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.
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.
I think it would be great if AI-generated submissions were outright banned as they fundamentally break the balance of effort that HN was built upon, but as was already stated by another user, YC is heavily invested in AI so there's a conflict of interest there.
And 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.
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)
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.
I imagine the set of articles that are somehow both interesting-enough-to-read but not interesting-enough-to-write is smaller than you'd think.
If there is a great post on a topic and the author used AI when generating it, what’s so bad about that?
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. I think this norm has always been present but we didn't know until we'd really explored the alternatives.
I spend a LOT of time reading AI generated content because I use AI a lot for various purposes - maybe I'm more sensitive to its voice than some. AI voice always bothers me and its been getting more annoying the more I notice it, but there is a huge difference in reading responses to my own prompts and in reading the response to a prompt I haven't seen, when I don't know how many revisions there were, when I don't know if a human mind reviewed it at all before clicking send.
It becomes an unacceptable distraction because I don't know if I'm investing more time in the content than the author did, when in normal written communication the author would be putting in at least 5x the work.
Is it purely just a "human supremacist" desire that fuels the motivation to ban or block such articles?
Hacker News adopting such a feature would likely do more harm than good.
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.
ranger_danger•50m ago