alt Hacker NewsWhat a welcome post. The whole reason I come here is to get thoughtful input from smart people, and not what I could get myself from an LLM. While we are at it; Think your own thoughts as well :) I know how easy it is to "let it come up with a first draft" and not spend the real effort of thinking for yourself on questions, but you'll find it's a road to perdition if you let yourself slip into the habit. Thanks to all the humans still here!!
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Totally agree with you. I come here to read comments made by humans. If I need to read comments made by AI Bots I would go to Twitter or reddit, both made me not read the comments section entirely.
Agreed- if it wasn't important enough to spend the time thinking of a satisfying way of writing it, I don't feel like it's important enough for me to spend my bandwidth reading it.
Not to mention, so much of my thinking has been helped by formulating ways of communicating my thoughts that anyone who isn't in the habit of at least struggling with it is, from my point of view, cheating themselves.
Yes, I find LLM-written posts valueless because I can already talk to a LLM any time I want (and get the same info). It's not these commenters are the Queen of Sheba bearing a priceless gift of LLM slop. That stuff's pretty cheap.
Copy+pasted LLM output is actually far worse than prompting an LLM myself, because it hides an important detail: the prompt. Maybe the prompter asked their question wrong, or is trolling ("only output wrong answers!"). I don't know how the blob of text they placed on my screen was generated, and have to take them at their word.
I actually do something similar on my personal site using this note that includes a purposeful typo: https://jasoneckert.github.io/site/about-this-site/
I'm hoping people catch that typo after reading "every single word, phrase, and typo (purposeful or not)" and smiled every time I've had someone post a PR with a fix for it (that I subsequently reject ;-)
great idea, but seems a little futile if there is no protection agains llms training on HN comments. ironically, if HN can succefully prevent llm content, it will become one of the best sources available for training data
Amen and agreed 100%
There is no universal cure so every community has to figure it out. I know HN will.
If the community gets lazy with our standards, we drown.
Downvote & flag the AI slop to hell. If we need other mechanisms, let’s figure those out.
Quite! It's very easy to send a HN link to one of our new artificial friends to see what they have to say about it. Subsequently publicly posting the inference variation you receive strikes me as very self-centered. Passing it off as your own words - which the majority seem to - is doubly bizarre.
It's very funny to imagine people prompting: "Write a compelling comment, for me, to pass off as my thoughts, for this HN news thread, which will attract both upvotes and engagement.".
In good faith, per the guidelines: What losers!
Many programmers believe that math is the best way to solve problems or order the world or whatever. There are lots of real 20 year olds out there using chatbots to "optimize" their humanities learning, or to "optimizing" using dating apps. It's a fact about this audience. Some people have a very myopic point of view, however, it coheres with certain cultural forces, overlapping with people of specific ethnic heritages, who are from California and New York, go to fancy school and post online, to earn tons of money, buy conspicuous real estate, date skinny women and marry young.
These aren't the marina bros, they're the guys who think they're really smart because they did well in math. They are using LLMs to reply to people. They LOOK like you. Do you get it?
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You are missing the point here.
It is not about whether the comment was written by AI, a native English speaker, English major, or ESL.
What matters is an idea or an opinion. That is all what matters.
I try to "think my own thoughts" but then I see them elsewhere all the time.
My twitter bio has been "Thoughts expressed here are probably those of someone else." for over half a decade.
Same here, and similarly, I come here to find interesting submissions from smart people. I want to read their own thoughts in their own words, not what an LLM has to say. I'm capable of prompting my own LLM with their prompts if they'd supply them.
It would be great if we could have some kind of indicator that a submission is AI output, perhaps a submitter could vouch that their submission is AI or not, and if they consistently submit AI spam, they have their submission ability suspended or get banned.