I hope HN doesn't get into moderating the politics of articles.

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.

▲ bryanrasmussen 17 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

>in a world where the difference between human trained to talk like an AI and AI masquerading as human

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.

▲ matheusmoreira 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You've accurately described the current state of Lobsters.

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3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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archagon 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

As opposed to wonderful old HN, where about 95% of the front page is now AI, AI-related, or AI-generated.

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matheusmoreira 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There's significant overlap between the front pages of HN and Lobsters. Almost every time I try to submit the interesting articles I see on Lobsters here, I just get redirected to the existing discussion thread.

The massive 1000+ comments/upvotes AI model release threads only show up on HN. Lobsters doesn't accept "business" articles like that. You're quite likely to find reactionary articles that are critical of AI on the front page though. There are several on the front page right now, in addition to the ones derisively tagged vibecoding.

	▲	mmastrac 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There's a bot user that seems to crosspost every lobsters story here if it isn't already.

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dang 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's a high exaggeration of course, but in the wonderful old HN tradition of perceiving the site as dominated by $badness, where everyone has their own perception of $badness.

I'm not picking on you - it's practically a universal response, so much so that it must be driven by human hard-wiring. I've written about this so many times that for once I don't even know what to link to. Perhaps https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098. Or maybe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48427800

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archagon 31 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Fine. Looking at today's /active, it's more than half just based on the titles. (Likely 2/3 or more in practice, but I did not delve into each post.) And this does not feel particularly unusual.

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mh- 41 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

(Apologies if you've commented on the following already, but I've not seen it.)

The most concerning growing trend I see is comments that don't violate any guidelines, but are flagged to dead.

I'm not talking about posters that are shadowbanned, but about comments that engaged thoughtfully on a topic but the rest of the thread disagreed emphatically with.

I also don't even mean controversial takes on hot-button issues like vaccines.

Just plain old bucking the trend in a thread about AI, transit, housing, layoffs, etc.

I've been browsing with showdead on for as long as I can remember, and I'm seeing this accelerate. Comments from folks both you and I respect as high quality contributors here.

I don't know what the solution is, but it discourages me (and I'm sure others) from having the kind of thought-provoking dialog I've gotten used to reading here for the last 15 years.

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defrost 19 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> comments that don't violate any guidelines, but are flagged to dead.

Vouch them and/or email to hn@ycombinator.com and say why you think they deserve to be [undead].

I see that a lot, some have been erroneously caught by the real time AI detect filter (which actually isn't too bad at slicing out the actual AI gen comments) others have gone hard against the zeitgeist.

I've had the mods reinstate comments that I've thoroughly disagreed with but were making their best case for an opposing view - the threads are better with the best arguments forward for all sides of the elephant.

	▲	mh- 11 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I always vouch them but have never bothered to email. I figure the mods are seeing the same HN I am. But maybe I spend too much time here some evenings.. But yes, it's the "going against the zeitgeist" ones I have in mind. It feels very damaging to the community.

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dang 25 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I'd need to see specific links, but many of those posts are probably being killed because our software classified them as being genai, which is not allowed on HN (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079.)

	▲	mh- 4 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		In the meantime, here's one I saw recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48660796
	▲	mh- 12 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Happy to find and email you some when I'm at my desk. (I'm well aware of the genAI policy, and very supportive of it.)

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grahamburger 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And the remainder is people complaining about all the AI

▲ dang 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You posted your comment while I was editing mine so this conversation is in an indeterminate state! (Not a criticism - I take forever to edit these things sometimes.)

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.

▲ sph 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Honest question, why would it be a grim future for people to be allergic to what, in 99% of the cases, is effortless slop?

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.

▲ MisterSandman 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Hacker News is already in the business of policing articles though. This is a curated list of articles that people share, and a lot of unrelated articles are automatically deleted or just downvoted out of existence. This isnt Reddit.

It’s okay to have an opinionated website. Not every corner of the internet needs to be a bastion of free speech

▲ satisfice 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

“AI generated” is already a slur.

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dang 3 hours ago | parent [-]

It's sometimes used that way, sometimes a fact, and sometimes both. It's all unclear because we're still in the early stages of this working itself out.

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minimaxir 3 hours ago | parent [-]

And then there's clanker (which has fortunately tapered off a bit): https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

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dang 2 hours ago | parent [-]

This is a nested-enough subthread that I can say whatever I want because no one will ever link to it because if they do no one will care.

The class of comments you're talking about—not just ones that say "clanker" literally but the more general category—is particle-wave undecidable right now.

If the commenter is right—i.e. if the commenter they are castigating actually did post LLM-generated text—then it's a community immune system response.

If the commenter is wrong—i.e. they are castigating a sincere human and hauling them to court on false charges—then it's the kind of attack that we tell people not to post here.

They can't know for sure whether what they're saying is true or false, and we can't know for sure whether we should moderate it. Both questions depend on information that is unavailable. This is what I mean when I say that the whole question is in a chaotic state right now, and it's too soon to know which way it will stabilize.

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not-a-llm an hour ago | parent | next [-]

and then some articles will have maybe a small section, 10% of it, LLM generated. And the it really is a superposition of LLM/human written, and flaggable/unflaggable

	▲	dang 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It's true! Or maybe 20% or 60% or 80%.

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minimaxir 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's a fair response.

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bluefirebrand an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't envy the position you're in.

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

	▲	dang 21 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Ok, but we're not talking about all AI usage. We're talking about using AI to process text that we publish for others to read. There are tons of ways to use AI that don't intersect with that.

▲ asdff 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Why would humans ever be trained to talk like an AI? If they are working in some capacity where there is strong incentive to write llm-slop adjacent content, might as well use the llm slop generator.

▲ Barbing 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

  "You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with."

Now if one’s a language model…

(Subconscious training like when we pick up an accent, though eventually folks might automatically code switch - so that’s hopeful.)

▲ unholiness 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Are you maybe misunderstanding this point?

> 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.

▲ minimaxir 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's just LinkedIn.

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asdff 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Scrolling the general feed there makes me want to put a pencil in my eye

	▲	genxy 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Just detox by heading over to youtube logged out.

▲ fzeroracer 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

'humans trained to talk like an AI' is just LinkedIn and I would hope that the last thing anyone wants is for HN to become the utter void that is LinkedIn posts.