alt Hacker NewsThere is an epistemic silver lining. This is in fact a Red Queen's race that cannot be won. So in the end the only solution is to evaluate the text on its own merits without reference to the writer's status, because that status can no longer be reliably detected. For a public feed like this one, the only alternative is to ignore it. The fire hose of data will inevitably become ever more fecal. We can only walk away from it or be more careful about the pearls we pluck out. It ends well only if we get better at pearl detection.
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"cannot be won" "only solution" "only alternative". sorry, no, that's too black and white. There are other solutions, even if they will only work for a couple of days/months/years.
Agreed. Merit is the only fair solution. If OP noticed a garbage post, that means they evaluated a post on merit and decided it was garbage. So it works.
We have genAI generating videos and the quality sucks compared to human produced and filmed content. People call it out and nobody is going to watch a genAI movie at the theater or binge a genAI TV show. Merit based filtering.
GenAI for music is not as good as human-generated music either. Not a single AI song from Suno or Udio has reached the top40. Not even one. 100% of the songs are human because they are evaluated on merit.
We have SWE and agentic benchmarks to evaluate coding LLMs on merit.
Disclaimer: I am a new account.
The thing is, I can read something that's really terribly written and still extract useful information from it. (Suppose, for example, an LLM was directed to synthesize information from some sources that I wouldn't have thought of doing; or a submission simply makes me aware of a blind spot I had. Or I look up documentation and find something that's incredibly verbose and full of marketing-speak, but the code samples look reasonable and can be verified by testing and/or cross-reference.)
This comment uses a lot of big words but it’s full of fallacies.
The HN user base is not perfect at detecting LLM content but a lot of it does get flagged and downvoted eventually. About once a day I’ll click on a link, realize it’s AI slop, and go back to HN to flag it but discover that it’s already flagged.
If you turn on showdead you can see all of the comments from LLM bots that have been discovered and shadowbanned.
The fallacy in the comment above is simple: It’s taking the current situation and extrapolating to an extreme future, then applying the extrapolated future prediction on to the current situation. The current situation does not represent the extreme future predicted. A lot of the LLM content is easily spotted and a lot of it is a waste of time to read, therefore it’s right to police and ban it. Even if imperfect.
> So in the end the only solution is to evaluate the text on its own merits
This falls apart as soon as you realize that evaluating the text requires far more effort than generating it. If you're spending 2 minutes reading text that took 2 seconds to generate, you already lost.
I'm somewhat keen to adopt ATProto's feed generators and/or labeller concepts to create an alternative /new and comment prioritizer
> The fire hose of data will inevitably become ever more fecal. We can only walk away from it or be more careful about the pearls we pluck out. It ends well only if we get better at pearl detection.
I'm not sure we can. Imagine an AI that 1) creates multiple accounts, 2) spews huge numbers of comments, 3) has accounts cross-upvote, and then 4) gets enough karma on multiple accounts to get downvote privileges. That AI now controls the conversation. Anything it doesn't like, it can downvote to death.
I mean, I'm sure that HN has a "voting ring" detector, but an AI could do this on a sufficient scale to be too large to register as one cohesive group. And I think HN has a "downvote brigading" detector, but if the AI had enough different accounts, I'm not sure that would trigger, either.
The best chance to detect it is just on volume (or perhaps on too many accounts coming from the same IP address or block). But if the AI was patient, I'm not sure even that would work.
That's depressing. I don't want HN to become a bot playground, with humans crowded out. But I'm not sure we can stop it, if it was done on a large enough scale.
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One way that I could imagine a human-only HN could evolve in the coming AI wasteland: motivated individuals join small local groups and are validated face-to-face at meet-ups. Local trusted leads gatekeep their chapter’s posts, and this scalable moderation works up the tree. Bad leaves get culled out reasonably fast, maybe there’s some controls at the top level that let you see more content “lower down the tree” if you’re ok with lower SNR. Latency to get a post widely distributed grows but I don’t see that as a massive problem.