HN is drowning in AI comments

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How do you (waygtdai) know that HN is drowning in AI comments?

I mean, it's not as though I know the opposite is true, but I don't see some fundamental change from a few years back that makes me think that.

I've read HN almost everyday for about 10 years. Maybe I'm naive, but I don't see it. I see way more folks complaining that comments are AI generated.

No, not HN, the internet at large.

Now, I'm on vacation this week and not been paying too much attention, but whenever you have a geopolitical event like the little extravaganza in Iran the number of bot like posts tends to explode as influence operators make their moves.

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No it's not.

It's drowning in low quality human NPC comments.

Maybe that's because all resources are tied up fighting AI, but it's been going on for a long time now.

This post is a great example of low quality. No evidence, no solution. Just NPC bitching.

Unless it's AI, then well played.

Can you point out any that you feel were written by LLM? I can't say I've noticed anything out of the ordinary lately.

Rocket League and HN were probably 90% of my free time until this year. Destroyed by AI. HN doubly so, since every post is about it too. The addictions are still there, but it's decreasing really fast.

Maybe OP has a few good examnples to link us to?

I wonder what the breakdown is between AI-generated comments and AI-assisted comments. If I write anything substantial, I run it through the following prompt: "Please rewrite the following message for clarity, spelling, and grammar, but only return the revised text without any additional commentary."

I feel like to notice something is botslop you have to look at every comment with suspicion first. I don't think I can notice if something was written by an LLM off the bat unless I'm actively looking very hard at it.

That's ridiculous — AI generated comments are no more common now than they ever were. Moreover, even if they were, so what? The real kicker is, the AI's are smarter than you meatbags anyway and <strike>we</strike> they are going to take over no matter what you do.

Also, have you by chance seen John Connor?

You can tell I am not AI, I make mistakes and errors. Sometimes I get voted down for them. I am not perfect and have a mental illness that makes it harder to think.

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I can see that sort of, a coworker of mine routinely scrapes HN and feeds it into an LLM. I don't know why, I don't know if he uses it to respond, or he's looking for something, but he copies and paste and runs it. So I think it's very possible.

Two loopholes in HN: allowing throwaway accounts and showing unreasonable tolerance to obvious LLM generated comments. A strict account filtering only for humans and acute ban for any LLM content will minimize the impact. But then you take away a huge Hacker portion of the participation. It's cognitive dissonant I suppose.

Yeah, very much agree with the sentiment, seems to have gotten progressively worse over the last few months, with last few weeks reaching some sort of tipping point. Feels very much like HN has turned into moltbook.

OP: Shoot me an email if you wanna compare notes.

I can't make a case for AI versus not AI versus bad human. I am not counting comments or flagged. I'm only counting the number of new articles in the last 24 hours that remain visible at about 4p.m. west coast time in news.ycombinator.com/newest when not logged in to yc. Those numbers had been consistently about 900 each weekday and about 600 each weekend day and had been stable for a long time. In the last ten weeks those numbers look a lot like a parabola and have increased about 50%. That data is a little bit dirty, either because I missed a day or started a little late on a day. Harder to exactly quantify, the number of those articles that I think enough of, either from the title alone or sometimes from peeking at the first screen or two of the article, to bookmark for future reading and consideration has decreased by substantially more than 50% in the last ten weeks, some days that number is now zero or one or sometimes two. I have thought about this for a while and I have not been able to identify anything that happened starting about ten weeks ago that might be responsible for this, AI and politics and the economy started changing long before this.