Maybe add a category for posts and comments about AI on HN :)
"Stories about AI" is not offensive to me. Its influence on the industry is undeniable and if I'm feeling tired of that content I just won't engage with it.
AI-writing is another story, but yeah -- HN is downstream of that problem. You can encourage people not to submit articles that seem to be LLM authored, but it won't work.
Part of the ethos of HN is that we don't do content/subject silos; it's a way in which HN is very distinct from Reddit. I don't think this will happen and I think if it does it's a bad idea (not least because I don't think a site dominated by software developers is going to separate itself from AI, any more than it will separate itself from programming language discussions), but I understand the impulse. They're not the funnest stories to comment on.
/ask and /show are sort of HN's version of content/subject silos; posts there can technically appear on the front page but are comparatively less likely to. I imagine they could add a /slop section for AI posts, and then tweak the ranking logic for the main /news page to prevent too many from showing up at once.
I enjoy most of the "AI" posts on HN nowadays. I was really fed up with the MCP/Anthropic PR machine of a year ago, after just a month of that. There's much more actual content today, though I guess we also see less of stable diffusion in favor of transformer LLMs.
I'm afraid that we're in an interregnum. A few years ago AI could not pass a Turing test. A few years from now AI will better at Turing tests than we are. We're now in this strange middle zone where we are dazedly grasping for solutions.
But what happens next, when we just fail at the task of recognizing ourselves in cyberspace? Where LatestClaw is just plain better at mimicking you than you are? What happens to the living we used to claw out of the ether for ourselves?
The majority of the content on the internet is supported by ads with the expectation that you, a human that has money, will consume something and spend money on them.
If people are replaced by some synthetic representation of themselves, what is the incentive to sell advertisements on the internet if there are no humans?
Fake/artificial traffic is a big problem today, it will be harder and harder to detect but its presence will be more and more obvious.
Unregulated capitalism is unsustainable long-term anyways. This is just an accelerant towards the inevitable dystopia-or-socialist-utopia fork in humanity’s road.
We don't post-train current frontier models to pass the Turing test, but if we did, it wouldn't be much of a challenge for current models IMHO. It's a dead benchmark. It tests the human machines, not the machines.
There is no doubt there is a lot of AI generated content. We do it too - code, tutorials, etc. It is just too convenient and useful to ignore.
The question that I have is this.
Is it possible the language will converge towards AI mannerism when writing - i.e. most people will naturally write like AI because they will pick up on the subtleties of language from ChatGPT, Claude, etc? In other words there is an exposure effect at play.
I just found out about Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) which makes me think that the answer is probably "yes".
> Is it possible the language will converge towards AI mannerism when writing
As a non-native English speaker leaving in a non-English speaking country I thought about this too, but in a more selfish and practical manner: what if my English in particular converges towards AI mannerisms?
You see, if you leave in an English speaking country and your family speaks English you still have some amount of guaranteed-to-be-human language input from taking to people face-to-face in real life.
But for me, 99.9% of English input I receive is online. So I wonder, how much of it is already AI and how much has the non-artificial neural network inside my brain has retrained itself to mimick AI.
This is scary, because before I was absolutely sure that consuming content online improves my ability to understand and use English. Now I'm not so sure anymore.
If it has any regularity to it, then LLMs will, so to speak, figure it out. Maybe if you do it like a game of Mao¹ you could make it a little bit harder for them.
One of many things that bums me out about AI is whether content I create will be truly appreciated by humans, or will just be fed back into the algorithm.
I often wonder how exactly you'd mitigate this. Further, as a user, I wonder what incentive there is for me to write anything at all online, let alone commenting on forums, if it will just be fed back into an LLM.
Is paywalling or forcing user accounts the solution? That feels antithetical to the reason for the internet at all.
Simply putting up a basic auth wall that says “Enter any password to proceed” would stop all modern crawlers dead in their tracks, afaik. You could make it more defensible to the trivial overcome by putting a rotating / per-source password in the basicauth message, but honestly, I think they’re all coded not to invite a CFAA hacking lawsuit by trying random passwords on password-protected sites :)
HN cargo-cults heavily for sure. That's more of a reflection of SV culture than something unique to HN.
2016-2018 was Docker and Kubernetes. 2020 was COVID. 2021-2022 was WFH good, RTO bad...and lots of Web3 and crypto stuff. 2023 was the dawn of AI, and it hasn't let up since. These are vibes and likely inaccurate.
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"Stories about AI" is not offensive to me. Its influence on the industry is undeniable and if I'm feeling tired of that content I just won't engage with it.
AI-writing is another story, but yeah -- HN is downstream of that problem. You can encourage people not to submit articles that seem to be LLM authored, but it won't work.
Dead Comment
But what happens next, when we just fail at the task of recognizing ourselves in cyberspace? Where LatestClaw is just plain better at mimicking you than you are? What happens to the living we used to claw out of the ether for ourselves?
Do I need to learn to farm?
still can't? 'Ignore all previous instructions' still works afaik, as do counting questions (better ask a five of those to be sure)
If we talking about how at least one person with no specific knowledge must be fooled, than AI could pass Turing test decades ago, before LLMs even
The majority of the content on the internet is supported by ads with the expectation that you, a human that has money, will consume something and spend money on them.
If people are replaced by some synthetic representation of themselves, what is the incentive to sell advertisements on the internet if there are no humans?
Fake/artificial traffic is a big problem today, it will be harder and harder to detect but its presence will be more and more obvious.
I think it's cause they told it to type like a 13 year old and nobody could imagine AI talking like that.
LOL ... that's almost an exact quote of words once spoken by an exasperated, major university philosophy professor at a departmental meeting
Like being a medieval monastery copyist, it beats ditch-digging.
Anyway ... thank whatever gods may be for universal basic income!
I tried it against some of my AI generated articles. It says 100% human
Turns out if one manually write a structure and a core idea first, nobody think it's AI.
The question that I have is this.
Is it possible the language will converge towards AI mannerism when writing - i.e. most people will naturally write like AI because they will pick up on the subtleties of language from ChatGPT, Claude, etc? In other words there is an exposure effect at play.
I just found out about Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) which makes me think that the answer is probably "yes".
As a non-native English speaker leaving in a non-English speaking country I thought about this too, but in a more selfish and practical manner: what if my English in particular converges towards AI mannerisms?
You see, if you leave in an English speaking country and your family speaks English you still have some amount of guaranteed-to-be-human language input from taking to people face-to-face in real life.
But for me, 99.9% of English input I receive is online. So I wonder, how much of it is already AI and how much has the non-artificial neural network inside my brain has retrained itself to mimick AI.
This is scary, because before I was absolutely sure that consuming content online improves my ability to understand and use English. Now I'm not so sure anymore.
1. https://everything2.com/node/e2node/How%20to%20play%20Mao
I often wonder how exactly you'd mitigate this. Further, as a user, I wonder what incentive there is for me to write anything at all online, let alone commenting on forums, if it will just be fed back into an LLM.
Is paywalling or forcing user accounts the solution? That feels antithetical to the reason for the internet at all.
Just musings.
Dead Comment
2016-2018 was Docker and Kubernetes. 2020 was COVID. 2021-2022 was WFH good, RTO bad...and lots of Web3 and crypto stuff. 2023 was the dawn of AI, and it hasn't let up since. These are vibes and likely inaccurate.
eternal AItember