for human written articles.

On the flip side, somebody could spend an enormous amount of effort creating a masterpiece with AI. Penalizing that because of the tool that was used is arbitrary.

awllau• 10 days ago

I was thinking the same. A lot of people use AI to refine their writing and make it more concise.

I do think the dead giveaways (em dashes, it's not X it's Y, etc.) are annoying to come across repeatedly. A person not bothering to remove these tells feels 'low effort' to me.

jvwww• 10 days ago

Personally I just use Pangram's chrome extension, which is amazing for spotting AI generated text.

pokpokpok• 9 days ago

I wish I had a version that worked on mobile!

sjs382• 10 days ago

It seems like we get a post like this every other day or so...

feverzsj• 10 days ago

Just ban anything AI.

rddbs• 10 days ago

I care more about hiding AI related articles than I do about AI-authored content in articles. Feels like most of the content on HN is now AI related and it’s just exhausting. Anyone have a way they’re correcting this balance of content, like a browser extension maybe?

insin• 10 days ago

I have default "AI" keyword and domain filters as a separate toggleable option (so you can keep your personal filters separate) in my HN extension (which I really need to add recent model names to):

https://soitis.dev/comments-owl-for-hacker-news

dijksterhuis• 9 days ago

people have done regex-filtering hn clones, ai to detect the ai, etc. been a few show hns. but threads like this would get caught up in that (no perfect solution).

i just manually hide anything ai related.

first pass: hide anything related to AI on front page.

second pass: is there anything interesting left on the front page?

sadly the answer to the second question is often no nowadays :/

lazyasciiart• 10 days ago

What about a title marker similar to [1997]? It’s content that people may or may not be interested in but will react differently if they know this about it’s origin.

sph8• 10 days ago

Probably one of the best solutions I have heard. Just add [AI] at the end. Though it should probably be [SLOP] as the term AI has legitimate uses.

danieltanfh954• 10 days ago

1. because your belief that AI-generated text is worse than human written text is flat out illogical and wrong.

2. judge content not by its cover and think.

atahanacar2• 10 days ago

judge content not by its cover and think

If we are supposed to not judge the content by its cover, then don't put a cover on it. It's that simple. AI adds no value to the content, just some noise that makes it harder to reach the actual information/emotion.

danieltanfh954• 9 days ago

what do you even mean to "not put a cover" on it, everyone communicates differently. Your comment here puts on a "snide, snarky, trying to be smart but failing" cover that I have discarded because your idea may have some merit to be discussed on.

nickthegreek• 9 days ago

I do not have unlimited time. If enough of this community flags an article as low caliber AI, that is useful to me. The whole idea of a site like this is that the community IS judging the content at some level to up/down vote.

danieltanfh954• 9 days ago

Outsourcing your ability to think to "the community" is pretty much the same as handing it over to AI. AI is trained on the community. Argumentum ad populum.

xeyownt2• 10 days ago

I find the proposal ridicule.

Would you skip articles because it's written with a text processor? You need to have it written bit by bit by fusing it directly in memory?

AI / LLM is the new word editor. Get over it.

What I find really annoying is all the comments that pretend to see / detect AI slop... with lot of false positives.

lpribis• 10 days ago

False equivalence, text processor leaves the authors intention completely in tact and is deterministically controlled completely by the author. Not true for gen ai

Cadabrum• 10 days ago

You might as well try tagging stupid articles. That would be a useful feature, by the way.

nunez• 10 days ago

I asked for this a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48296731

I'm glad the idea is picking up steam.

IMO, the post title should get "[AI Generated]" at the end if enough people flag the content as AI.

DevKoala• 10 days ago

Only care that an article is informative, grounded in facts, unbiased, etc. How it was composed doesn’t matter to me.

luciana1u• 10 days ago

the flag should have a third option: 'human-written but I wish an AI had stopped them'

arjie2• 10 days ago

I had to create a killfile list to block other users’ comments on the site that were repetitive. Likely we will simply have to create for ourselves such killfile lists for domains (sites, I suppose) and users who post them that are primarily generated text.

The problem with these texts to me is that the parts that are information-dense are often not real and the majority is not information-dense. It’s just filler text of a sort that’s pointless “35% ram. 3x throughout. No latency trade off. That’s the whole point”. Okay, what’s this random “that’s the whole point” added there. Useless.

I know it’s passé to say “HN is becoming like X” but this is pure LinkedIn slop. Someone publishes pure bullshit and their fan club posts a bunch of likes and “I’m so excited to see this. Great post”.

atomicthumbs• 10 days ago

telling someone to read something written by a machine is disrespectful of their time. if you didn't care enough to write it, why should anyone else care enough to read it? its value is zero.

ramon156• 10 days ago

I made a personal extension just for that :) if I find a person to be mostly posting AI generated information I will blacklist them from my feed.

Works on a personal level, unsure if this would work well in practice. Maybe just a tag is enough, so people can conclude for themselves.

I know there are extensions out there that are doing the democratic part right. Mostly YouTube-related extensions like DeArrow and SponsorBlock

arjie2• 10 days ago

Have you made your blocklist public? I would like it please.

mleroy• 10 days ago

Instead of chasing and flagging AI content, you could just use Self-Labeled Original Content. Let authors voluntarily tag their links with [Handmade], [Craft-Article] or [Artisan-Thinking].

KingOfCoders• 10 days ago

An article is either great or it isn't.

I don't care if a human, an AI or a cat wrote it.

pillmillipedes• 9 days ago

can you give your example of a great article written by an ai or a cat?

hgs3• 10 days ago

Can we also flag AI generated projects posted on Show HN?

I used to love reading HN for the handwritten articles and handmade projects, but in the LLM era the quality has deteriorated significantly. I find myself flocking to other message boards where LLM content is flagged, discouraged, or banned.

aryehof• 10 days ago

This makes me fear for the ability to easily dismiss or silence a particular human viewpoint just by insinuating it is “AI-generated”.

teiferer2• 10 days ago

It is not black or white. Many articles start with a human brainstorming the content, maybe writing a rough draft, and then AI filling gaps or just polishing the language. Maybe the author isn't a native speaker or has dylexia. It's hard to draw a line.

itsgrimetime• 10 days ago

I don’t have a problem with labeling them. I would love to see more engagement with the content regardless of how it was written, though. I know a lot of folks do but I feel like I’ve been seeing more and more instant dismissal/criticism of how it was written rather than what the submission is actually about.

nyellin• 10 days ago

No, because every article will devolve into a discussion on if AI generated or not, and to what degree. Let content speak for itself.

rienbdj• 10 days ago

Ask HN: add a flag for articles about AI?

Debugreality2• 10 days ago

It's a tough one because some ideas may not exist without AI help.

Personally I recently published a white paper on an idea for democracy that has been bouncing around in my head for decades. AI helped flesh out the idea and write the pages of text and structure the whitepaper.

I'm not an academic so I probably would never have fleshed out this idea without AI but I think it's better to have the idea published so it can be seen than to have remained bouncing around in my head until I passed away.

I'd agree that an academic version of my idea written by hand would be better. But a mostly AI written version is better than the knowledge never being published and I still spent a good two days on it making sure I agreed with every paragraph and fixed every issue I could find.

Considering this in general I think the amount of human effort that goes into creating something is probably the right measure of it's quality over if AI was used to assist in it's creation.

Aachen8• 10 days ago

AI helped flesh out the idea and write the pages of text and structure the whitepaper.

- LLM for helping with structure: sure. feels to me like more of a motivation problem to commit a first version to paper so you can start editing and moving bits around, and the LLM's role is being a conversational partner who cares and talks to you, but whatever works

- LLM for writing the pages of text: I would almost certainly prefer the version where you just write the key aspects (your insights) and not have to wade through pages of prose to find them

- LLM for fleshing out: hell no. if you want to lecture and bore people to death, this is the way to go

Turning insights into elaborate documents is relevant once this makes it to legal codification (compare "tell people how you use their data" with the relevant articles in GDPR)

lukasbm• 10 days ago

Nobody likes reading straight unfiltered chatbot output, but it's also impossible to detect

tukunjil• 10 days ago

Tried to say similar thing here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48039702

shahzaibmushtaq• 10 days ago

AI hasn't a higher power than HI.

AI isn't a higher power than HI and it never shall.

It is the author's and writer's duty and sole responsibility to tell viewers/readers that their respective works are AI-generated or how much percentage of it.

admiralrohan• 10 days ago

We should prioritize original thinking over thinking about whether it's written by AI. A human can type motivational nonsense by hand, and also can use AI as a thinking partner for their original thesis. Which is more valuable?

warshinder• 10 days ago

I just look at the comments first. I probably shouldn’t give away these hn secrets so freely, but people will always comment if it’s ai, or not worth reading, or won’t load, and in the early hn days it actually helped submitters avoid the hug of death. Also works for paywalled; someone will comment the archived version.

thinkingemote• 10 days ago

Most articles that people want on HN are about LLMs and most of those are written by LLMs. The submissions are always horrible to read and usually have no gems to inspire, so if relevant I will at most skim it but the comments on HN about the submission is where the real jewels are likely to be.

If you can easily detect the pattern of LLM writing here's something for you to look at: I was reading some pre-consumer-LLM papers by AI researchers and founders and the way these are written are incredibly similar to existing LLM prose!

ivanjermakov• 10 days ago

Not too long until next gen LLMs to produce text indistinguishable from human's. Voting system is usually enough to filter out low quality submissions.

brador• 10 days ago

Prove it.

A good article is a good article. Doesn't matter who wrote it.

Obfuscation of facts is the major issue with AI articles that should be bopped.

shantnutiwari• 10 days ago

NO.

Quoting myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48063759

> Every post that reaches the top of HN will have at least a few comments saying "This is LLM!"

It has become a proxy for "I don't like this article, so it must be a LLM"

To me, it feels like lazy karma farming, as these comments often do get a few upvotes.

And of course, accuse a 100 posts if being LLM, you are guaranteed to be right at least once, then like astrologers you can claim success.

Is there anything we can do to discourage this type of lazy and low effort posting?

Xotic007• 10 days ago

That would just turn into a nameable target to avoid. Ofc you'd end up with less obviously-AI text but it wouldn't take much more effort to produce than the AI-generated version did since it is not that hard to game it.

amelius• 10 days ago

Unicode should add a codepage for characters in latin1 but reserved for AI tools. That would allow us to have a sticky bit in AI generated stuff, at least to an approximation.

We can do it already if we ask the AI companies to use one of the special whitespace characters instead of ascii 0x20. It would also help them avoid the problem of feeding their training loop on generated data.

wartywhoa235• 9 days ago

Yes, it absolutely should!

Esophagus4• 9 days ago

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_bit

sean_pedersen• 9 days ago

It is not about AI generated or not, it is and always has been about quality of the content. So just let the people up- / downvote.

armanckeser• 9 days ago

Places like r/selfhosted try this and to be completely frank, puts that community into the "naive" side of history. One day not so far in the future AI assisted/generated will mean more reliable, better tested, better documented by default, and do you think AI companies are not focusing on making their LLMs not sound like AI? In 2 generations everything we know about identifying LLM generated content will be obsolete. Only thing that matters is if the content is quality or not.

deevus• 9 days ago

I tried to post a Show HN on here and got auto-modded, even though I hand-wrote my post. To be honest it triggered my rejection sensitivity and I haven't posted here since.

rdataguy• 9 days ago

Well, it's not always easy to tell and it seems like it could be abused. But I guess the wisdom of the crowd would be able to discern enough AI generated content that it might be useful.

gverrilla• 9 days ago

Increasingly you will have to go offline for human experiences and the internet will be more and more ads and agents land. It has barely started - we're still in early adoption and early infra phase. Content for the web is already so perishable. I have no problem whatsoever reading LLM text if it was produced by SOTA models - earlier/currently free models are pretty bad, but their style is almost instantly recognizable so it's an easy skip. Not only model "intelligence" will increase, it seems, but also the skill/habit of customizing the writing style of your LLM. It all feels inevitable, tbh: incentives are too great in this era - so distant of knowledge, reading, community, rationality, etc. Last time I've hand-written a long text, it was a 2-page letter - I took 8 hours to write it, thinking carefully about each and every word, idea, paragraph and logic - and the receiver answered with a single meme gif.

CM30• 9 days ago

I do think it'd be useful if AI generated content was pointed out here, given that it usually indicates a lot less investment in the work than if someone made it themself.

But I'm not sure there's a great way to handle it. Flagging works as AI generated is good in theory, but it's become a bit of a witch hunt online, with plenty of human created pieces getting wrongly flagged as AI generated due to using em dashes in text, having the hands drawn awkwardly in artwork, or using other stylistic traits that AI content overuses. I fear half the site could end up flagged as AI-generated, just because a lot of people are hyper-vigilant about such content and assume the worst for everything.

At the same time, there's not really much of a way to incentivise writers to flag their own articles here, since revealing that a work is created by AI is a great way to both kill your credibility and drive away about half the people who'd otherwise enjoy it. So, if it's up to the authors, the incentives are for them to lie through their teeth.

I also don't really trust many AI detection tools, since they usually use AI themselves and misflag a lot of content.

But I don't think the site should change that much. Maybe add an option for AI content in the flagging system, and assume good faith for submissions in general. I'd rather not see the site get too paranoid or restrictive over this stuff.

ltbarcly3• 9 days ago

1. It's only going to get harder to identify these articles.

2. Labeling the ones that are honest about being AI generated punishes honesty and rewards lying by boosting AI generated articles that say they are not AI generated.

pocksuppet• 9 days ago

The regular voting system is not enough because there is no downvoting for articles.

saint-evan• 9 days ago

yaaay... More fuzzy 'me vs them'-ism.

spwa4• 9 days ago

How would you prevent it from just becoming another AI benchmark?

cloudpilot• 9 days ago

Ya, no kidding, I've had the help of AI to create my app, but im the one putting in the messages and I get flagged

chickenuggies69• 9 days ago

I can AI generate my own articles

oleggromov• 9 days ago

Yes, please.

teo_zero• 9 days ago

If you are allergic to AI-generated articles, I can't stand syntactic mistakes.

The day you get your "AI generated" flag, I'll want my "lousy with mistakes", too.

pritesh1908• 9 days ago

labeling should focus less on whether AI touched the article and more on whether a human is accountable for stats, claims, sources, and corrections. It would be unfair to expect humans to write everything themselves anymore

Ma4etaSS• 9 days ago

This occurred on HN as well. It's not just Reddit-coded

PaiDxng• 9 days ago

A non-ranking indicator seems compatible with HN’s fundamentals: voting still decides visibility, while readers get a choice. The harder problem is defining “AI-generated” without creating an unenforceable honor system.

antfarm• 8 days ago

There should be a global registry for books written by generative AI and sold under the name of a "real" (probably non-exisiting) author.

ThierryRakt• 7 days ago

Many hackers and developers haven't truly mastered english writing, so they use translators or AI to check for grammatical errors. I think this case should be considered separately, but sometimes I really don't know how to distinguish them from ai slop

feedweave• 4 days ago

Regular downvotes/flags are for low quality or spam. AI content isn't always 'bad' per se, it’s just... empty. It eats up attention without saying anything new. A dedicated tag would be great because I don't want to bury the post, I just want to opt out of reading a glorified autocomplete.

the__alchemist• 3 days ago

Personally, I've been using a small browser plugin called "hn_mute_" (On FF and chrome). It lets me permanently mute any user with 1 click. I have a 0 tolerance policy for ai-gen article posts, among other types of behavior. This sound harsh, and so unfortunately has false positives. But is required in this environment. This is a partial solution, and would be enhanced by network effects. (e.g. people sharing mute lists, and aggregating)

Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles

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