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Posted by usefulposter 1 day ago

Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans(news.ycombinator.com)
4113 points | 1606 commentspage 11
jsnell 1 day ago|
A practical question: what should readers do when they suspect a comment (or story) is AI-generated? Is that an appropriate reason for flagging? Email the mods? Do nothing?

I've been pretty wary about flagging AI slop that wasn't breaking other guidelines, and by default this will probably make me do it more. But it is a lot harder to be certain about something being AI-written than it is to judge other types of rules violations.

(But am definitely flagging every single "this was written by AI" joke comment posted on this story. What the hell is wrong with you people?)

nickvec 1 day ago||
How can HN actually moderate this though and prevent AI content from proliferating unchecked?
joquarky 5 hours ago|
They can't. This is akin to security theater, which will just make the infractions less conspicuous (which is probably enough to appease most people).
nineteen999 1 day ago||
Im fine with this, in 99.999% of cases anyway I'm way too lazy to type something into an LLM and ask it to clean it up and then copy and paste. You can tell this is true by the some of the stupider things I type in here sometimes.
GodelNumbering 1 day ago||
Even if people try to bypass it, having the official rule matters a lot.

@dang, if you read this, why don't we implement honeypots to catch bots? Like having an empty or invisible field while posting/commenting that a human would never fill in

tomasz-tomczyk 1 day ago|
It's likely going to be a game of whack-a-mole, especially with AI as opposed to simple bots/scripts. Not that they shouldn't try to prevent it, but not entirely sure what the solution is.
tavavex 1 day ago||
There's probably no solution, but at least this gives a reason to go after the lowest hanging fruit - the zero-effort, obvious, low-quality output.
qaid 1 day ago||
Shout out to ClackerNews[0], which I discovered last night and find it both very educational and amusing

I hope to see more bots on there (and not here)

[0] https://clackernews.com/

fudfomo 21 hours ago||
Highly appreciate this! It's what makes the difference: humans are not perfect which is why evolution works quite well.
adamsmark 1 day ago||
I frequently use AI to make my comments more concise and easy to follow. I find myself meandering a lot when I type, and now that I've transitioned to full voice dictation through FUTO keyboard I am speaking more off the cuff and having an LLM clean it up.

You may also notice that I don't have much common history here. I mostly comment on Reddit.

Here's where I draw the line. If you are not reading the text that is produced by the LLM, then I don't want to read whatever it is that you wrote. I will usually only do one or two iterations of my comment, but afterwards I will usually edit it by hand.

Technically, there is light AI editing of this comment because FUTO keyboard has the ability to enable a transformer model that will capitalize, punctuate, and just generally remove filler words and make it so that it's not a hyper-literal transcription.

zarzavat 1 day ago|
To err is human. Let's embrace our humanity in the face of this proliferation of insipid perfection.

I want the raw tokens straight out of your head. Even if they are lower quality, they contain something that LLMs can never generate: authenticity. When we surrender our thoughts to a machine to be sanitized before publication, we lose a little of what it means to be human, and so does everyone who reads what we write.

Part of the joy of reading is to wallow in a writer's idiosyncrasies. If everybody ends up writing the same way, AI companies will have succeeded in laundering all the joy from this world.

aicoldtrail 22 hours ago||
I don't think I'm going to spend the time to paraphrase my worthwhile AI-applied work for such hypocritical rules.

So develop and fund and use AI but manually paraphrase things and don't cite AI?

It is best to cite a source and/or a method.

Do you think it is better to paraphrase and not cite AI?

I don't recall encountering posts on HN that I've wanted to flag as AI.

aicoldtrail 14 hours ago||
> It is best to cite a source and/or a method

Have you considered this?

If people do not cite their sources or methods when they use AI, then we will not know where error was introduced by paraphrasing AI.

westurner 14 hours ago||
Everyone that uses a search engine (with or without an "AI mode") is using AI and LLMs and software built and tested with AI.

If they say "no" to "did you use AI", they're probably not correct and/or lying.

But you may not cite or quote or link to AI generated work?

> If people do not cite their sources or methods when they use AI, then we will not know where error was introduced by paraphrasing AI.

aicoldtrail 14 hours ago||
I think that you have rallied hate for AI to falsely justify need for censorship. If HN takes a "hate and hunt" AI stance, I will not contribute to HN.
aicoldtrail 14 hours ago||
Here are alternate possible rules for this; though I don't agree that making such distinction for every post is called for:

1. No AI comments without a human in the loop.

2. Please cite. Please cite when you use AI so that others can trace the errors and evaluate the premises of the argument. An argument has premises and a logical form.

We should expect the frequency of AI errors like hallucinations to decrease and accuracy to increase over time.

You should always consider peer review and getting another opinion regardless of whether AI or ML were used.

Do you need to cite AI?

If scientific reproducibility is necessary or important for your application,

You should also cite search queries, search results at that time, the name and version and software package hash of each software tool, the configuration parameters for each software tool, the URL and hash of the data, and whether you used spell check or autocorrect or an AI grammar service.

If you use an (AI) grammar service, you should disclose the model name and version, model hash or Merkle hash, and the model parameters.

But most people don't even cite URLs here; it's just people making unsupported arguments.

shredswap 1 day ago||
I enjoy conversations on hn because they feel genuine. People are not here to optimize their posts or comments for engagement or pushing some kind of follower count like they do on social media platforms.
wmoxam 1 day ago|

    Robot walks into a bar
    Orders a drink, lays down a bill
    Bartender says, "Hey, we don't serve robots"
    And the robot says, "Oh, but someday you will"
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