We've been asking people not to comment like this on HN. We can never know exactly how much an individual's writing is LLM-generated, and the negative consequences of a false accusation outweigh the positive consequences of a valid one.
We don't want LLM-generated content on HN, but we also don't want a substantial portion of any thread being devoted to meta-discussion about whether a post is LLM-generated, and the merits of discussing whether a post is LLM-generated, etc. This all belongs in the generic tangent category that we're explicitly trying to avoid here.
If you suspect it, please use the the established approaches for reacting to inappropriate content: if it's bad content for HN, flag it; if it's a bad comment downvote it; and if there's evidence that it's LLM-generated, email us to point it out. We'll investigate it the same way we do when there are accusations of shilling etc, and we'll take the appropriate action. This way we can cut down on repetitive, generic tangents, and unfair accusations.
I don’t mind articles that have a hint of “an AI helped write this” as long as the content is actually informationally dense and well explained. But this article is an obvious ad, has almost no interesting information or summaries or insights, and has the… weirdly chipper? tone that AI loves to glaze readers with.
3/4 of what hits the front page is an "ad" by that standard. I don't see how you can get less promotional than a long-form piece about why your tech is obsolete. Seems just mean-spirited.
Why call it an ad? It’s not even on the company site. I only mentioned my company upfront so people get context (why we had to build a complex RAG pipeline, what kinds of documents we’re working with, and why the examples come from real production use cases).
It stands out because the flow and tone was clearly AI generated. It’s fluff, and I don’t trust it was written by a human who wasn’t hallucinating the non-company related talking points.
There are typos in it, too. I don't think this kind of style critique is really on topic for HN.
Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
Those guidelines that you reference talk almost exclusively about annoyances on the webpage itself, not the content of the article.
I think it's fair to point out that many articles today are essentially a little bit of a human wrapper around a core of ChatGPT content.
Whether or not this was AI-generated, the tells of AI-written text are all throughout it. There are some people who have learned to write like the AI talks to them, which is really not much of an improvement over just using the AI as your word processor.
Do you agree that bickering over AI-generated vs. not AI-generated makes for dull discussion? Sliding sewing needles deep into my fingernail bed sounds more appealing than nagging over such minutiae.
It’s also dull to brush my teeth, but I still do it because it is necessary.
The problem is that HN is one of the few places left where original thoughts are the main reason people are here. Letting LLMs write articles for us here is just not all that useful or fun.
Maybe quarantining AI related articles to their own thing a la Show HN would be a good move. I know it is the predominant topic here for the moment but like there is other interesting stuff too. And articles about AI written by AI so that Google’s AI can rank it higher and show it to more AI models to train on is just gross.
minutiae to me is the effort of loading a page and reading half a paragraph in order to determine the AI tone for myself. The new AI literature frontier has actually added value to reading the comments first on HN in a surprising twist -- saves me the trouble.
There's an idea - create a website which can accurately assess "Slop-o-Meter" for any link, kind of like what FakeSpot of old did for Amazon products with fake reviews.
It certainly makes a dull discussion, but frankly we need to have it. Post-AI HN is now a checkbox on a marketing plan - like a GitHub repository is - and I’m sick of being manipulated and sold to in one of the few forums that wasn’t gamed. It’s not minutiae, it’s an overarching theme that’s enshittifying the third places. Heck even having to discuss this is ruining it (yet here I am lol).
I'm guessing first draft was AI. I had to re-read that part a couple times because the flow was off. That second paragraph was completely unnecessary too since the previous paragraph already got the point across that "context window small in 2022".
Go on an average college campus, and almost anyone can tell you when an essay was written with AI vs when it wasn't. Is this a skill issue? Are better prompters able to evade that innate immune response? Probably yes. But the revulsion is innate.
We've been asking people not to comment like this on HN. We can never know exactly how much an individual's writing is LLM-generated, and the negative consequences of a false accusation outweigh the positive consequences of a valid one.
We don't want LLM-generated content on HN, but we also don't want a substantial portion of any thread being devoted to meta-discussion about whether a post is LLM-generated, and the merits of discussing whether a post is LLM-generated, etc. This all belongs in the generic tangent category that we're explicitly trying to avoid here.
If you suspect it, please use the the established approaches for reacting to inappropriate content: if it's bad content for HN, flag it; if it's a bad comment downvote it; and if there's evidence that it's LLM-generated, email us to point it out. We'll investigate it the same way we do when there are accusations of shilling etc, and we'll take the appropriate action. This way we can cut down on repetitive, generic tangents, and unfair accusations.
I don’t mind articles that have a hint of “an AI helped write this” as long as the content is actually informationally dense and well explained. But this article is an obvious ad, has almost no interesting information or summaries or insights, and has the… weirdly chipper? tone that AI loves to glaze readers with.
How is this an ad? It's a couple thousand words about how they built something complicated that was then obsoleted.
in the same vein that a 'Behind The Scenes Look At The Making of Jurassic Park' is , in fact, an ad.
having a company name pitched at you within the first two sentences is a pretty good give away.
3/4 of what hits the front page is an "ad" by that standard. I don't see how you can get less promotional than a long-form piece about why your tech is obsolete. Seems just mean-spirited.
It’s because the article’s main goal is to sell me the company’s product, not inform me about RAG. It’s a zero calorie article.
> 3/4 of what hits the front page is an "ad" by that standard.
Is anyone disagreeing with that?
haha so true!
Why call it an ad? It’s not even on the company site. I only mentioned my company upfront so people get context (why we had to build a complex RAG pipeline, what kinds of documents we’re working with, and why the examples come from real production use cases).
It stands out because the flow and tone was clearly AI generated. It’s fluff, and I don’t trust it was written by a human who wasn’t hallucinating the non-company related talking points.
There are typos in it, too. I don't think this kind of style critique is really on topic for HN.
Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Those guidelines that you reference talk almost exclusively about annoyances on the webpage itself, not the content of the article.
I think it's fair to point out that many articles today are essentially a little bit of a human wrapper around a core of ChatGPT content.
Whether or not this was AI-generated, the tells of AI-written text are all throughout it. There are some people who have learned to write like the AI talks to them, which is really not much of an improvement over just using the AI as your word processor.
Do you agree that bickering over AI-generated vs. not AI-generated makes for dull discussion? Sliding sewing needles deep into my fingernail bed sounds more appealing than nagging over such minutiae.
It’s also dull to brush my teeth, but I still do it because it is necessary.
The problem is that HN is one of the few places left where original thoughts are the main reason people are here. Letting LLMs write articles for us here is just not all that useful or fun.
Maybe quarantining AI related articles to their own thing a la Show HN would be a good move. I know it is the predominant topic here for the moment but like there is other interesting stuff too. And articles about AI written by AI so that Google’s AI can rank it higher and show it to more AI models to train on is just gross.
I'm not the person you're replying to, but for my part I do actually like to hear when people think it sounds like it's AI-generated.
minutiae to me is the effort of loading a page and reading half a paragraph in order to determine the AI tone for myself. The new AI literature frontier has actually added value to reading the comments first on HN in a surprising twist -- saves me the trouble.
It's more akin to complaining about how Google search results have gotten worse.
Almost as dull as being spoon-fed AI slop articles, yeah.
There's an idea - create a website which can accurately assess "Slop-o-Meter" for any link, kind of like what FakeSpot of old did for Amazon products with fake reviews.
I've tried doing this, but LLMs are shockingly bad at differentiating between their own slopware and true wetware thoughts.
It certainly makes a dull discussion, but frankly we need to have it. Post-AI HN is now a checkbox on a marketing plan - like a GitHub repository is - and I’m sick of being manipulated and sold to in one of the few forums that wasn’t gamed. It’s not minutiae, it’s an overarching theme that’s enshittifying the third places. Heck even having to discuss this is ruining it (yet here I am lol).
I hate to ruin the magic for you, but HN has been part of marketing plans long before AI.
"This wasn't written by a person" isn't a tangential style critique.
I'm guessing first draft was AI. I had to re-read that part a couple times because the flow was off. That second paragraph was completely unnecessary too since the previous paragraph already got the point across that "context window small in 2022".
On the whole though, I still learned a lot.
Thanks! Sorry if the flow was off
It truly is unfortunate. Thankfully most people seem to have an innate immune response to this kind of RLHF slop.
Unfortunately this can't be true, otherwise it wouldn't be a product of RLHF.
Go on an average college campus, and almost anyone can tell you when an essay was written with AI vs when it wasn't. Is this a skill issue? Are better prompters able to evade that innate immune response? Probably yes. But the revulsion is innate.
Crowds can have terrible taste, even if they're made up of people with good (or at least middling) taste
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