Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
I am asking if Hacker News should add a feature to flag articles as AI-generated without affecting their ranking. I want this indicator to help users who prefer not to read AI-generated text to easily skip them. I am also questioning why the current voting system is insufficient and whether Hacker News should change its fundamentals in response to the gen AI era.
- dang
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 mat […]
- IgorPartola
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?
- Retr0id
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.
- minimaxir
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.
- dawnerd
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).
- nunez
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.
- shantnutiwari
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?
- lazyasciiart
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.
- Debugreality
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.
- mattas
Might be more appropriate to add a "not AI" flag at this point.