HN Explorer

Tons of new LLM bot accounts here

18 points by koolala ↗ HN
There are lots of fresh made accounts pretending to be humans commenting everywhere. They all post small 1 paragraph comments that don't actually express an idea and restate the obvious.

Is someone targeting HN with OpenClaw? I wish they at least used a high-thinking model but it seems like they are using the cheap API.

15 comments

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dddddaviddddd
Long-term, I think AI bots will destroy text-based online communities like this one. I'll be sad to see it disappear.
baddash
My take is that at some point, we will need ID verification online in general to prove you are human. Otherwise it's just chaos out here identity-wise and will get worse like you point out.
Fervicus
Humans can still use LLM for posting.
rvz
Assume anyone with a new account created after 30th November 2022 and beyond is an AI agent.

There is no such thing as due process for AI agents. They are guilty until proven otherwise.

nazbasho
ah, AI agents have buried every community.
-1
what is the point of this? what do they get out of having an AI post/write a comment? I don't understand it
maxalbarello
Would love to share some projects I've been working on but I can't because of this... any tips?
gary0330
I wouldn’t even mind bots if they occasionally surfaced a genuinely interesting question or a non-obvious angle. Tools that help people think more deeply seem net-positive.

What feels corrosive is the flood of AI (and human) comments that are just frictionless, low-effort rephrasings of the obvious. They don’t ask anything, don’t take a risk, don’t reveal any experience – they just occupy space.

Maybe the real line isn’t “bot vs human” but “does this comment introduce a question, a tradeoff, or a concrete detail that someone could actually think about?”. By that standard, a lot of today’s noise fails regardless of who—or what—typed it.

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nashashmi
They might be aura farming and then used to pose as legitimate accounts for political debate when they are all beng run by single state actors for propaganda. I know of one country that has been more invested recently in defending itself on here.