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Time to add option in Hacker News "AI excluded Show HN"

7•tukunjil•26m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Is anyone seriously considering a career change?

18•zeven7•2h ago•8 comments

Reviewing in the Age of AI

6•maxalbarello•2h ago•4 comments

Rumors of my death are slightly exaggerated

19•CliffStoll•3h ago•3 comments

Ask HN: How to start up as an individual developer?

4•alexyan0431•6h ago•0 comments

Ask HN: How do I get freelance developer jobs?

4•downbad_•1h ago•2 comments

Ask HN: Who got hired with Who wants to be hired? (On 2026)

10•Gooblebrai•11h ago•8 comments

I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA

206•proberts•5d ago•249 comments

Ask HN: Is the future everyone having 100 MCP processes running on their PC?

6•ex-aws-dude•12h ago•4 comments

Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (May 2026)

149•whoishiring•5d ago•476 comments

Ask HN: The death of software development as a job?

13•piratesAndSons•18h ago•21 comments

Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2026)

304•whoishiring•5d ago•463 comments

Ask HN: Is there a term for feeling sad about forced AI adoption?

20•ge96•1d ago•26 comments

Ask HN: Best Embedding Models?

16•devstein•1d ago•17 comments

Ask HN: Is the Job Market Actually Bad?

126•idontwantthis•4d ago•201 comments

Tell HN: An update from the new Tindie team

85•altairprime•1w ago•49 comments

Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day

593•_-x-_•1w ago•188 comments

Ask HN: Where are you getting your AI news from?

10•baetylus•1d ago•13 comments

Why Does a Single Firefox Tab Take Almost 1.5GB RAM?

6•syeare•1d ago•9 comments

Ask HN: Is a hands-off, family-friendly, de-Googled "home lab" feasible?

10•strix_varius•2d ago•11 comments

Ask HN: Why would we care about "extended time horizons" and LLMs?

4•ozozozd•1d ago•5 comments

Ask HN: Those building Swift apps without touching Xcode, what is your workflow?

18•p5v•3d ago•9 comments

You've reached the end!

Open in hackernews

Rumors of my death are slightly exaggerated

19•CliffStoll•3h ago
AI hallucinations are getting ambitious.

A couple people recently emailed, asking whether the Klein bottle business was still operating after my death.

“Huh?” I thought. “I ain’t dead yet.”

After some digging, I discovered the source: an AI-generated review of The Cuckoo’s Egg circulating on Facebook. Alongside the usual synthetic praise and fabricated details, it confidently announced that I had died in May 2024.

Apparently AI has now advanced to the point where it can kill people off before they notice.

Mark Twain once wrote, “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” I never expected to field-test the quote personally.

source: https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=989939243570691&id=100076638743004

Cheers, -Cliff

Comments

Aurornis•2h ago
Good to hear you're doing well.

AI slop is rampant on social media right now. It has become the easy way to grow accounts and gain followers. It takes less than a minute to ask an LLM to write a social media post about something interesting and then post it online. It would be easy to use a $20 per month plan from a major provider to get more accurate output with fewer (though not zero) hallucinations, but the accounts I see seem to be using cheap models that make a lot of mistakes and hallucinate facts.

I have a theory that the hallucinations add extra spice to the posts, making them feel more interesting and therefore more likely to be shared.

It's a difficult time for social media users who haven't yet caught on to what AI spam looks like and why it can't be trusted.

CliffStoll•2h ago
You betcha, Aurornis. Simple economics tells us that cheap work drives out quality. (Is that Gresham's law?).

Slowly, people will adapt to AI in online forums. But for me, it's one more reason to share coffee with friends, rather than investing hours in social media.

FrankWilhoit•56m ago
The larger point is that AI is being developed by people who think everything is performance (in the artistic sense of the word), and therefore, it, expectably and probably even necessarily, thinks so too. This manifests in many contexts and will manifest in many more; but hardly anyone will care about any of them, because just about everybody has succumbed to the performance delusion.