Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
Should HN add the ability to flag articles as AI-generated? This doesn't have to act as a regular flag, i.e., it won't de-rank the article; it could just show up as an indicator, allowing others (like myself) who don't like reading AI-generated text, to skip it.
Open questions:
1. Why is the regular voting system not enough?
2. Should HN change in response to the gen AI era? It has been successful not changing fundamentals.
348 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] threadAnd im sure this was designed in order to encourage positive discussion
"Submit to my knowledge or else!" is abusive.
People can drive a car without needing an expert copilot. Why should they need a software engineer to use a computer?
Spare the appeals to history as the historical record would show software engineers have unemployed many others. Technology moves on; rotary phone makers and travel agents have a seat for in their support group.
Your self selection and vanity could not be more obvious.
AI could provided assistance with building both cars and software, but you still need a decent level of knowledge in either field to get a good result.
They are driving (lol) towards the sale of a computer with a model on chip without a programmer salary and benefits adding to cost and resource use (all the tools of the trade need to be stored and copied around).
Just stokes addiction to a false sense of empowerment and social contribution
Downvote away to hide from ideas and opinions you don't like.
Conservative people are the only people so dysregulated by ideas they don't understand or that do not validate prior experience and embedded biases they just try to hide them from view. Not the kind of people whose judgment I concern myself with in any meaningful way
yeah keep chatting with the sycophantic psychosis-inducing LLM chatbot, I think you'll have a better time.
LLMs are mass theft of intellectual property. I didn't need them to "drive" this computer for the last ten years.
they are different systems created for completely different reasons. the idea of calling them all "property" came from lobbyists who wanted to make people think they are natural rights that should be expanded and protected at all costs, instead of tools made for a specific purpose.
thats how we get todays system where publishing anything even without a copyright notice gives you life plus 70 years of total exclusivity, but also if you signed a bad contract with your employer they will act like all your work belongs to them even if you did it on your own time and threaten you with lawsuits if you try and fight. its bad at protecting artists (just look at the music industry) and even worse at protecting the public.
what llm vendors (not the models themselves) are doing is not really theft because you cant steal something if the original owner has it the whole time. the bad thing they actually do is train llms on everyones work and then claim copyright over the result. that is the real injustice. and its why i think open source === ethical when it comes to ai. if you take you have to give back.
the only true permanent solution is a full rebalance. all "ip" rights should be for commercial use only and last 25 years or less. yes that means piracy is legal as long as you dont make money off it. unpaid royalties are a problem for real people but pirates only hurt corporations. i know what side im on.
"intellectual property does not exist" -> goes on to define various legal instruments for protecting intellectual property.
"you can't steal something if the original owner has it the whole time" Is this fifth grade? So if I go over to your house and trash it, it doesn't matter the house was under your possession the whole time.
No the rebalance is to sue these companies into the dirt.
Conspiracy minded responses are low value, and yours is especially so considering HN bans AI comments.
WTF? What do you mean by "hosted"?
I know it's the internet's happy place to blithely accuse others of monstrosity and then derive from that how nobody other then themselves has any "morals or ideals", but this one sticks in my craw.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/17f16071-87e0-4675-a152-6d6285b97...
[2] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/industry/nft
[3] https://paulgraham.com/woke.html
Here is me referencing it about 11 months ago and I have older comments that reference it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44864419#44866331
I guess HN likes to scrub things that make them look bad instead of confronting the reality that they helped launder and "humanize" genocide.
We don't ever delete anything from HN (except in rare cases where a user asks us to do so for privacy reasons).
If we had deleted something as controversial/inflammatory as what you're claiming, it would easily be exposed; the HN API is public and many people ingest and store everything that is posted, so someone would have a record of it and could easily dig it up. That's aside from any cached copies in The Internet Archive, any screenshots of it, any tweets about it, etc. We never even consider trying to hide anything that's happened on HN, because it would so easily be exposed if we did. If something bad happens on HN, we own it and work to improve.
For the record, this is the comment that dang replied to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39158222.
( ° ͜ʖ͡°)╭∩╮
Tagging an opinion different from yours with 1967 CIA axioms is of even lower value.
Voting systems can be gamed and as HN becomes bigger and bigger it'll start to attract unsavory audiences who have an agenda.
The latest codemaxxed models all tend to write in very distinct, instantly recognizable ways unless carefully instructed otherwise (honestly a good thing if you want to avoid wasting time reading AI text). A great example is this submission that's currently #1 on the front page (which is also just a thinly veiled advertisement): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48884853
I have a hard time finding these communities
How do you tell which is the case?
If we don't allow AI help at all, is that perhaps discriminating against those who don't feel comfortable posting with imperfect English?
I agree in principle, but am concerned in implementation... I'm not sure we can be fair without high risk of discrimination
Edit: typo fix
Edit: or am I AI?! And making edits looks more legit.... (To be clear: I'm not, I play by rules)
It's not discrimination to ban a practice which has been proven to be harmful. AI slop is harmful to readers, as well as being harmful to produce. Whatever issues one might raise, for instance someone who is not a native English speaker, we can find alternative solutions which are better for the environment and better for human minds.
However, a lot of the academic or technical posts on this site have turned out to include AI hallucinations (a problem that is not just on HN, in fairness). If an article or paper contains nonexistent or obviously, blatantly wrong citations, then I feel very strongly that such content is disrespectful to the HN audience, certainly to me, because I've just wasted my time trying to take the author seriously only to discover that the argument was founded on a hallucination. In a sense, it doesn't matter to me whether the hallucination was due to AI or not -- if a person puts in bogus citations, AI-generated or otherwise, my view is that their article or paper fully deserves to be flagged so that we don't waste other people's time.
Wait I'm not sure I understand the cause and consequence here if you're saying you use an LLM but your articles aren't slop (note that those are rough synonyms). Do you mention in your submissions you subscribed to or used Claude? The mere existence of the subscription and using it for unrelated things won't be why people flag, I can only assume they notice the quality level and/or style
Not a single word of my articles were written by LLMs. I used them for proofreading and critique.
Writing articles by hand is useful for me since it allows me to crystallize my knowledge. Writing it down for my own future reference essentially prevents me from forgetting in the first place. LLMs accelerated me so much I'm actually trying to slow down so I can let my recent achievements sink in a bit.
> Do you mention in your submissions you subscribed to or used Claude?
I don't use Claude in my articles. I use Claude for code review and design. Implementation is almost a footnote, and even that gets significantly rewritten during my numerous human review passes. I still write code by hand too.
That's for the projects I actually care about. I do have some explicitly vibecoded projects, and I never made a secret out of it. Projects that wouldn't exist at all were it not for LLMs making it easy to execute. I personally review those too, just not as often.
I don't add AI models as co-authors to commits of my own repositories. I'm not in the business of providing free advertising to trillion dollar corporations. If other projects require it, I do so as per their rules.
> The mere existence of the subscription and using it for unrelated things won't be why people flag
It will. They will zero in on things like CLAUDE.md and dismiss your entire project as slop the second they see it.
I know because I asked people directly. Response? If an LLM touched your project, then your project is slop. Verbatim. And that's the polite reply.
Trying to establish some simple criteria for sloppy vs good work nearly got me kicked out. People came at me with literal "I know it when I see it" nonsense. Even Claude does a better job of defining "slop" than that. I find it hilarious how these rules are based on vibes. People just get LLM vibes out of other people's projects, and then dismiss them.
> I can only assume they notice the quality level and/or style
I'm not sure they even saw my project. It's just pure prejudice. AI detected? Slop, no need to even read it. If they actually read my work and thought it sucked, fine. In fact I'd be very interested in knowing why so I can improve. I refuse to accept these predetermined judgements though.
AI slop is AI slop.
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.
If there is a great post on a topic and the author used AI when generating it, what’s so bad about that?
agreed.
For me, the issue I have is that a vocal group seems to despise AI-edited content and they can't manage to take their disgust eleswhere.
AI-editing is another tool, just like spellcheck.
The issue is complicated by the fact that there can be substantial effort invested in a process outside of the writing itself - and so AI written does not guarantee that the content will not valuable. But I'm inclined to punish it anyway to establish a norm of valuing genuine human communication - which I think has always been present but we didn't know until the alternative presented itself.
My entire position: I'm not interested in reading text that sounds like it was written by AI.
I think this is a fair position - if the author did not even take the time to read their own article, why should they expect others to read it?
If they did read it, they would have spotted instantly how AI it sounds.
Is it purely just a "human supremacist" desire that fuels the motivation to ban or block such articles?
It's not about the end output. End output is already good IMO. Now, if you don't give a damn about writing what's on your mind, why should we give a damn about reading it?
Hacker News adopting such a feature would likely do more harm than good.
The issue is that label has expanded to anything that's weird/unusual, and the consequences of being accused of AI are far more severe than the consequences of a false accusation so people do it frequently. It is absolutely a vector for harrassment/trolling.
One subreddit I follow now bans people if they make an accusation of AI-generation that's weak/disproven, which is a rule I like.
A simple beneficial step that would lead to modest improvements and little downside: partner with Pangram. Either adding it as an automated spam filter, or by simply attaching the detection % to all posts.
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.
[editing - bear with me...]
I can see a grim future (present?) where "AI generated" turns into a slur, warranted or otherwise, in a world where the difference between human trained to talk like an AI and AI masquerading as human becomes increasingly difficult to discern, and some hidden cabal passes judgement.
That is wholly different from taking a stance on HN being a place for humans to comment on articles.
(Subconscious training like when we pick up an accent, though eventually folks might automatically code switch - so that’s hopeful.)
> 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.
Humans are training to detect AI content. Humans writing more like AIs is an unrelated (and slower) phenomenon.
The class of comments you're mentioning—not just ones that say "clanker" literally but the more general category—is a total particle-wave undecidable question right now.
If the comment is right—i.e. if the comment being castigated actually was LLM-generated—then it's a sort of community immune system response.
[editing - bear with me...]
I think the decision to ban AI submissions is a good one, but ultimately it's going to create this conflict for some time, maybe a really long time until things stabilize around AI in the broader culture
I hope eventually AI usage does become a taboo, at least in some fields. Creative fields should be for creative humans, not people who can't even publish an article without the help of an LLM
There are tons of ways to use AI that don't intersect with that.
If it becomes very normal and expected that people just let LLMs speak for them online using their voice, then I don't think any kind of online community has a hope of actually keeping that behavior at bay long-term
For people like me that means the end of online communication entirely, most likely. I don't want to talk to people's LLMs
My hope is there's some broader cultural taboos around AI usage for communication purposes at least.
For example, I think you said "the politics of articles" before I added the thing about a "class distinction". Intriguing overlap!
I don't quite follow what you mean about grim future but if you wouldn't mind reading the edited version of my post, I can respond to anything that isn't addressed there.
It’s okay to have an opinionated website. Not every corner of the internet needs to be a bastion of free speech
Personally that is the future I hope to see. Hence my continuous protestations at the lazy excuses for articles that get posted these days, and the lazier excuses given by their authors for avoiding using their brain.
I was once accused of using AI for writing in the voice of a depressed character because the character had a certain emotional detachment that to the person lodging the accusation indicated AI.
In short it is not just specific phrasing or words but also aesthetic effects that mean one is AI nowadays.
I am not sure how the future may be, but the direction of AIs has been to solidify their distinct writing style rather than assimilate to humans. So we can start addressing what we are dealing with now. I doubt HN tagging/flagging can put enough pressure to affect how llms will evolve anyway in the future, while the llm speech becomes more and more ubiquitous and unhinged.
Yes, but what if it doesn't? Anyone can create a model or prompt to adjust the tone, remove the tells that people are now on the lookout for, etc.
And it's self-reinforcing, because the people that are on the lookout will always consider themselves to be right in their judgment, also because of survivorship bias - they won't know if they missed an AI generated comment/post unless it's revealed.
This is one reason why I'm in favor of tagging AI generated posts, because at one point we can't tell. If we can't tell, does it still matter? I don't know, but I'd like to know anyway.
Of course, it can't be mandated, so if the submitter doesn't tag it and the readers can't tell the difference, it's futile.
Before you say I'm just falsely calling them out, it's typical ChatGPT style of either very amicable or Nobel Laureate tone, lots of formatting, with a couple of paragraphs and then a clever one-line punchline at the end. If you look at those commenters their history, it's all like that. Either generated or assisted. For older accounts you can see the steep increase of it around 2025ish.
Seems like HN absolutely adores AI comments and the rule banning them is (sadly) unnecessary. Or at least not what 'the people' want.
The HN guidelines[1] include:
and I'd argue pointing out that you think an article is AI is very similar in value to pointing out any of the above. None of us like AI slop. But I wouldn't be surprised if, by the end of 2026, 90-95% of articles posted online are AI slop. Pointing it out is useless. As useless as pointing out that the article breaks the scrollbar (which happens often) or that the article is formatted badly or has poor text contrast, or that an article is Chinese propaganda. Probably true, but posting about it adds nothing to the discussion, and is not allowed on HN.All we really need is to add "Don't complain that an article is AI" to the guidelines.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> You should add more AI to your life
I hope you can see how this is not a useful suggestion.
To continue your analogy, that would be like if Gmail got rid of spam filters, and then told people to stop complaining endlessly and manually copy every email they get into SpamGPT to ask if it's spam or not.
I think the criticism also signals to the submitter or idk co-author? That the article isn't valued
Nowadays I usually check the comments first for the "This is AI" comment, I've left a few of my own and gotten thank yous in reply.
Actually, when 90%-95% of articles posted online are AI slop, it's even more useful to identify those which aren't.
When the signal/noise ratio is too low, having an indicator of signal is tremendously useful.
The OP then replied:
> Not AI. Not sure how I feel getting my writing style called out like that though :D
".. Fault-tolerant and highly available hardware must facilitate low-latency, single-threaded communication with high semantic density in order to achieve multi-dimensional consensus in a safety-critical, heterogeneous, adversarial environment. .."
I am not sure why you think someone saying "not AI trust me bro" carries any merit.
At any rate, like I said, I've given up the war. People enjoy reading that stuff, I'll just be the old man no longer yelling at the clouds.
Its kind of fitting (and funny) a guy like minimaxir popped up because he's the exact type that has caused me to give up. He didn't bother to check the actual AI parent comment, and when given proof he'd rather just ignore the proof (didn't respond to it), dig in and pretend he's right because he doesn't wanna feel OP 'got' him. It's behavior I see everywhere I tried to call out AI comments. Even with blatant one's people would rather dogpile on the person making them feel like a fool rather than the person that made them a fool.
Anyway, I used too much mental bandwidth on this already. You can tell I actually care, but I am trying hard to make myself not care because the world at large is not going to change.
[0] or they're totally cool with the idea that readers will be using an LLM to summarize (pages of) comments, which goes from disrespectful to horrifying because it means they're fine with a future where humans don't even directly interact anymore.
No LLM has responded like your quote of OP that you assert is LLM generated. Dense verbose writing is not something LLMs do without very specific prompt engineering that no one would do rationally. The tropes of LLM writing are more highly sporadic terms of writing (e.g. "delve") with highly atypical grammatical constructions. Look at Wikipedia's list and try to figure out which item the OP falls under: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
Yes, OP has a verbose way with words and grammar. On a site like Hacker News that shouldn't be that weird, and accusing people of using AI without a smoking gun hurts culture and discourse far more than doing nothing at all, which is why I'm passionate about baseless AI use accusations.
And no, that is not just "a verbose way with words".
I think it's because I'm not optimizing my life to get the correct answer as fast as possible, or to build things as fast as possible.
To me, the most important thing about the internet is connecting with other people. If I ask a question on a forum it's because I want to talk to someone about it, maybe make an acquaintance or even a friend. Otherwise I would of course just ask the AI now. Google has been around for a long time, and could already usually find answers for me. I still would rather discuss with a colleague sometimes than Google every single thing.
Human connection. We need more of it, not less. I think heavy AI use and reliance on AI for thinking, research, communication and building... It's going to isolate people even more
But then again, there’s always reddit :)
That's not a value-judgement of the content, it's something which directly impacts the reader-experience, or possibly lack thereof. (Kind of like how Back In The Day people wanted to know the filesize of something before they clicked, so that they didn't make an blind investment of their dial-up bandwidth.)
Then it was to protect our modems bandwidth (cost and time) while now it's more about protecting our own cognitive bandwidth.
1st: the presumption that AI generated text is actually unsuccessful, rather than proliferating broadly unchallenged today
2nd: the disposition that negative attitudes towards AI text are unjustified discrirmination, rather than working as a strong latent predictor of low-effort content
3rd: the assumption that human writing is reliably doled benefits, rather than some poor proxy of it (winning the social contest for claiming authenticity)
Operationally, only a very small minority of humans actually successfully identify AI generated text at rates ≥ Pangram. People discriminate against the label of "AI", but mostly fail to vote accurately. It's not uncommon to see bots abusing this gap for their own success -- accusing humans, sympathizing with generated profiles... FUD environment where people routinely get away with dismissing true accusations.
For someone who is mediocre at detection, this would structurally feel like an unhinged, unjustified bias: look at all these good posts, these honest people, getting undermined by discrimination...
I don't think this is true, at least not right now, and in a way I'm actually thankful for it.
The frantic rush to chase the only potentially profitable use case for LLMs found so far (writing code) and the resulting focus on coding RLHF means models are actively becoming worse at sounding like humans.
This is my favorite example, and it's already relatively outdated: https://progress.openai.com/?prompt=10
Does that mean that an article being AI-generated is a flaggable offense? Should we be flagging suspected AI-generated articles already, or should we wait for the flagging system to support reasons first?
Stuff interesting enough to get upvoted (i.e. not slop), but I'm so irritated and triggered by pointless, human, comment threads moaning about "this is AI generated".
Do you believe adding friction to flagging reduce the quantity of low quality articles?
Or is the flagging of high quality articles a bigger and more pressing problem?
Or is the problem simply too-many-damn-flags?
Just curious.
I guess the idea is that if lots of people flag a comment for the "genai" reason then we can treat that a more precise community signal than "flagged in general". But this argument seems weaker to me as soon as I write it out.
I really really hope more people take up pen and paper! My last blog post [0] came with proof-of-work attached.
[0] https://abner.page/post/are-we-harold-bloom/
What a goofy situation to imagine. I hope we can figure out a way though. I personally have no interest in reading anything spat out by an LLM, so if anything can be used to prove that an author wrote something themselves, I'm interested
But nonetheless a problem in desperate need of solving!
Doesn't seem too hard to fake now, now that AI can generate convincing videos. Failing that, it's definitely within the realm of possibility for AI to create fake pages for a notebook, then generate a blender/unreal engine project to render it.
This is totally tangential to your point, what is that page? It's not your usual link to an algolia search. Is this already part of some sort of manual tagging system? Clicking on the first one, these comments don't seem to be moderated. Are you using these complaints to help detect AI generated content? I think the existence of that page just leaves me confused on whether you actually want people to comment like this or not.
Keep in mind that we have a REPL over here and can make any link do anything!
Ultimately though this is the same debate as "should we allow genai code in codebases". High quality code lands naturally while slop is slop. Not much value in banning AI outright--the desire is predominantly to ban the slop.
I guess my response to that is we want the most interesting threads.
Many are quite a bit more subtle, like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48844062
The more subversive undercurrent is interesting to me. People intentionally fucking with someone's bot, burning tokens for the lulz.
Hackernews isn’t work, obviously, but “it’s impossible to engage deeper with the material because the author doesn’t really exist” is sort of a problem for a discussion site. If the human coauthor puts in enough work, they can make sure the doc really reflects their views and their understanding, but in my experience that’s much less common.
FWIW, same problem with PRs or PoC that I have to work on; now my first question is, "did you know about his behaviour?". The first step, getting a decent spec, is delayed to after a first draft implementation is already pushed...
You can't have a discussion about it, how it was done, because for 80% of cases it's "the AI did it".
I don't think this is that interesting or useful for HN, because indeed it's a discussion site.
It would be different if the vibe coded thing didn't come as a "look what it made and its vibe written README" but instead as a human written blog article about "how I made this thing using AI, what models, prompts and harnesses, how the experience was etc etc etc" --- again that would be something interesting to have a discussion about.
But otherwise what is there to say except "yeah cool that's cool that the AI made you that thing"
> it’s impossible to know whether misconceptions or gaps are because the author doesn’t understand the material deeply enough or the author does but the AI doesn’t and the author’s not proofreading carefully enough. Or if a surprising idea is raised — is it the authors insight, can they elaborate on it, where did it come from, etc?
Ways to contribute: Peer review, human code review, money for tokens for code and code review, configure SAST and DAST tools to make it DevSecOps
Compare "It's inadequate because it's AI" with "it looks like this generation of agents doesn't yet handle this quality aspect with or without explicit prompts" with "you could improve quality by writing tests, docs, and before that refactor for maintainability and subjective elegance" (if you're trying develop a hit open source project)
> impossible to know whether misconceptions or gaps are because the author doesn’t understand the material
Shouldn't a researcher consider the argument - it's premises and form - instead of tangential ad hominem about the author?
Pushing for well-formed arguments is older than AI
“The author doesn’t understand the material” isn’t an ad hominem — most of my work involves working with other people, usually less experienced, to help them deliver reasonably complex econometric or ML models. Sometimes I’m hands on, usually not. Knowing if it’s “the author not understanding the material” is important because my job is to help them understand it so that they can deliver something that 1) works and 2) does what it’s supposed to. AI written docs are at best a mixed blessing.
Or maybe it’s me not understanding! Either way, if something looks wrong, I want to discuss it with people who know the subject matter and can talk me through the parts that look off so that I can learn from it.
No, that's not an ai written comment either.
AI is not useful for econometric ML because the client doesn't understand the model?
"Explain the model to the client like they're five and they don't remember our fee is already negotiated" has inaccurate model replies in your field?
Even before LLM AI, could an OpenCog dog have done the model search and optimization?
What is the difference between AutoML's predictive error next to expert-biased model selection and parameter grid search with CV in your field this year?
How could AI help validate - you mentioned econometrics - econometrics latex in manuscripts?
- Port manuscripts to interactive notebooks
- translate LaTeX to a CAS syntax (e.g. SymPy), test to validate, and enqueue for human review
- Develop causal experiments based upon observational data from non-blinded experiments, like this: > "Answering causal questions using observational data" (2021) [PDF] https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2021/10/advanced-economic... ... 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2021/pop...
Dismayed at AI bashing because its consistently winning at red team and blue team tasks and now better than preliminary code review and if the hatemongering bandwagon wins our team will lose the ai advantage.
I'm looking at seriously billions in cost reductions and sustainability wins from LLMs applied to production processes and products (in various non-tech and tech fields). Justify estimates of CapEx, OpEx, Marginal cost for Garage, Lab, Pilot, Production, and Giga-Production scales. Find synergies, valorize waste, eliminate hazards, eliminate external costs.
But that's all only exploratory, discovery phase work.
Does a persin need to rephrase it by human proxy in order to link to it, if they've applied AI?
There is significant real potential opportunity to applied AI, so it's disheartening to learn that the AI spam justifies new censorship controls in this also an election year.
It's really frustrating and alienating to be subject to false allegations. It's really frustrating to be censored or shawbdned.
When it's "censor that and all their other s because it's AI" but it's not. No AI ever should not be the TOS.
A person could create a "split with us against AI" site as a separate forum and test and buy insurance for that.
HN does not but Reddit supports bots; you put "bot" in the bot's username.
Perhaps AI-written articles should include the prompt as hidden text on the page. Or include a link with the prompt embedded, that causes the AI to spit out the same article that you could then ask questions about.
“Why didn’t the author consider [this thing that seems similar]” is almost never something you can ask an llm, especially for articles where the author is putting in so little of their own effort that they don’t edit out obvious AI tells.
Thanks for giving shape to a general annoyance, in my case with code, that I only recently started noticing.
When discussing code with my colleagues, especially with those that I do not know particularly well, I often relied on the quality of the code they produced to modulate how technical the conversation ought to be be.
Now, instead, I often see very complex code from people that I know wouldn't have been able to produce it themselves, and I have no clue how to engage with it, how to review it with them, how detailed can my comments be etc.
It's pretty annoying.
It doesn’t matter. The human responsible for the written piece is … responsible for the written piece. If someone is willing to use AI to supplement their own intellect and/or writing abilities, then they need to take ownership of the mistakes, misconceptions, etc., that come along with that, the same as an author who does all the work themselves. The problem you’ve identified here is that the human responsible for the writing is not fully taking responsibility for the writing.
It's not a purity test, it's as the author is communicating they don't care whether the reader has any signals of what is accurate vs inaccurate information, which puts the burden of investigating how much is accurate on the reader at every step when there's some minimum expectation that should be an author's role (outside of topics where there is some expectation of ulterior motives/biases and one would naturally engage more critically minded).
When people complain here it's more often than not when an article has no disclaimer about AI use or what has been human-reviewed, so the burden again falls on the reader who is now even more skeptical. That is more to ask of a reader than when it's coming from say a known expert and the reader is receptive to engage and learn.
That's the reason tired cliches and turns of phrase (overused by LLMs) have become a heuristic for whether to pay attention, because it's a sign that there's some unknown quantity of of the article that hasn't had human review and it's easier to put in the bucket of 'maybe worthwhile but would need a fully human analysis of this' or just outright rejection (as we've seen from comments).
Edit: I see a sibling comment has raised the same observation.
I know several people that have difficulty writing but are still f*cking smart. So what, they should refrain from using AI to help them because the AI police says so?
But yeah, let's continue classifying people based on their outer qualities and habits... History showed us were this leads us to.
And here an em dash -- to freak out the AI police.
Do what other people do when they cannot do something: don’t do it?
I can’t draw or do art and I don’t have an AI generate art for me so I can LARP as an artist.
You can just… not do things? Nobody is putting a gun to your head to make you write blog posts and post them on HN.
PS that's not an em-dash – this is.
Better is simply don't publish slop. If someone spends time refining and editing their idea with AI assistance and are happy with the quality of the finished product then I say go for it.
It's not like all human writers produce content that is worth reading.
The issue is that AI doesn't actually help them; it corrects grammar and removes voice. If you're trying to sound more professional/convincing/engaging, AI usage undermines that.
A strategy for people who feel they can't write is to just keep it short and sweet. Intelligence is such a potent force. It shines through.
What humans want most is to hear the voices of other humans.
However, the second part of the problem - the AI comments, that's really what kills the discussion and eventually the community. If I have trust issues that I'm talking to a bot but not a real user, I am not going to engage further. I might or might not flag the account, but at some point, I'm going to be tired of reporting if everywhere around me it's just bots pretending to be humans. I think this is the more serious problem that needs focus.
In my experience, sloppy AI content almost always, sometime instantly even gets flagged out.
Congratulations on your recursive ascension, too
Also, votes and flags are personal, even intimate data. I can't imagine publishing it.
Poor writing is not a new thing, of course. Most of the moderation mechanisms that it uses were perfected a quarter century ago when sites like Slashdot were popular as a defense mechanism against bad user behavior. Bad user behavior impacts commenting, article submissions, and moderating itself. While bad users now have AI to abuse, the problem of a large volume of low quality content is is largely the same. The moderation mechanisms end up targeting the problem at the source: identifying good and bad users. So, the same amount of bad users generating a lot more garbage isn't that big of a deal. Getting good karma still is a lot of work and it makes identifying all the garbage created by users without that relatively straightforward.
Using LLMs to tag, flag and filter content might not be a bad thing to experiment with. There are a lot of low quality AI generated opinion pieces that somehow make it to the front page. Same for political and controversial stuff, which of course is against the HN guidelines for content. Auto flagging things that obviously violate guidelines should not be that hard. It's just a matter of having good guard rails. @dang might actually already be doing that. I know I would be if staying on top of piles of generated garbage was part of my job description. It might also be done to give good content a little boost.
The new articles section has a very low signal to noise ratio currently and the window for good content to make it past that is very short. Often articles on the front page will have many duplicate submissions that never made it past that. IMHO duplicate submissions should just count as upvotes on the original. Auto de-duplicating based on canonical URL should not be that hard.
I respectfully disagree on almost all counts (beyond poor writing not being new, of course!).
Moderation mechanisms have not been perfected. They're certainly not perfect, and, given that, I don't know what would make one call them perfected. Humans have probably gotten more accustomed to being moderated, but it'd take a lot to convince me that we have even reached a decent place for moderation at moderate scale, let alone something that is good-to-perfect.
Most importantly, the problem of low quality content is now not the same. Magnitudes matter, and a difference in degree eventually becomes a difference in kind. LLMs have escalated the problem of garbage content beyond what would've previously been conceivable.
To illustrate: How do you dispose of several trash bags at once? Take them to the trash can. How do you dispose of several tens of trash bags at once? Need to rent a dumpster.
Or a classic: If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem.
Bringing it back to written content: doing human-driven moderation on hundreds of submissions a day is tractable with (idk) a couple of people. For thousands or tens of thousands? Intractable. And bear in mind that human-driven moderation is one of the things that keeps HN a better place on the net than many (most) others.
Generally I'd appreciate a top level comment from the submitter saying this is LLM generated but I read it and found it interesting because x,y,z because I'd rather read slop someone vouches for than slop someone hasn't
(I already flag submissions I think were written by AI.)
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"?
just for a while :)
That said, the stigma is real. 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 have given up on posting my content here for that reason. I still get hundreds of views a day and positive feedback from others, but its just not worth the negativity that comes from posting on HN. I have considered allowing to toggle between my original drafts and the AI output (a shit/slop toggle), but i am not particularly comfortable about that either - otherwise i wouldn't have used AI in the first place.
Either way, its an arms race. Its already trivial to avoid detection with fine-tuned humanisers. I'd rather not hide what I am doing and have something that I feel reads well than hide it and sacrifice the message.
EDIT: downvotes, as expected. hope you see this anyway @dang - this is exactly why you shouldnt flag AI. The downvoters are making my point more coherently than I ever will.
Why is that a good thing? If you aren't going to bother to write something, other people shouldn't have to bother to read it, so please don't put it in the world at all.
Gatekeeping based on skill and motivation is good!
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.
It seems better if HN users poke around and decide for themselves what the articles and threads are about, and which are interesting or not.
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.
Humans? We're not particularly effective at this as a whole...
AI service ? We'd probably have to pay for that AI to detect that AI and well.. Its also not particularly effective
Effectiveness is important, because we dont want real human produced data to be accidentally removed from view, just as much if not more so than having AI gen data being left on the site.
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?
The idiom is someone says “tell us how you really feel” (which he’s rephrased here) to express (I think) that one’s expressed opinion is far too dramatic in its opposition of some thing. It’s meant to be read ironically.
having said that, i'd still much prefer a norm of including prompt history with the article, or the codebase for that matter, so people can choose for themselves :)
On the extreme end you have recipe blogspam, with the tropey life stories and Amazon affiliate spam that precede the meat (pardon the pun). If that pre-filler is inconsequential, why not have an LLM parse the semantic markup - which 99% of recipe sites use for Google SEO - to produce custom content for you? Like a history of the ingredients, or better instructions with an equipment list tailored to your kitchen and timings/temps for your specific oven?
I can see there being a middle ground where you publish some sort of context that a user’s LLM can generate the content from. Is it fundamentally any different from dramatized non-fiction? Think of books like Operation Mincemeat where the facts are thoroughly researched, but the author uses a lot of artistic license to tell the story.
But to your point, if there is back-and-forth, I wish people would pay more attention to the obvious traits of LLM writing. Not everything needs to read like it’s a snappy editorial, but I sense we’re still in the early days where people have been handed this technology and are simply excited that they can pump out 1000 words in a coherent narrative.
Regarding llm writing, it is disappointing. Especially as people could use it in the “opposite” direction, using the tirelessness of the llm to experiment with the communication with the aim to make it as clear as possible for the reader…
Also, the information density plummeted because of ads, not because it was demanded by readers.
Two showstopper problems with this:
1. Many of "us" don't like interacting with LLMs more than we have to, and view reading as a pleasure that would be extinguished instantly at a chat prompt.
2. It lazily implies that the essence of an article is so easy to communicate that it can be compressed into a prompt. There's a reason for titles, subtitles, open sentences, hero images, paragraph openers, etc etc: they pull you in, establish tone and voice and so forth. Where are the prompts that can entice a reader to even skim it much less plug into their favorite chatbot?
Whether you agree that a con artist is only a criminal if he gets caught, or you think he’s a criminal the whole time, surely you can see why many people might want to know if they are dealing with a friend and not something simulating a friend.
if it were, 90% of startups would be illegal and they founders jailable
The era of people caring about knowledge/learning seems to be dead. At least in the way we used to, because a lot of what we needed that for can now be done by the LLMs.
Yes, because I have an interest in traces and mechanisms of human connections being preserved.
Like, of course it matters who wrote it - an author imparts parts of themself onto their work. That’s what makes writing that’s worth reading.
I really hope there's a huge bot army pretending to be those people, but alas, you might be right and the reality is worse than that.
Right now, in mid 2026, many of believe that LLM prose is not as good as human output.
The deception is one aspect. AI for spellcheck and proofreading is one thing; AI writing the content wholesale in the first person, which you pass off as your own, is another. I also don’t care for the Tailwind-styled demo sites that have flooded Show HN.
The sort of content that people react viscerally to (as slop) is rarely that subtle. Again, no problem with careful and subtle use (see CGI in movies), but when I see Claude-isms and snappy section headings that nobody used to use, I close the page.
You can/should write for you, to get experience writing, to present a portfolio, to share things you find interesting, a photo a day, whatever. Why does that have to die?
I don't think this is true. I think most of the people who post LLM content without editing and without even style guidelines are simply of the opinion that the resulting text is genuinely of an acceptable quality.
Agreed with the rest of your post. We should think of this in terms of quality of the result, not the process.
I don't disagree with that assessment, with one extra detail: for many of them their bar of “an acceptable quality” is too low. No higher than “sod it, it'll do” and often lower. To too many, generated content is seen as a gateway to maybe accidentally becoming some sort of influencer, a way to get themselves out there with little or no care about whether their contribution is actually useful overall just as long as it garners a bit of attention.
I don't want to waste time hunting through the extra piles of “it'll do” or worse to find the remaining nuggets of actually good writing, be they entirely human made or created by humans using LLM assistance. There are at lease a few people of agree with me on the matter.
The problem with judging on quality is that you often have to at least start reading the slop to realise and move on to the next thing. Rating systems and flags may help somewhat, but they will all eventually be gamed so it will become yet another battle of attrition: people and systems trying to filter out the crap while other people and their systems finding it more profitable to spend time breaking the filtering mechanisms instead of producing content good enough to not actually be filtered by them.
As for the rating system, we already have many people who first check the comments for things like "AI, don't bother". I think that's OK; it could be better by quoting two or three sample sentences so that others could quickly judge how bad it is. I don't think it needs to be more formal than this.
It’s the same reason recipe websites don’t honestly label that they ripped off other recipe websites: it would train users to go to the source.
For example, consider this project where I also complained about atrocious writing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48876506. I think this is really just someone who wanted to "create" something, I don't think this is in the same category as recipe/blog spam. I don't think the person who put this online thinks that this landing page is worse than any other programming language website.
That was a two-pronged thing. As well as the blog-spam drowning out what good blogs there were, a lot of people that used to output that way moved to centralised platforms that then either tried to lock their content in, or surrounded it with ad-tech bothers, or both.
> if an AI generated article is indistinguishable from a human written article…
Quite a bit of AI generated output is indistinguishable from crap human writing, often mediocre human writing, and that is actually part of the problem. A lot of people bang something out of their LLM/agents of choice and not bother taking the time needed to lift to good or excellent, so there is a bulk of mediocre or worse stuff flooding the medium because it is so easy to produce. But do we really need 100+ mediocre articles and a few good ones on a subject where there would previously have been a few mediocre ones and still a few good+ ones? It makes the genuinely worthwhile content much harder to stumble upon, especially as the ones taking the lazier approaches to writing seem to be making greater efforts in self-promotion with the time they have saved!
> if an AI generated article is […] is accurate and interesting, do you care who wrote it?
Firstly: maybe not, or at least less so. But I'm not convinced they can be trusted to be that accurate. I don't trust the average human that much either, they are often authoritatively wrong too (which doesn't help the LLMs, which have been at least partially trained on authoritatively wrong content), but I trust good human writers (who may be assisted by LLMs these days) above other human writers and content almost entirely drawn from LLMs.
Secondly: Yes. I care. I'm still smarting that after years of people being fined heavily, band from things, and even imprisoned, for copying content, we seem fine with the big companies pirating whatever they want for training purposes⁰. Yes, some fines have been paid, but a few hours worth of income isn't even a slap on the wrist given how much funny money is being sloshed around the sector ATM, and do you know any content makers who got a share of those fines? I'm still trying to avoid being a part of that, to the point of being in the process of committing career suicide¹, so yes, I do care who/what made most effort on creating the article. Given a choice between human, human with LLM assist, LLM with minimal human editing, and purer slop, I would morally prefer something from as close to the “just humans” end of the scale over anything else, even if the quality is practically identical.
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[0] I wonder how the corporates would take the “we only downloaded and used it ignoring the licence for model training purposes” point being used about their output. After all, I'm only using it irrespective of your licence to train the intelligence model that sits between my ears!
[1] The current corporate overlords have as much said “get with AI or be left behind”, and I'm sure being left behind will involve being PIPed out to pasture. I might be able to argue “the difference is enough to be considered a material change in roll, so you can't force that under UK employment law nor sack me for not playing ball”, but the same change-of-roll argument just opens up the possibility of redundancy instead², which is only marginally better. In either case I'm done for working in development with my current attitudes.
[2] this interpretation, if not legal pigswill entirely, also makes “we need less legacy developers and more agenic developers, your legacy roll is therefore redundant, do you want to change to an agent-based job or do you want to leave?” perfectly legal.
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 in a hypothetical future things may change 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
AI writing is not the problem - low effort is the problem. Low effort AI articles are full of tics which are obvious, if you've done a lot of AI writing. To write well with AI you need to spend a good deal of time editing.
If you submit something that's low effort but has a clickbait headline that appeals to HN, you may well make the front page even if the article is lightweight (it does happen!) This is true both for AI and for human written articles.
On the flip side, somebody could spend an enormous amount of effort creating a masterpiece with AI. Penalizing that because of the tool that was used is arbitrary.
I do think the dead giveaways (em dashes, it's not X it's Y, etc.) are annoying to come across repeatedly. A person not bothering to remove these tells feels 'low effort' to me.