Similar discussion on the other site: https://lobste.rs/s/ktew3s/who_does_anubis_actually_stop#c_c...

Maybe just adding down-vote to submissions would do?

Considering YC invests in AI I doubt you’ll get anything of the sort. Too many people here also think you just have to give in and accept (abuser mentality IMO).

> why is the regular voting system not enough

Voting systems can be gamed and as HN becomes bigger and bigger it'll start to attract unsavory audiences who have an agenda.

A problem I see is that what someone may consider to be AI-generated actually isn't. And the AI checkers aren't reliable enough to definitely enough say something is AI-generated.

I'm of the deepest conviction AI-generated text should not show up at all. Proving that however can be difficult (obvious LLM tells aside). Requiring evidence of authentic human authorship is also difficult, though increasingly I lean towards communities where that is a given for any legitimate shares.

The recent rule addition to the Guidelines says this: "Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans." And I think that covers comments, but I'd be happy to see it also cover articles that are blatantly and primarily if not exclusively AI-generated. But how much AI is permitted? For instance: I'm writing a blog post now. It's all mine. If I include an AI-generated cartoon at the end, just to illustrate something, but not to be the whole or primary point of the article, is that AI-generated? Would the rule be conservative in nature to the extent that mostly human but clearly also AI-enhanced might get flagged but it's in the discretion of the moderators? How would you propose enforcing as to articles (versus comments which are usually quite obvious and thankfully have pretty much stopped being AI-generated since the rule was implemented, for the most part)?

That will only further increase the stigma surrounding LLMs. On Lobsters it actually got to the point where I no longer felt welcome on the site, even though I don't use LLMs to generate articles. The constant "this is AI slop" commentary is noisy and tiresome as well.

Regarding 1, I think a) a sizeable fraction of voters are not able to recognize AI-generated text b) many who notice don't care, or are willing to overlook it if the premise is interesting enough. (The latter is true for me, on occasion)

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.

Sounds like a good job for AI. Why should humans have to waste their time on it? Accounts that post any should just get banned and deleted.

Great so I can use a CSS rule to hide anything with the flag.

The regular voting system is not enough because posts can't be downvoted and for some reason many people are not bothered by the notion of reading something no one bothered to write.

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.

Might be more appropriate to add a "not AI" flag at this point.

+1, I would love to stop reading AI slop.

This makes sense if AI articles are bad or low quality, but what if one day, the AI generated content is actually good? As good or even better than what any human creates?

Is it purely just a "human supremacist" desire that fuels the motivation to ban or block such articles?

This is something that works better on paper in practice. Namely, there are a hell of a lot of false positives of AI use which frequently causes shitstorms on social media where someone says "AI?" in bad faith and now the OP has to defend themselves and in the case of writing a blog post there aren't as concrete ways to defend yourself. (no, demanding the edit history of the post is not reasonable)

Hacker News adopting such a feature would likely do more harm than good.

Most parsimonious explanation IMV: site staff can't see most AI slop. Reasons unimportant, but moderation systems are guaranteed to break down when the moderators themselves have poor classification ability.

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 allow genai text on HN itself - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079. How to enforce this is a separate question, of course, but the rule exists.

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—or, to put it a bit more conservatively—sharply discounts it. This is why we see so many "just show me the prompt" posts, along with others like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/genai-pushback. I built that list so I have something to send to users who email about why their genai articles got flagged.

There is a fascinating arms race happening right now where 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. No doubt the AIs will adapt to this over time, and humans will adapt in turn. Where it ends up is anyone's guess. I have an optimistic view, but I've been wrong about this so many times already that I have low confidence in it.

[editing - bear with me...]

how are we detecting AI gen text?

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.

Nobody wants to label their stuff as AI generated because they removed credibility. Communities can flag posts as AI generated based on speculation and telltales but it won’t be 100% and will take extra work.

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?