Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles

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?

just for a while :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

I do.

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

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

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

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.

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

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