7/13/2026 at 2:30:29 AM
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 it 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 more conservatively, discounts it. This is why we see so many "just show me the prompt" responses, 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.
It's a fascinating arms race right now: 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. The AIs will adapt to this, but the humans will adapt in turn. Where it ends up is anyone's guess.
For the present, there is an emerging class distinction between writing (and writers) that use genai vs. writing that does not. As soon as the "this sounds like an LLM" allergy kicks in, the writing instantly gets relegated to a low-status bucket in the reader's mind. That doesn't mean it won't still get looked at - but it is now under a stigma.
(I was rather pleased with the originality of this until I remembered pg had come up with "writes and write-nots" in https://paulgraham.com/writes.html. Oh well, it's the point that matters.)
This has the happy flipside that anyone who would like readers to classify their article as high-status rather than low-status can apply the judo move of simply writing it themselves.
Now I need to add the disclaimer that none of this is a dismissal of LLM technology per se. We rely on it heavily, and there's no question that it's useful. The question is how to use it (pg again: https://x.com/paulg/status/2058871512451412457) and whether one should use it on writing that one publishes to other humans.
To turn to OP's questions:
> Should HN add the ability to flag articles as AI-generated? [...] it could just show up as an indicator
Flagging-as-just-an-indicator would be tagging, which we've always resisted adding to HN, but I wouldn't rule it out.
What I do think we'll (finally) add is a "please give a reason why you flagged this post" step, and "because I think it's genai" will be one choice among several (spam, offtopic, mean, etc.)
> Why is the regular voting system not enough?
The regular voting system is never enough. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
> Should HN change in response to the gen AI era?
To this I am tempted to reply with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48887149 in homage to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742902.
by dang
7/13/2026 at 5:52:50 AM
I think classifying it as an allergy or a status thing is a little too glib. I’ve read and reviewed, conservatively, hundreds of AI generated documents for work, and “written”/commissioned a bunch too. My biggest issue is that it’s impossible to engage with and give feedback on an AI written document, because it’s impossible to know whether misconceptions or gaps are because the author doesn’t understand the material deeply enough or the author does but the AI doesn’t and the author’s not proofreading carefully enough. Or if a surprising idea is raised — is it the authors insight, can they elaborate on it, where did it come from, etc?Hackernews isn’t work, obviously, but “it’s impossible to engage deeper with the material because the author doesn’t really exist” is sort of a problem for a discussion site. If the human coauthor puts in enough work, they can make sure the doc really reflects their views and their understanding, but in my experience that’s much less common.
by grayclhn
7/13/2026 at 9:25:25 AM
This exactly. Whenever someone shows me their (or someone else's) AI-assisted-coded (vibe coded) thing, I can only ever engage with it on a very superficial level, saying "oh cool".You can't have a discussion about it, how it was done, because for 80% of cases it's "the AI did it".
I don't think this is that interesting or useful for HN, because indeed it's a discussion site.
It would be different if the vibe coded thing didn't come as a "look what it made and its vibe written README" but instead as a human written blog article about "how I made this thing using AI, what models, prompts and harnesses, how the experience was etc etc etc" --- again that would be something interesting to have a discussion about.
But otherwise what is there to say except "yeah cool that's cool that the AI made you that thing"
> it’s impossible to know whether misconceptions or gaps are because the author doesn’t understand the material deeply enough or the author does but the AI doesn’t and the author’s not proofreading carefully enough. Or if a surprising idea is raised — is it the authors insight, can they elaborate on it, where did it come from, etc?
by tripzilch
7/13/2026 at 1:34:26 PM
This is becoming a problem on the anti-HN (reddit). Someone will submit something cool, not disclose its status as vibecoded, and then not be able to answer any real questions about whatever it is they submitted. I don't have a problem with vibe coded software in general, but I think sharing it like that is strange. What do these people get from it? Prestige? I don't think they get any, as it's almost always clocked as vibecoded a few minutes after seeing itby mghackerlady
7/13/2026 at 8:08:22 PM
This occurred on HN as well. It's not just Reddit-codedby uncivilized
7/13/2026 at 2:36:54 PM
> what is there to sayWays to contribute: Peer review, human code review, money for tokens for code and code review, configure SAST and DAST tools to make it DevSecOps instead of DevOpsSec, configure AGENTS.md and an /upgrade-dependencies-and-run-tests skill,
Compare "It's inadequate because it's AI" with "it looks like this generation of agents doesn't yet handle this quality aspect with or without explicit prompts" with "you could improve quality by writing tests, docs, and before that refactor for maintainability and subjective elegance" (if you're trying develop a hit open source project)
> impossible to know whether misconceptions or gaps are because the author doesn’t understand the material
Shouldn't a researcher consider the argument - it's premises and form - instead of tangential ad hominem about the author?
Pushing for well-formed arguments is older than AI
by westurner
7/13/2026 at 3:55:18 PM
Just skimmed your resume and, assuming it’s up to date, it looks like you mostly work independently. If that’s the case, I can totally see why my argument doesn’t resonate.“The author doesn’t understand the material” isn’t an ad hominem — most of my work involves working with other people, usually less experienced, to help them deliver reasonably complex econometric or ML models. Sometimes I’m hands on, usually not. Knowing if it’s “the author not understanding the material” is important because my job is to help them understand it so that they can deliver something that 1) works and 2) does what it’s supposed to. AI written docs are at best a mixed blessing.
Or maybe it’s me not understanding! Either way, if something looks wrong, I want to discuss it with people who know the subject matter and can talk me through the parts that look off so that I can learn from it.
by grayclhn
7/14/2026 at 1:36:09 AM
Too late to edit - should have looked at comment history and not profile I guess, because like an idiot I spent time replying to a clearly ai-written comment… Well GP isn’t going to learn anything from my (gracious! beautiful! dare I say, heroic?) attempt to find a common shared experience in our otherwise separate lives, but hopefully other people got something out of it. I hope to god there’s a lesson there for someone.by grayclhn
7/14/2026 at 4:13:06 AM
What?No, that's not an ai written comment either.
by westurner
7/14/2026 at 5:09:53 AM
There will always be a place for handmade furniture.AI is not useful for econometric ML because the client doesn't understand the model?
"Explain the model to the client like they're five and they don't remember our fee is already negotiated" has inaccurate model replies in your field?
Even before LLM AI, could an OpenCog dog have done the model search and optimization?
What is the difference between AutoML's predictive error next to expert-biased model selection and parameter grid search with CV in your field this year?
How could AI help validate - you mentioned econometrics - econometrics latex in manuscripts?
- Port manuscripts to interactive notebooks
- translate LaTeX to a CAS syntax (e.g. SymPy), test to validate, and enqueue for human review
- Develop causal experiments based upon observational data from non-blinded experiments, like this: > "Answering causal questions using observational data" (2021) [PDF] https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2021/10/advanced-economic... ... 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2021/pop...
Dismayed at AI bashing because its consistently winning at red team and blue team tasks and now better than preliminary code review and if the hatemongering bandwagon wins our team will lose the ai advantage.
I'm looking at seriously billions in cost reductions and sustainability wins from LLMs applied to production processes and products (in various non-tech and tech fields). Justify estimates of CapEx, OpEx, Marginal cost for Garage, Lab, Pilot, Production, and Giga-Production scales. Find synergies, valorize waste, eliminate hazards, eliminate external costs.
But that's all only exploratory, discovery phase work.
Does a persin need to rephrase it by human proxy in order to link to it, if they've applied AI?
There is significant real potential opportunity to applied AI, so it's disheartening to learn that the AI spam justifies new censorship controls in this also an election year.
It's really frustrating and alienating to be subject to false allegations. It's really frustrating to be censored or shawbdned.
When it's "censor that and all their other s because it's AI" but it's not. No AI ever should not be the TOS.
A person could create a "split with us against AI" site as a separate forum and test and buy insurance for that.
HN does not but Reddit supports bots; you put "bot" in the bot's username.
by westurner
7/13/2026 at 2:51:53 PM
>My biggest issue is that it’s impossible to engage with and give feedback on an AI written documentThanks for giving shape to a general annoyance, in my case with code, that I only recently started noticing.
When discussing code with my colleagues, especially with those that I do not know particularly well, I often relied on the quality of the code they produced to modulate how technical the conversation ought to be be.
Now, instead, I often see very complex code from people that I know wouldn't have been able to produce it themselves, and I have no clue how to engage with it, how to review it with them, how detailed can my comments be etc.
It's pretty annoying.
by thevinter
7/13/2026 at 6:37:18 AM
>My biggest issue is that it’s impossible to engage with and give feedback on an AI written document, because it’s impossible to know whether misconceptions or gaps are because the author doesn’t understand the material deeply enough or the author does but the AI doesn’t and the author’s not proofreading carefully enough.FWIW, same problem with PRs or PoC that I have to work on; now my first question is, "did you know about his behaviour?". The first step, getting a decent spec, is delayed to after a first draft implementation is already pushed...
by woolion
7/13/2026 at 10:06:53 AM
You can engage with an AI-written document! Simply paste the document into the AI (same or different as the AI that wrote it) and ask questions. You can get an answer in seconds compared to an hour (if it's a blog post by an HN reader), days (if it's a professional blogger), or never (if it's by a journalist).Perhaps AI-written articles should include the prompt as hidden text on the page. Or include a link with the prompt embedded, that causes the AI to spit out the same article that you could then ask questions about.
by tlb
7/13/2026 at 1:44:24 PM
I can indeed use AI to do research on topics I learn about on HN. That’s a different activity than what I come to HN for, or when I’m reviewing a proposal for something at work, or if I’m interested in an article and want to learn more about some of the details that didn’t make the final draft from either the author or from other people with experience in the area.“Why didn’t the author consider [this thing that seems similar]” is almost never something you can ask an llm, especially for articles where the author is putting in so little of their own effort that they don’t edit out obvious AI tells.
by grayclhn
7/14/2026 at 12:02:19 AM
> it’s impossible to know whether misconceptions or gaps are because the author doesn’t understand the material deeply enough or the author does but the AI doesn’t and the author’s not proofreading carefully enoughIt doesn’t matter. The human responsible for the written piece is … responsible for the written piece. If someone is willing to use AI to supplement their own intellect and/or writing abilities, then they need to take ownership of the mistakes, misconceptions, etc., that come along with that, the same as an author who does all the work themselves. The problem you’ve identified here is that the human responsible for the writing is not fully taking responsibility for the writing.
by baubino
7/13/2026 at 5:59:07 AM
That's interesting, thank you! My only pushback is that my bit about "allergy" and "status" is about the audience response here, whereas you seem to be talking on a somewhat different level.by dang
7/13/2026 at 6:20:51 AM
Oh for sure. My only point is that IME (and I’d assume many other commenters) the quality of discussion and engagement around an imperfect ai-written doc is considerably worse than the same doc written by a human. Work is where it’s most obvious to me… because many of these are design docs for systems I care deeply about us delivering, but I’ve noticed the same thing elsewhere.by grayclhn
7/13/2026 at 9:33:24 AM
But you wouldn't have called it "allergy" or a "status" problem when considering the audience's response to human written posts of a similar low quality level.It's always been the case that the HN audience has been "allergic" to low effort slop (including human generated).
The OP (and my) point was trying to point out how the AI generated stuff might masquerade as something "interesting" if it had been human written, but actually is much of a nothing burger when there's no human behind it:
if a human made a strange, weird, or even sub-optimal design decision, that's something to possibly have an interesting discussion about.
if an AI does the same, first of, I don't care and don't wanna guess why its weights did the thing it did, it's just not as interesting as human motivations, UNLESS the main meat of the article/link is in fact about (again the human experience of) "how I made this thing, using AI, what prompts, harness, models, etc".
I hope it makes sense and allows you to no longer dismiss this as an "allergy" (aka the audience's problem), but as something that is actually a quality problem with the post.
by tripzilch
7/13/2026 at 4:53:52 PM
You are heavily discounting the human side of the generation effort. The first output from an AI might be slop but once you start injecting your own ideas and desires it lands much further away from what any AI would output on its own. (Not that there's no zero-effort slop around - there's a lot).by heurist
7/13/2026 at 5:12:48 PM
Sorry if I made it seem I think the human side of AI-use is without effort, because it's not and can take a lot of time (and effort/energy).It is, however, my experience that even the people who spend a lot of time and effort generating something with AI, tend to shrug when you ask a deeper question about the project, and often point to the AI generated documentation, which is, let me be subtle and say, "not really a joy to read", and especially pales in comparison to having a conversation with a human who spent their effort on learning how to do the thing it did, instead of prompting an AI.
I'm also not saying there aren't any exceptions to this. But I've found them rare.
Like I said, even if the human doesn't quite understand what they generated, even then it would be preferable to read a human written article about how it was generated, using what tools and harnesses, etc.
I come to this website to learn stuff and converse with other people, not just to go "ooh aah" at what somebody generated with AI (if that is all they can offer).
Hope that makes sense.
by tripzilch
7/13/2026 at 6:08:46 AM
> The current picture is that there is an emerging class distinction between writing (and writers) that use genai vs. writing that does not. As soon as the "this sounds like an LLM" allergy kicks in, the writing instantly gets relegated to a low-status bucket in the reader's mind.It's not a purity test, it's as the author is communicating they don't care whether the reader has any signals of what is accurate vs inaccurate information, which puts the burden of investigating how much is accurate on the reader at every step when there's some minimum expectation that should be an author's role (outside of topics where there is some expectation of ulterior motives/biases and one would naturally engage more critically minded).
When people complain here it's more often than not when an article has no disclaimer about AI use or what has been human-reviewed, so the burden again falls on the reader who is now even more skeptical. That is more to ask of a reader than when it's coming from say a known expert and the reader is receptive to engage and learn.
That's the reason tired cliches and turns of phrase (overused by LLMs) have become a heuristic for whether to pay attention, because it's a sign that there's some unknown quantity of of the article that hasn't had human review and it's easier to put in the bucket of 'maybe worthwhile but would need a fully human analysis of this' or just outright rejection (as we've seen from comments).
Edit: I see a sibling comment has raised the same observation.
by Springtime
7/13/2026 at 6:15:27 AM
I'm afraid I don't understand this - can I ask what was the sibling comment? Maybe that will help me triangulate.by dang
7/13/2026 at 6:26:07 AM
This[1] comment, mostly in terms of not knowing which parts are generated and which not when not disclosed, which puts an added burden on the reader to assess.Like, if some non-controversial article makes a statement about something technical (where one's guard isn't already raised) but you've observed signs of LLM use (without any disclosure of to what degree) then instead of thinking it might be an interesting thing to follow-up on or remember one might be thinking instead 'is this something the author themselves understands and has reviewed for accuracy or slipped in by the LLM' and other such distractions (and legwork if wanting to try and fact-check such things on the spot).
It goes from having a perhaps pleasurable, educational read to questioning and being more skeptical/cynical about the material. HN's guidelines meanwhile encourage good faith engagement, which is challenging.
Edit: corrected permalink (had accidental extra digit).
by Springtime
7/13/2026 at 4:22:24 AM
> What I do think we'll (finally) add is a "please give a reason why you flagged this post" step, and "because I think it's genai" will be one choice among severalDoes that mean that an article being AI-generated is a flaggable offense? Should we be flagging suspected AI-generated articles already, or should we wait for the flagging system to support reasons first?
by bhaney
7/13/2026 at 4:26:47 AM
Damn you people for asking good questions that go straight to the fuzzy areas!I don't know for sure yet. But you're right that that would follow from what I said.
What I do know is that users should flag articles that they think don't belong on HN. But this should rely on their reading of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not just be based on a like/dislike reaction. That is, users should flag articles that they think break the site guidelines, not just ones they dislike.
by dang
7/13/2026 at 4:52:14 AM
I have been discouraging people from flagging ‘articles that they think don't belong on HN’, because you have disabled my ability to do so time and time again. In private conversation with you, you have confirmed that if I flag/vouch stuff you mods don’t agree with, I get the privilege taken away, even if I genuinely believe a post to fall outside of the guidelines.So either I read your mind, or it is best not to flag unless something is obviously, unequivocally, running afoul of the guidelines.
I keep being annoyed at how arbitrary, and dare I say hypocritical, the entire flagging mechanism and its surrounding politics are.
by sph
7/13/2026 at 11:55:59 AM
Flagging, to me, seems like pissing in the wind. If I notice serial posters submitting extremely low effort content (a pair of their own posts every waking hour from "6 months and 5 minutes ago", off-topic wikipedia nearly once a day, "I have 60000+ points but only upload from thealtantic/guardian/nytimes") then I go on an irate ten-minute flagging binge.I've also been aghast at the nerve of those same serial posters applying the letter of the law against other users. I genuinely wouldn't care if Bartosz Ciechanowski only self-promotes every last one of his own posts. Some users are significantly more interesting than others, whether or not they violate the site guidelines marginally on a technicality.
I have suspected it's possible some users flags are worth more than others, and I wouldn't be surprised if my flagging ability was silently removed several years ago.
by PennRobotics
7/13/2026 at 5:04:16 AM
> In private conversation with you, you have confirmed that if I flag/vouch stuff you mods don’t agree with, I get the privilege taken away, even if I genuinely believe a post to fall outside of the guidelines.People love to make vague claims like this based on things we supposedly said. How about you quote what exactly what I literally said so readers can make up their own minds?
Sorry if that is testy (well, it is testy), but I can't count the number of times that disgruntled users have posted falsely to HN threads to vent their residual frustrations with the mods.
by dang
7/13/2026 at 5:22:31 AM
Sure, quoting select passages over multiple emails with you personally.> I'm afraid we took vouching privileges away from your account because you vouched for too many comments that were unsubstantive and/or flamebait and/or otherwise broke the site guidelines
> If you want to build up a track record for a while of vouching for good comments only, and then email so we can look at the recent vouches
Wondering how does one tell what is ‘good’ in your mind:
> Btw if you're unsure about a case you can always check with us about it. I know the borderline cases are not always easy to call.
—-
In other words, do as dang himself would do, or get penalised. I am not in the business of mind reading.
This was years ago. I am pretty sure lately I have been flagging/vouching stuff I genuinely believe were OK, though you have all the data in front to smite me with “ah, but on this day you vouched this bad comment! Gotcha!” so in the end it’s always a losing battle.
In any case, my issue is with you saying, I quote, ”users should flag articles that they think don't belong on HN”. Emphasis mine. No. It is more nuanced than that.
by sph
7/13/2026 at 6:03:16 AM
Kudos to you for responding exactly as I asked! That is rare to begin with, and more so when I'm being irritable. Big respect.I can see how using the word "good" was confusing, but I just meant the opposite of "comments that were unsubstantive and/or flamebait and/or otherwise broke the site guidelines". It just boils down to: what fits the guidelines or not.
> Wondering how does one tell what is ‘good’ in your mind
Since you can't read my mind (at least I assume you can't, and if you could you wouldn't have this question), that's not doable. What you can do is assess things according to your own reading of the site guidelines. If you assimilate https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and evaluate comments based on that and not just on what you like/dislike, then I imagine you won't end up too far from where the mods are, because that's what we're also trying to do.
I'm sure there will always be individual cases where we disagree—even tomhow and I disagree on individual cases—but they should be a minority.
If there are specific cases where you think we got it wrong, I'd be interested to see links, and we're always willing to hear a contrary argument.
by dang
7/13/2026 at 8:07:57 AM
Completely meta and possibly out-of-place, but this thread was I think my first encounter with dang (the human), and, based on it, I'm filled with respect for him.Good job being you. Please continue doing so.
by hypfer
7/13/2026 at 10:05:49 AM
I have had plenty of disagreements with dang over my time on this site, yet I am the first to claim he has been instrumental in making HN as good as it is, notwithstanding the deluge of posts, bots, trolls, and other ungovernable people.I have a lot of respect for his work.
by sph
7/13/2026 at 12:55:48 PM
> I have had plenty of disagreements with dang over my time on this siteTo think that someone has multiple / repeated disagreements with Dang is wild to me.
In my history on this site, I have not once seen Dang say or do anything that’s not in the best interest of the community.
He’s possibly one of the least controversial moderators I have ever encountered online.
by cj
7/13/2026 at 5:44:52 PM
Well I mean for starters, one might disagree whether all members of "the community" should actually be part of it/be catered to.I mean it's kinda hard to kick out the VC brainrot get-rich-quick sanity-is-tertiary scum when you're literally housed under a ycombinator subdomain, but that is technically also a choice that people might see as controversial.
by hypfer
7/13/2026 at 11:21:40 AM
I can honestly say I've never seen a moderator on any forum as good as Dang. I wish I had!by Nition
7/13/2026 at 5:10:24 PM
As opposed to dang the robot? :)by abustamam
7/13/2026 at 5:47:46 PM
As opposed to dang wearing the HN hat.by hypfer
7/13/2026 at 10:10:50 AM
> what fits the guidelines or notIt is no coincidence lawyering is a lucrative career, even when (in most countries) it is simply about interpreting what’s written in the big book.
Until you rewrite the guidelines in an unambiguous programming language (Lisp will do), and provide a system to discern whether a comment falls afoul of them, your personal interpretation of the Word will often differ from someone else’s.
That said, thanks for the edifying discussion.
by sph
7/13/2026 at 2:10:22 PM
I think you'll find as soon as you codify something strict, people will do their absolute best to work around those rules in any way possible.by fireflash38
7/13/2026 at 6:07:35 AM
How were you penalised? Was it just losing the ability to flag?If however you see things isn’t lining up well with how they want things flagged, it makes sense to remove that from you. Unless there’s more punishment attached this seems very sensible regardless of how genuinely you believe in things.
by IanCal
7/13/2026 at 8:42:18 AM
(Not OP.) I can understand that it feels like a punishment though, if you are legitimately trying to help and this is the thanks you get. It's not just a human-to-human notice, but a change of your permission level; you're being stepped down. Of course I have no idea about this specific case and what the user flagged/vouched, and I can see your logic, just that I'd probably also feel bad if it happened to me and the wording seems fitting enough to meby Aachen
7/13/2026 at 5:01:23 AM
Dan likes some people and you ain't in the group, buddy.by bellowsgulch
7/13/2026 at 5:07:49 AM
I like people who follow the site guidelines and want to use HN as intended. That doesn't mean I dislike people who don't, but that side of the moon is more...nuanced.by dang
7/13/2026 at 5:50:29 AM
He has no idea who I am.Privately, when I was new he was polite and helpful. (Tried to be polite, was returned.)
/singular anecdote for reader reference
by Barbing
7/13/2026 at 5:29:24 AM
What I do know is that users should flag articles that they think don't belong on HNIf this is true then this statement should be added to the guidelines. Many a time I've seen a submission and thought "My god, this is the most moronic thing I've ever read in my life, nearly every single factual claim in this is wrong" but I don't flag it because "don't post utter drivel" is not in the guidelines.
by causality0
7/13/2026 at 6:19:05 AM
What did you think flagging was for? (Genuine question)It's true that we don't spell things out precisely, but that's because it's impossible to spell things out fully precisely. If you start, where do you stop?
by dang
7/13/2026 at 7:12:45 AM
What did you think flagging was for? (Genuine question)Same as on other sites: Spam and/or bot, abuse and/or insults and other ad hominems and particularly the point in the guidelines where you go: Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. and Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Not that my flagging amounts to anything, there's so much domestic US politics articles from mainstream media on here that I often wonder whether I misunderstand the guidelines, but then, I'm just an Europoor /s
by frm88
7/13/2026 at 5:40:47 AM
> users should flag articles that they think break the site guidelinesI'm more and more think that link actually hurts the site more than helps. It's a gotcha against everything, can be used a sword and a shield too.
See the part about politics. There is more and more US domestic politics post here (which I actually flag all the time) yet when the topic comes up people will say: "should hackers turn their back on when the world burns" So basically everything goes as long as it fits the narrative.
And the worst offender imo is the last part about reddit. Because I do _really agree_ that HN is more and more like reddit, if not already is. This very post with the comments where everyone is asking for a downvote button is a perfect example of that.
by haunter
7/13/2026 at 4:45:05 AM
Generally speaking, HN seems to have more of a problem now of people just drive-by downvoting things because they don't like someone's opinion.I know you hate the supposedly "noob" comment, as you've put it over the years, and as it is written in the guidelines, that HN is or isn't turning into Reddit, but this aspect of HN makes it indistinguishable to me as a long-time reader here whether you accept it from your perspective as a long-time moderator or not.
Because HN moderation allows people to downvote or flag things simply because they don't like something, it will always be like Reddit. There is no distinguishing feature to separate it otherwise.
One thing that would, would be forcing users to say why they downvoted or flagged something.
Edit: If you spend years saying "no, no, it isn't true" to people, you're just sticking your fingers in your ears. Where there's smoke, there's fire.
by bellowsgulch
7/13/2026 at 10:06:42 AM
Yeah, even if this is very hard to get it perfect, I keep thinking there has to exist a better voting system than what we have. We can do a presumed step in the right direction and evaluate.- To give an outlet for (dis)agreement: We could have two arrows on each post, one for agree/disagree, the other for 'legitimate post that helps the conversation'. Someone posting wrong info rarely helps the conversation, but also often enough it's an opinion matter and you can disagree while leaving the latter arrow alone. The latter determines sort order (most helpful first); the former is displayed as a fun fact on posts that are deemed helpful (author sees exact counts just like now)
- A system that seems to work better: A local tech site uses a system where you assign a quality level to a post. The short labels are (translated) "flamebait", "irrelevant but well-intentioned", "relevant but well-known", "useful contribution", and "exceptionally useful". Each one has a numerical value, ranging from -1 to +3, and it'll take the median of all votes (with a half-vote bias towards +1 I think, but that's an implementation detail). If your median comes out to -1, it's collapsed by default; at +2 and +3, it gets highlighted. Incorporating opinion into your quality assessment is a problem here, too, but then you might get +0 instead of +1 and not (like on HN) a score of -7. Not just does that feel a lot more fair, the system and its UI also just makes more clear to everyone that you're supposed to objectively score the comments on the mentioned guidelines (it shows a description every time you hover over a vote option)
by Aachen
7/13/2026 at 5:28:55 AM
It’s not necessarily that it isn’t true - the most common problem voters have is that it just isn’t interesting or unique.by DANmode
7/13/2026 at 5:38:02 PM
Most comments aren't interesting.by bellowsgulch
7/13/2026 at 5:49:05 PM
Then you’re in the wrong place (community, thread, or what have you).Said another way: I couldn’t disagree more.
by DANmode
7/13/2026 at 6:13:54 PM
I'm not trying to be edgy or intentionally controversial or something, it's just life. Most things people have to say are not interesting. Not everything written on HN can be exceptional, because by definition it wouldn't be the exception.Your comment right now, and mine above are not interesting!
In another thread there might be one whole comment out of hundreds that retells the experience of a senior engineer working on an uncommon problem, sharing specifics about a particular industry, piece of intellectual property, or another individual.
The rest will not be interesting. That's normal! That's OK! But most are not.
by bellowsgulch
7/13/2026 at 8:56:15 PM
They’re interesting to me, (or I wouldn’t be spending time on them), and they’re interesting because I expect to care about this specific community behind this specific domain in five or ten, same as I did five or ten ago.You may be more ephemeral with your community identities. That’s cool, too.
by DANmode
7/14/2026 at 9:13:43 AM
> Not everything written on HN can be exceptional, because by definition it wouldn't be the exception.I’m not arguing every comment on HN is exceptional, but that logic isn’t sound because exceptionalism is relative (as you alluded to).
In other words, it’s congruent that every comment on some website could be exceptional when compared to the internet at large.
by latexr
7/13/2026 at 5:35:27 AM
Don't you need a certain number of upvotes on your account before you can even use the downvote button? I seem to remember that being a thing, has it changed?The fact you can't just make an account, log in and start downvoting is already a massive improvement over Reddit
by bluefirebrand
7/13/2026 at 10:36:59 AM
This post from awhile back suggests it's at 501 karma - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439437by another-dave
7/13/2026 at 5:13:20 PM
To add to this, it does make me think what the difference between down vote and flag is. I mean down vote is obviously the numerical opposite of upvote but why else would people downvote if it not be inappropriate for the forum? (Other than the obvious "I dont like this commenter/their opinion")Just thinking out loud I suppose.
by abustamam
7/13/2026 at 2:44:17 AM
I hope HN doesn't get into moderating the politics of articles.I can see a grim future (present?) where "AI generated" turns into a slur, warranted or otherwise, in a world where the difference between human trained to talk like an AI and AI masquerading as human becomes increasingly difficult to discern, and some hidden cabal passes judgement.
That is wholly different from taking a stance on HN being a place for humans to comment on articles.
by avaer
7/13/2026 at 7:51:00 AM
AI has a distinct, low-quality and unnecessarily sensational writing style, which signals low effort post first of all. If you use AI and you put the effort to make it not look like AI it means that at least you put some effort into it.I am not sure how the future may be, but the direction of AIs has been to solidify their distinct writing style rather than assimilate to humans. So we can start addressing what we are dealing with now. I doubt HN tagging/flagging can put enough pressure to affect how llms will evolve anyway in the future, while the llm speech becomes more and more ubiquitous and unhinged.
by freehorse
7/13/2026 at 9:04:19 AM
> AI has a distinct, low-quality and unnecessarily sensational writing style, which signals low effort post first of allYes, but what if it doesn't? Anyone can create a model or prompt to adjust the tone, remove the tells that people are now on the lookout for, etc.
And it's self-reinforcing, because the people that are on the lookout will always consider themselves to be right in their judgment, also because of survivorship bias - they won't know if they missed an AI generated comment/post unless it's revealed.
This is one reason why I'm in favor of tagging AI generated posts, because at one point we can't tell. If we can't tell, does it still matter? I don't know, but I'd like to know anyway.
Of course, it can't be mandated, so if the submitter doesn't tag it and the readers can't tell the difference, it's futile.
by Cthulhu_
7/13/2026 at 9:36:41 AM
people could do this, but they don't. and if they did spend that effort, it would be better. but as it is now, the vast majority of AI written text, especially "documentation" of software projects, has this style signifying communication was outsourced to an AI.we are not at the point where "we can't tell", and if we actually couldn't tell we wouldn't be complaining about it
by tripzilch
7/13/2026 at 2:59:45 AM
You've accurately described the current state of Lobsters.by matheusmoreira
7/13/2026 at 3:03:10 AM
As opposed to wonderful old HN, where about 95% of the front page is now AI, AI-related, or AI-generated.by archagon
7/13/2026 at 3:11:17 AM
There's significant overlap between the front pages of HN and Lobsters. Almost every time I try to submit the interesting articles I see on Lobsters here, I just get redirected to the existing discussion thread.The massive 1000+ comments/upvotes AI model release threads only show up on HN. Lobsters doesn't accept "business" articles like that. You're quite likely to find reactionary articles that are critical of AI on the front page though. There are several on the front page right now, in addition to the ones derisively tagged vibecoding.
by matheusmoreira
7/13/2026 at 3:47:38 AM
There's a bot user that seems to crosspost every lobsters story here if it isn't already.by mmastrac
7/13/2026 at 3:35:59 AM
And the remainder is people complaining about all the AIby grahamburger
7/13/2026 at 9:05:14 AM
This happens all the time, depending on the trend of the time. It was Rust for a while, then cryptocurrencies, machine learning, starups / unicorns / enormous funding rounds, etc.It'll pass when the next cool tech comes around.
by Cthulhu_
7/13/2026 at 3:30:23 AM
That's a high exaggeration of course, but in the wonderful old HN tradition of perceiving the site as dominated by $badness, where everyone has their own perception of $badness.I'm not picking on you - it's practically a universal response, so much so that it must be driven by human hard-wiring. I've written about this so many times that for once I don't even know what to link to. Perhaps https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098. Or maybe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48427800
by dang
7/13/2026 at 6:18:06 AM
Fine. Looking at today's /active, it's more than half just based on the titles. (Likely 2/3 or more in practice, but I did not delve into each post.) And this does not feel particularly unusual.by archagon
7/13/2026 at 6:07:27 AM
(Apologies if you've commented on the following already, but I've not seen it.)The most concerning growing trend I see is comments that don't violate any guidelines, but are flagged to dead.
I'm not talking about posters that are shadowbanned, but about comments that engaged thoughtfully on a topic but the rest of the thread disagreed emphatically with.
I also don't even mean controversial takes on hot-button issues like vaccines.
Just plain old bucking the trend in a thread about AI, transit, housing, layoffs, etc.
I've been browsing with showdead on for as long as I can remember, and I'm seeing this accelerate. Comments from folks both you and I respect as high quality contributors here.
I don't know what the solution is, but it discourages me (and I'm sure others) from having the kind of thought-provoking dialog I've gotten used to reading here for the last 15 years.
by mh-
7/13/2026 at 6:30:04 AM
> comments that don't violate any guidelines, but are flagged to dead.Vouch them and/or email to hn@ycombinator.com and say why you think they deserve to be [undead].
I see that a lot, some have been erroneously caught by the real time AI detect filter (which actually isn't too bad at slicing out the actual AI gen comments) others have gone hard against the zeitgeist.
I've had the mods reinstate comments that I've thoroughly disagreed with but were making their best case for an opposing view - the threads are better with the best arguments forward for all sides of the elephant.
by defrost
7/13/2026 at 9:12:34 AM
I have vouched a couple (~3-5) benign comments a while back and now I no longer have a vouch button for comments.I don't know if the vouch threshold has increased or if the mods have removed my ability to vouch for other comments entirely.
Wondering if it was my good faith attempt to inform a user of their comments being auto-flagged [1] before I had any context that they were supposed to be persona non grata.
I can still vouch submissions though
by behindsight
7/14/2026 at 11:13:22 AM
Your account is fine - nothing changed. Most probably you're just expecting vouch links where there aren't any. (They only show up on posts that are [dead].)by dang
7/14/2026 at 5:20:36 PM
thank you so much for the clarification!Yes, you're correct. The vouch button doesn't appear when viewing the thread context containing the `[dead]` comment. It only appears when clicking the specific comment directly via its permalink (or comment ID). I may have misremembered being able to vouch with the context to the comment being visible.
Thanks as always dang ^_^
by behindsight
7/13/2026 at 6:37:34 AM
I always vouch them but have never bothered to email. I figure the mods are seeing the same HN I am. But maybe I spend too much time here some evenings..But yes, it's the "going against the zeitgeist" ones I have in mind. It feels very damaging to the community.
by mh-
7/13/2026 at 6:59:43 AM
> I figure the mods are seeing the same HN I am.It's a rare individual that reads all the comments .. my impression is they appreciate on point heads up emails about accidentally auto-binned comments and are happy to reverse flagging on good comments, even those that try and make the dark side of a case.
Probably best not to try and flood the zone with anti/pro pet subject matter karen emails though.
FWiW I semi frequently pick apart comments supporting cases I'm in favour of .. because I want to see better arguments being made and to discourage weak easily dismissed shallow support.
by defrost
7/13/2026 at 7:12:55 AM
I agree with that, the ones I see flagged are frequently espousing viewpoints I disagree with. But they should be debated then, and flagging them denies everyone that opportunity.by mh-
7/13/2026 at 6:46:22 PM
I try to flag only bad-faith arguing. I need to get more disciplined about flagging bad-faith arguing for stances I agree with: I don't flag those comments nearly as much, perhaps because I simply don't perceive them as bad-faith if I agree with them.Then again, I'm perfectly capable of perceiving bad-faith comments opposing generative AI. I had dismissed the possibility out of hand, so it's possible that the reason I don't see many bad-faith agrees-with-me comments, AI-bashing aside, is because there aren't many: maybe people who agree with me tend to act in good faith.
by wizzwizz4
7/13/2026 at 7:11:34 AM
Personally, I've never seen a dead comment come back to life. I'm not sure using the vouch button does anything. (It does for submissions, though.)by archagon
7/13/2026 at 7:10:37 PM
My vouch works well, but I barely use it: mostly on select comments of shadowbanned users. My flag, on the other hand, feels like it requires heavy consensus: even when it's successful, the comments I flag tend to get vouched back into existence on a hair-trigger.by wizzwizz4
7/13/2026 at 7:14:26 AM
I have, but it's definitely very rare. And might have been manual intervention as described above.by mh-
7/13/2026 at 7:21:15 AM
Personally, I've seen two - both ones that I emailed about (and I really disliked the stance taken on one of those, but they were debating at a level that was polite, addressed objections raised, acknowledged other PoVs etc.)Vouch, I've perhaps seen reverse things several times (more of a background observation not pursued, so, you know, fuzzy anecdata at best), I did get feedback from @dang that one comment I vouched for was, in fact, a legitimate AI gen comment .. so clearly I'm human enough to fall for the occasional clanker.
by defrost
7/13/2026 at 6:23:40 AM
I'd need to see specific links, but many of those posts are probably being killed because our software classified them as being genai, which is not allowed on HN (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079.)by dang
7/13/2026 at 6:36:37 AM
Happy to find and email you some when I'm at my desk.(I'm well aware of the genAI policy, and very supportive of it.)
by mh-
7/13/2026 at 6:44:49 AM
In the meantime, here's one I saw recently:by mh-
7/13/2026 at 6:55:07 AM
That definitely wasn't a genai-related issue but the kind of issue it was is a knot that I'm too tired to untangle right now!by dang
7/13/2026 at 7:00:00 AM
lol, fair. It wasn't a great example. Have a good night.by mh-
7/13/2026 at 8:12:27 AM
My memory is pretty spotty, but wasn't it similar with other hype-cycle topics like cryptocurrencies?by IsTom
7/13/2026 at 9:10:06 AM
It is understandable why so much content is ai-related, so many people are using itby ed_elliott_asc
7/13/2026 at 4:59:51 AM
Honest question, why would it be a grim future for people to be allergic to what, in 99% of the cases, is effortless slop?Personally that is the future I hope to see. Hence my continuous protestations at the lazy excuses for articles that get posted these days, and the lazier excuses given by their authors for avoiding using their brain.
by sph
7/13/2026 at 6:31:56 AM
>in a world where the difference between human trained to talk like an AI and AI masquerading as humanI was once accused of using AI for writing in the voice of a depressed character because the character had a certain emotional detachment that to the person lodging the accusation indicated AI.
In short it is not just specific phrasing or words but also aesthetic effects that mean one is AI nowadays.
by bryanrasmussen
7/13/2026 at 4:56:11 AM
Hacker News is already in the business of policing articles though. This is a curated list of articles that people share, and a lot of unrelated articles are automatically deleted or just downvoted out of existence. This isnt Reddit.It’s okay to have an opinionated website. Not every corner of the internet needs to be a bastion of free speech
by MisterSandman
7/13/2026 at 3:15:28 AM
“AI generated” is already a slur.by satisfice
7/13/2026 at 3:51:39 AM
It's sometimes used that way, sometimes a fact, and sometimes both. It's all unclear because we're still in the early stages of this working itself out.by dang
7/13/2026 at 4:09:06 AM
And then there's clanker (which has fortunately tapered off a bit): https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...by minimaxir
7/13/2026 at 4:34:18 AM
This is a nested-enough subthread that I can say whatever I want because no one will ever link to it because if they do no one will care.The class of comments you're talking about—not just ones that say "clanker" literally but the more general category—is particle-wave undecidable right now.
If the commenter is right—i.e. if the commenter they are castigating actually did post LLM-generated text—then it's a community immune system response.
If the commenter is wrong—i.e. they are castigating a sincere human and hauling them to court on false charges—then it's the kind of attack that we tell people not to post here.
They can't know for sure whether what they're saying is true or false, and we can't know for sure how we should moderate it. Both questions depend on information that is unavailable. This is what I mean when I say that the whole question is in a chaotic state right now, and it's too soon to know which way it will stabilize.
by dang
7/13/2026 at 5:44:48 AM
I don't envy the position you're in.I think the decision to ban AI submissions is a good one, but ultimately it's going to create this conflict for some time, maybe a really long time until things stabilize around AI in the broader culture
I hope eventually AI usage does become a taboo, at least in some fields. Creative fields should be for creative humans, not people who can't even publish an article without the help of an LLM
by bluefirebrand
7/13/2026 at 6:27:14 AM
Ok, but we're not talking about all AI usage. We're talking about using AI to process text that gets published for others to read.There are tons of ways to use AI that don't intersect with that.
by dang
7/13/2026 at 4:19:42 PM
I'm thinking about it more as a microcosm of how norms will form around AI usageIf it becomes very normal and expected that people just let LLMs speak for them online using their voice, then I don't think any kind of online community has a hope of actually keeping that behavior at bay long-term
For people like me that means the end of online communication entirely, most likely. I don't want to talk to people's LLMs
My hope is there's some broader cultural taboos around AI usage for communication purposes at least.
by bluefirebrand
7/13/2026 at 4:58:11 AM
That's a fair response.by minimaxir
7/13/2026 at 5:40:28 AM
and then some articles will have maybe a small section, 10% of it, LLM generated. And the it really is a superposition of LLM/human written, and flaggable/unflaggableby not-a-llm
7/13/2026 at 6:25:47 AM
It's true! Or maybe 20% or 60% or 80%.by dang
7/13/2026 at 3:08:30 AM
Why would humans ever be trained to talk like an AI? If they are working in some capacity where there is strong incentive to write llm-slop adjacent content, might as well use the llm slop generator.by asdff
7/13/2026 at 3:26:28 AM
"You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with."
(Subconscious training like when we pick up an accent, though eventually folks might automatically code switch - so that’s hopeful.)
by Barbing
7/13/2026 at 3:13:15 AM
That's just LinkedIn.by minimaxir
7/13/2026 at 3:26:55 AM
Scrolling the general feed there makes me want to put a pencil in my eyeby asdff
7/13/2026 at 4:16:09 AM
Just detox by heading over to youtube logged out.by genxy
7/13/2026 at 4:45:13 AM
Are you maybe misunderstanding this point?> It's a fascinating arms race right now: 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.
Humans are training to detect AI content. Humans writing more like AIs is an unrelated (and slower) phenomenon.
by unholiness
7/13/2026 at 3:38:41 AM
'humans trained to talk like an AI' is just LinkedIn and I would hope that the last thing anyone wants is for HN to become the utter void that is LinkedIn posts.by fzeroracer
7/13/2026 at 7:53:06 AM
I'd prefer a tag to the mounds of "this looks like it is AI generated, I can tell from the pixels and from having seen quite a few AIs in my time" comments. That way the people who reject AI content can filter it out rather than having to argue about it in the comments.by Leynos
7/13/2026 at 4:38:15 AM
If AI-generated comments are disallowed, why are AI-generated articles allowed? Seems like they have the same issues.by bigcityslider
7/13/2026 at 6:31:47 AM
It's a fair question and I don't have a good answer yet, other than to say that comment content and article content are two very different spheres.by dang
7/13/2026 at 5:18:06 AM
I can live with well-composed articles that have a huge chunk of AI in their generation.Stuff interesting enough to get upvoted (i.e. not slop), but I'm so irritated and triggered by pointless, human, comment threads moaning about "this is AI generated".
by philipswood
7/13/2026 at 4:59:11 AM
> This has the happy flipside that anyone who would like readers to classify their article as high-status rather than low-status can apply the judo move of simply writing it themselves.I really really hope more people take up pen and paper! My last blog post [0] came with proof-of-work attached.
by abnercoimbre
7/13/2026 at 1:26:31 PM
>proof-of-work attached.Doesn't seem too hard to fake now, now that AI can generate convincing videos. Failing that, it's definitely within the realm of possibility for AI to create fake pages for a notebook, then generate a blender/unreal engine project to render it.
by gruez
7/13/2026 at 5:06:54 PM
Imagine the cost involved for this though: I know you know my proof is genuine. Are we saying we’ll soon efficiently automate the generation of believable video evidence… for blog posts?!by abnercoimbre
7/13/2026 at 5:47:35 AM
I was just thinking about this, the proof of work angle. Maybe written blogs need to come with recordings of the process now too, otherwise they will be suspicious.What a goofy situation to imagine. I hope we can figure out a way though. I personally have no interest in reading anything spat out by an LLM, so if anything can be used to prove that an author wrote something themselves, I'm interested
by bluefirebrand
7/13/2026 at 7:48:43 AM
It's a tough problem, since I assume any common proof-of-work standard will inevitably generate a big enough dataset to train on.But nonetheless a problem in desperate need of solving!
by j4k0bfr
7/13/2026 at 4:56:13 AM
What I do think we'll (finally) add is a "please give a reason why you flagged this post" stepDo you believe adding friction to flagging will reduce the quantity of low quality articles?
Or is the flagging of high quality articles a bigger and more pressing problem?
Or is the problem simply too-many-damn-flags?
Just curious.
by brudgers
7/13/2026 at 6:35:27 AM
Another good question I don't know the answer to! Which is probably why we haven't done it yet.I guess the idea is that if lots of people flag a comment for the "genai" reason then we can treat that a more precise community signal than "flagged in general". But this argument seems weaker to me as soon as I write it out.
by dang
7/13/2026 at 3:49:28 PM
I think of LLM tells like grammatical issues. If you read an essay full of grammatical mistakes you’d immediately start thinking less of the author, even if the essay isn’t about grammar. You wonder if someone who doesn’t pay close enough attention to catch a mistake “their” from “they’re” took attention to the rest of their work. This isn’t necessarily fair because the content of the essay might still be good. But on the internet I don’t have the time to evaluate the quality of every piece of writing I come across. It is very much the burden of the author to, as fast as possible, prove to me that the rest of the article will not waste my time. There is already so much content to read, and in some sense the amount of time to evaluate if an article is well-founded can be unbounded (imagine how long it would take to tell if an article about why a programming language is thoughtful without going out and also learning that language).I find LLM-isms to be exactly the same as grammatical errors, but worse. At least when writing before you had to take the effort to type every word, so there was a minimum amount of effort you’d need to expend. If you aren’t catching obvious things like “the honest part” then that likely says bad things about your attention to detail elsewhere.
by johnfn
7/13/2026 at 4:13:16 AM
> The AIs will adapt to thisI don't think this is true, at least not right now, and in a way I'm actually thankful for it.
The frantic rush to chase the only potentially profitable use case for LLMs found so far (writing code) and the resulting focus on coding RLHF means models are actively becoming worse at sounding like humans.
This is my favorite example, and it's already relatively outdated: https://progress.openai.com/?prompt=10
by bakugo
7/13/2026 at 3:12:33 AM
Community generated tags seems like the obvious solution to all of this. You could easily give a setting to turn them off, breaks no existing systems, and allows for a broad emergent taxonomy. Only surface tags above X community upvotes except to superusers who are allowed to propose tags.But then again, there’s always reddit :)
by aabhay
7/13/2026 at 3:13:07 AM
It breaks a central goal of HN, which is a non-siloed experience where the entire community is exposed to the same feed.by tptacek
7/13/2026 at 10:48:35 AM
I think that goal only works when the community is small and culturally homogeneous and the velocity of content is relatively slow, but all of those result in implicit silos at scale. People's subjective experience of HN already differs wildly from others based entirely on when they show up, from where and what kind of content they consider on topic, and it already creates a great deal of tension and hostility.Plus, HN's design makes it easy for a single story or kind of story to appear to overwhelm the forum (I say "appear" because really there's more than what's on the frontpage, but most people never bother to check past the frontpage,) which only results in complaints and threads like this. Another layer of organization to handle HN's increasing scale and complexity might be necessary.
by krapp
7/13/2026 at 10:30:44 PM
People have been making the case that this central HN design goal (of being unsiloed) is bad or obsolete or whatever for many years, long before AI was a thing. I'm just saying: it's an explicit goal.by tptacek
7/13/2026 at 3:39:17 AM
> is a non-siloed experience where the entire community is exposed to the same feedSlashdot is still around
by DaiPlusPlus
7/13/2026 at 7:53:54 AM
The "show [dead]" setting already exists, so it is not 100% "exposed to the same feed".by freehorse
7/13/2026 at 6:25:41 AM
tags could be display only with no way of filtering for a certain tag.by aabhay
7/14/2026 at 10:46:14 PM
In that case, top voted comments pointing out that the article may be AI generated already does the same job. No point in redundant tags then no?by busymom0
7/13/2026 at 3:32:57 AM
The tricky thing about tags is that we get a tag for genai this year, what about next year’s thing and the year after that? We’d end up with a list of tags attached haphazardly all over the place. Flagging with a box to add a reason sounds like an excellent idea.by clickety_clack
7/13/2026 at 3:38:55 AM
I dunno, certainly some tags are justified, such as distinguishing submissions which are publicly-readable versus ones which require an account--or worse, payment.That's not a value-judgement of the true content of an article or piece of media, but a fairly objective facet which impacts the HN participant's experience.
It's kind of like how, back in the day, people really wanted to know the filesize of something before they clicked, to avoid a blind-investment of their dial-up bandwidth for indeterminate minutes of waiting (and opportunity-cost of other things not downloaded) that might be more than they really wanted for whatever-it-was.
by Terr_
7/13/2026 at 4:26:02 AM
This is, IMO, an excellent analogy.Then it was to protect our modems bandwidth (cost and time) while now it's more about protecting our own cognitive bandwidth.
by kruffalon
7/13/2026 at 9:02:34 AM
Sensible policy. I think with mainstream news publications now obviously using LLMs in their day to day workflows, it's going to be hard to take a purist stance here. Some do this more responsibly than others. But I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing if it is done responsibly. It's only a problem if it is done poorly.Poor writing is not a new thing, of course. Most of the moderation mechanisms that it uses were perfected a quarter century ago when sites like Slashdot were popular as a defense mechanism against bad user behavior. Bad user behavior impacts commenting, article submissions, and moderating itself. While bad users now have AI to abuse, the problem of a large volume of low quality content is is largely the same. The moderation mechanisms end up targeting the problem at the source: identifying good and bad users. So, the same amount of bad users generating a lot more garbage isn't that big of a deal. Getting good karma still is a lot of work and it makes identifying all the garbage created by users without that relatively straightforward.
Using LLMs to tag, flag and filter content might not be a bad thing to experiment with. There are a lot of low quality AI generated opinion pieces that somehow make it to the front page. Same for political and controversial stuff, which of course is against the HN guidelines for content. Auto flagging things that obviously violate guidelines should not be that hard. It's just a matter of having good guard rails. @dang might actually already be doing that. I know I would be if staying on top of piles of generated garbage was part of my job description. It might also be done to give good content a little boost.
The new articles section has a very low signal to noise ratio currently and the window for good content to make it past that is very short. Often articles on the front page will have many duplicate submissions that never made it past that. IMHO duplicate submissions should just count as upvotes on the original. Auto de-duplicating based on canonical URL should not be that hard.
by jillesvangurp
7/13/2026 at 5:59:46 PM
> Poor writing is not a new thing, of course. Most of the moderation mechanisms that it uses were perfected a quarter century ago when sites like Slashdot were popular as a defense mechanism against bad user behavior. Bad user behavior impacts commenting, article submissions, and moderating itself. While bad users now have AI to abuse, the problem of a large volume of low quality content is is largely the same.I respectfully disagree on almost all counts (beyond poor writing not being new, of course!).
Moderation mechanisms have not been perfected. They're certainly not perfect, and, given that, I don't know what would make one call them perfected. Humans have probably gotten more accustomed to being moderated, but it'd take a lot to convince me that we have even reached a decent place for moderation at moderate scale, let alone something that is good-to-perfect.
Most importantly, the problem of low quality content is now not the same. Magnitudes matter, and a difference in degree eventually becomes a difference in kind. LLMs have escalated the problem of garbage content beyond what would've previously been conceivable.
To illustrate: How do you dispose of several trash bags at once? Take them to the trash can. How do you dispose of several tens of trash bags at once? Need to rent a dumpster.
Or a classic: If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem.
Bringing it back to written content: doing human-driven moderation on hundreds of submissions a day is tractable with (idk) a couple of people. For thousands or tens of thousands? Intractable. And bear in mind that human-driven moderation is one of the things that keeps HN a better place on the net than many (most) others.
by jcgl
7/13/2026 at 5:12:29 AM
I would love to see a 'flag as AI' coupled with a profile setting to hide posts that have had a certain number of AI flags. Allow people who don't want to see likely AI content to filter it silently.by 1bpp
7/13/2026 at 3:43:13 AM
Great response. Thanks for weighing in and all the moderation you do!by cr125rider
7/13/2026 at 1:23:54 PM
>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 more conservatively, discounts it.It's definitely not universal. I've seen articles that seem clearly AI-generated, but still get upvoted because the community likes the title/thesis.
by gruez
7/13/2026 at 3:16:51 PM
The quality of HN articles has degraded rapidly in the last year. It seems a meaningful fraction of articles posted here, especially most blog posts, are now AI generated. (Of course, this is the case for the rest of the internet too, but HN has always been a haven from the rest of the internet.)by rappatic
7/13/2026 at 2:46:36 AM
The times I've pointed point out pretty blatant AI comments, I get nuked with downvotes. So often that I've stopped pointing them out.Before you say I'm just falsely calling them out, it's typical ChatGPT style of either very amicable or Nobel Laureate tone, lots of formatting, with a couple of paragraphs and then a clever one-line punchline at the end. If you look at those commenters their history, it's all like that. Either generated or assisted. For older accounts you can see the steep increase of it around 2025ish.
Seems like the HN crowd absolutely adores AI comments and the rule banning them is (sadly) unnecessary. Or at least not what 'the people' want.
by jorvi
7/13/2026 at 2:57:07 AM
Out of curiosity I looked through your post history to find an example of a time you got downvoted for calling out AI comments. The first one I could find was 3 months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47493096), where you got downvoted for calling out an AI comment...to a comment that had zero common signs of AI writing.The OP then replied:
> Not AI. Not sure how I feel getting my writing style called out like that though :D
by minimaxir
7/13/2026 at 3:45:39 AM
Not OP, but I’ve been nuked with downvotes for this several times too and tend to delete the dead comments. The slop is so prevalent that at this point it’s not a particularly interesting thing to say I think.by nojs
7/13/2026 at 3:49:46 AM
HN guidelines are to flag/downvote and move on anyways.by minimaxir
7/13/2026 at 4:13:09 AM
And if you flag/downvote AI content (or any other class of content) too consistently, you’ll find your flags and downvotes quickly become ineffective.So the guidelines are in some sense a red herring.
by TimorousBestie
7/13/2026 at 6:59:59 AM
That's not true- can I ask what you saw that made you come to that conclusion?by dang
7/13/2026 at 3:09:51 AM
OP wrote in the parent:".. Fault-tolerant and highly available hardware must facilitate low-latency, single-threaded communication with high semantic density in order to achieve multi-dimensional consensus in a safety-critical, heterogeneous, adversarial environment. .."
I am not sure why you think someone saying "not AI trust me bro" carries any merit.
At any rate, like I said, I've given up the war. People enjoy reading that stuff, I'll just be the old man no longer yelling at the clouds.
by jorvi
7/13/2026 at 3:54:01 AM
Your post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47493096) might also have been downvoted for saying "Be better", which is an internet putdown trope.by dang
7/13/2026 at 3:59:35 AM
Also that.by minimaxir
7/13/2026 at 1:26:39 PM
[flagged]by jorvi
7/13/2026 at 3:35:45 PM
I didn't respond to your argument because I didn't want to escalate, but since you insist on personally attacking me and breaking the HN guidelines far more explicitly than what you're accusing the OP of doing...No LLM has responded like your quote of OP that you assert is LLM generated. Dense verbose writing is not something LLMs do without very specific prompt engineering that no one would do rationally. The tropes of LLM writing are more highly sporadic verbose writing (e.g. "delve") with highly atypical grammatical constructions, it's more precise than "it's sounds like a MBA" like you are asserting. Look at Wikipedia's list and try to figure out which item the OP falls under: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
Yes, OP has a verbose way with words and grammar. On a site like Hacker News that shouldn't be that weird, and accusing people of using AI without a smoking gun hurts culture and discourse far more than doing nothing at all, which is why I'm passionate about baseless AI use accusations. There are more than enough smoking-gun AI-written comments you can flag/downvote respectfully.
by minimaxir
7/13/2026 at 7:23:01 PM
[flagged]by jorvi
7/13/2026 at 3:24:54 AM
Just the idea that something is AI is bothersome to some, and some AI content is genuinely useful and gets thrown out with the bathwater. Not saying all of it is useful, but there are shades of grey, not just black and white.by kordlessagain
7/13/2026 at 3:34:04 AM
That isn't related to my comment? My comment is more criticizing accusing something of being AI based on vibes, and likely being wrong about it.by minimaxir
7/13/2026 at 12:35:32 PM
The broader point stands that all this AI stuff is highly polarizing, for a reason. I think you did a good job explaining why people get polarized. Sorry for any confusion.by kordlessagain
7/13/2026 at 5:58:25 AM
I can't speak for everyone, but I've done a lot of reflecting on this so I have something of an explanation for why I feel this way about AII think it's because I'm not optimizing my life to get the correct answer as fast as possible, or to build things as fast as possible.
To me, the most important thing about the internet is connecting with other people. If I ask a question on a forum it's because I want to talk to someone about it, maybe make an acquaintance or even a friend. Otherwise I would of course just ask the AI now. Google has been around for a long time, and could already usually find answers for me. I still would rather discuss with a colleague sometimes than Google every single thing.
Human connection. We need more of it, not less. I think heavy AI use and reliance on AI for thinking, research, communication and building... It's going to isolate people even more
by bluefirebrand
7/13/2026 at 6:00:26 AM
to be honest, I hope you'll also recognize that non-native English speakers have limited vocabulary and phrasing when participating in HN.by jdw64
7/13/2026 at 2:54:05 AM
IMO posting "This article is AI" does not add anything to the conversation.The HN guidelines[1] include:
Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage.
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken.
All we really need is to add "Don't complain that an article is AI" to the guidelines.
by ryandrake
7/13/2026 at 5:34:06 AM
But it is useful. I can deal with a broken scrollbar if the content is good, but if an article is AI written I don't want to read the content at all. That's a huge difference.Nowadays I usually check the comments first for the "This is AI" comment, I've left a few of my own and gotten thank yous in reply.
by WD-42
7/13/2026 at 3:16:37 AM
I don't think I agree with that. Complaining about AI written articles is more about the quality of the writing. it's on par with a piece of writing that wasn't proof read, well researched or some stream of consciousness rant.I think the criticism also signals to the submitter or idk co-author? That the article isn't valued
by tayo42
7/13/2026 at 3:09:55 AM
Flagged as AI is useful as it would mean I skip the article.by asdff
7/13/2026 at 3:26:34 AM
You could just ask your AI to flag it with an extension, or rewrite it in a style you prefer (or just do a good job summarizing the articles core meaning).by kordlessagain
7/13/2026 at 4:19:36 AM
That would be like driving a v12 down my driveway everytime I want to check the mailbox.by asdff
7/13/2026 at 12:33:09 PM
I have a local 12GB GPU doing this, and it's definitely not a v12.by kordlessagain
7/13/2026 at 4:15:16 PM
Meanwhile I use no vram to read with my own eyesby asdff
7/13/2026 at 5:19:50 AM
But what if your v12 was fueling an entire economy based on miles driven?by eclipticplane
7/13/2026 at 5:38:54 AM
A real v12, vs hypothetical in my example, actually does in the form of gas consumed. Still, doesn't mean it is a good excuse to justify the waste in energy and materials, all to achieve what I already can do. It would be nice to throw that compute towards stuff like curing disease or towards something that might stave off climate change, instead of using it to turn bullet points into an article and me turning that article back into bullet points.by asdff
7/13/2026 at 4:20:11 AM
> > I don't want to deal with AI or AI slop> You should add more AI to your life
I hope you can see how this is not a useful suggestion.
by nvme0n1p1
7/13/2026 at 12:26:16 PM
I'm suggesting using AI to combat the AI issue, not complaining endlessly with pointless points that do nothing to solve the very real problem that is not going away by being stubborn or rude. My suggestion, which I use myself, helps limit the blast radius. Doesn't mean I have to get involved with it while it's doing what it does. Do you also question email filters and argue that sending spam is wrong and suggesting to use a spam filter is not useful to the conversation?by kordlessagain
7/13/2026 at 3:33:07 PM
GP proposed the site should solve the problem once at the source, and everyone benefits. You counter-proposed that every individual reader should take manual action on every headline they see. That's a lot of redundant wasted effort across the userbase.To continue your analogy, that would be like if Gmail got rid of spam filters, and then told people to stop complaining endlessly and manually copy every email they get into SpamGPT to ask if it's spam or not.
by nvme0n1p1
7/13/2026 at 1:03:28 PM
It is very useful when the LLM-generated article is full of inaccuracies. Look how confused people were in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48873424 A disclaimer on HN saying "AI generated" would have cleared things up instantly.by Diogenesian
7/13/2026 at 6:08:35 AM
> But I wouldn't be surprised if, by the end of 2026, 90-95% of articles posted online are AI slop. Pointing it out is useless.Actually, when 90%-95% of articles posted online are AI slop, it's even more useful to identify those which aren't.
When the signal/noise ratio is too low, having an indicator of signal is tremendously useful.
by lelanthran
7/13/2026 at 3:04:33 AM
I am exclusively interested in the remaining 5% that is not AI slop, so yes, I always want to see that information.by archagon
7/13/2026 at 3:10:02 AM
Agreed, I find comments whining about AI slop to be far less valuable than the supposed AI slop, and I wonder if the commenters are aware of the irony, or perhaps those comments are also AI slop themselves.by Ferret7446
7/13/2026 at 1:10:15 PM
> my sense is that the community mostly doesn't want to read itI can confirm. Most LLM-written content is low effort, low value. This is somewhat by construction. You get the blandest takes in the blandest language.
by Hendrikto
7/13/2026 at 4:15:52 AM
A fixed dropdown list of flag reasons would be a very good change, I think, because it would somewhat counteract strategic flagging of stories as a downvote. I think you'd want to keep the list pretty tight, because it seems like a huge source of meta drama.by tptacek
7/13/2026 at 5:12:45 AM
The problem with fixed lists is that what is in the spirit of HN evolves.Single page info-graphics and Awesome-Lists come to mind.
Hell, one or more of PG’s books has one or more baysian generated texts presented as poems.
by brudgers
7/13/2026 at 7:56:09 AM
I think the problem space needs to be divided into two - AI generated articles (which the OP's question is about) and AI generated content/comments. The articles - honestly, normal flagging just works. If the content and the information in it is worthwhile, I don't think people would flag it. Isn't this the whole point of flagging?However, the second part of the problem - the AI comments, that's really what kills the discussion and eventually the community. If I have trust issues that I'm talking to a bot but not a real user, I am not going to engage further. I might or might not flag the account, but at some point, I'm going to be tired of reporting if everywhere around me it's just bots pretending to be humans. I think this is the more serious problem that needs focus.
In my experience, sloppy AI content almost always, sometime instantly even gets flagged out.
by neya
7/13/2026 at 5:47:22 AM
My only thought is that "good" genai authors/articles will easily get through the filter while "generic" ones will fail. So the outcome won't be all genai articles getting flagged (unless people self-report), just the low quality ones. I'm guessing that's okay and I'm one of those people who discounts genai writing the second I read one of the tells, so the flag would save me time.Ultimately though this is the same debate as "should we allow genai code in codebases". High quality code lands naturally while slop is slop. Not much value in banning AI outright--the desire is predominantly to ban the slop.
Maybe the tag should be [slop] rather than [genai]...
by dcow
7/13/2026 at 6:37:21 AM
There have definitely been cases of "good" genai articles that led to quite good HN threads. (Don't ask me for links - alas but my sandblasted memory doesn't retain anything.)I guess my response to that is we want the most interesting threads.
by dang
7/13/2026 at 6:33:09 AM
I find PG's article so dismissive.I know several people that have difficulty writing but are still f*cking smart. So what, they should refrain from using AI to help them because the AI police says so?
But yeah, let's continue classifying people based on their outer qualities and habits... History showed us were this leads us to.
And here an em dash -- to freak out the AI police.
by xeyownt
7/13/2026 at 7:09:35 AM
> I know several people that have difficulty writing but are still f*cking smart. So what, they should refrain from using AI to help them because the AI police says so?Do what other people do when they cannot do something: don’t do it?
I can’t draw or do art and I don’t have an AI generate art for me so I can LARP as an artist.
You can just… not do things? Nobody is putting a gun to your head to make you write blog posts and post them on HN.
by dwroberts
7/13/2026 at 7:59:18 AM
A judgement on the content (product of writing) is not a judgement on people. I dont care if a person uses LLMs in their life – heck, I myself do. But I care if I want to spend my time reading an LLM-written/assisted article or not.PS that's not an em-dash – this is.
by freehorse
7/13/2026 at 10:30:19 AM
re PS: no; unless HN now swallows em dashes, what you posted is https://unicodeplus.com/U+2013, not https://unicodeplus.com/U+2014by Aachen
7/13/2026 at 10:57:33 AM
Oops — sorry.by freehorse
7/13/2026 at 11:54:29 AM
> I know several people that have difficulty writing but are still f*cking smart. So what, they should refrain from using AI to help them because the AI police says so?The issue is that AI doesn't actually help them; it corrects grammar and removes voice. If you're trying to sound more professional/convincing/engaging, AI usage undermines that.
by Planktonne
7/13/2026 at 6:56:24 AM
I agree with your second paragraph - in fact I posted something pretty sympatico a couple hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48887812. But I have such a different reaction to pg's article that I can't fathom why you say that.by dang
7/13/2026 at 3:47:08 PM
They should refrain from using AI if it turns more people off to their ideas than it turns people on to them. There's no need to invent "AI police" as a big baddie here.A strategy for people who feel they can't write is to just keep it short and sweet. Intelligence is such a potent force. It shines through.
What humans want most is to hear the voices of other humans.
by djeastm
7/13/2026 at 8:10:59 AM
I strongly agree. Humanity only benefits from having more smart ideas published.Better is simply don't publish slop. If someone spends time refining and editing their idea with AI assistance and are happy with the quality of the finished product then I say go for it.
It's not like all human writers produce content that is worth reading.
by Debugreality
7/13/2026 at 8:24:09 AM
Let's make flags public, too. Flagged_by link.Congratulations on your recursive ascension, too
by keepamovin
7/13/2026 at 11:14:17 PM
That would just supply ammunition to the kind of users who like to go after other users. We want to discourage that, not encourage it.Also, votes and flags are personal, even intimate data. I can't imagine publishing it.
by dang
7/13/2026 at 1:07:22 PM
Some of us use genAI as an accessibility tool. It enables people to write and publish work that otherwise wouldn't exist.Some people already dismiss genuinely useful content solely based on the use of AI to assist in writing it - i am not sure what flagging would do other than to reinforce that prejudice.
I posted a couple of my articles here, and the one that got traction was generally well received (and also received some constructive feedback from those who acknowledged that is was AI assisted) - but it is evident across HN there is a vocal minority who outright dismiss content solely because it was "AI generated" completely disregarding the content itself. I appreciate this is personal taste, or LLM fatigue, or whatever, but its not really constructive.
If what you want to do is target the slop while not targeting the quality content, then that is what the voting mechanism already does. If people don't like something they can downvote it. Flagging content as AI generated is just a dogwhistle to those who want to downvote AI generated content. If anything, id rather see a rule that stops people commenting on stuff just to dismiss it as "LLM slop".
Its already trivial to avoid detection with fine-tuned humanisers [i] built on non-instruction-tuned models. That makes the flag mostly useless - or worse - a way of penalising any content you disagree with. I'd rather not hide what I am doing and have something that I feel reads well than hide it and sacrifice the message to satisfy a vocal minority.
[i] https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19516
EDIT: downvotes, as expected. hope you see this anyway @dang. Downvotes kind of make my point for me.
by supermatt
7/13/2026 at 3:03:55 PM
> It enables people to write and publish work that otherwise wouldn't exist.Why is that a good thing? If you aren't going to bother to write something, other people shouldn't have to bother to read it, so please don't put it in the world at all.
Gatekeeping based on skill and motivation is good!
by umanwizard
7/13/2026 at 3:07:09 PM
This is the exactly the ableist mentality i mention.You are gatekeeping based on the medium, not the skill or motivation.
by supermatt
7/13/2026 at 3:09:44 PM
Well yeah, if people are unable to write, then I don't want to read their writing. That sounds harsh but it's the unfortunate reality. I also don't want to look at paintings made by people who can't paint, or listen to music made by people who are tone-deaf.by umanwizard
7/13/2026 at 3:19:51 PM
[flagged]by supermatt
7/13/2026 at 4:37:59 PM
[flagged]by umanwizard
7/13/2026 at 4:52:23 PM
[flagged]by supermatt
7/13/2026 at 1:12:49 PM
> I'd rather not hide what I am doingSo why are you doing that by sloppyfying your own writing? If you want people to take interest in your writing, it should probably actually be your own writing.
by Hendrikto
7/13/2026 at 1:58:12 PM
I am VERY clear that i use assistive AI with my writing. I dont believe it is "sloppyfying" - I believe it makes it much more readable than i would otherwise achieve, not least because I simply wouldn't publish it without.Your prejudice/ableism in calling it "sloppyfying" is exactly the problem I mention with allowing it to be a flag.
by supermatt
7/13/2026 at 12:14:56 PM
We should try replacing forum mods with AIjust for a while :)
by Razengan
7/14/2026 at 9:30:12 PM
I wish!by dang
7/13/2026 at 12:04:06 PM
This is a real conundrum.For example, if I quote a GenAI response –even in criticism– (See what I did, there?), it can get flagged, and result in a shadowban (has happened to me -lesson learned).
But a good use for LLMs, is as a copyeditor. They do a great job. Some unedited stuff is so bad, I'd rather read slop, any day.
The problem is, what's the threshold? If they just fix a few typos and misspellings, that's fine, but what if they offer more substantial changes? How much text must change, before we can legit dismiss as "slop"?
Also, what if there's a significant GenAI component, but the article really is something that we want on the HN frontpage, because of its content?
by ChrisMarshallNY
7/13/2026 at 5:35:29 AM
>This is why we see so many "just show me the prompt" responses, along with others like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/genai-pushback.This is totally tangential to your point, but what is that page? It's not your usual link to an algolia search. Is this already part of some sort of manual tagging system? Clicking on the first one, these comments don't seem to be moderated. Are you using these complaints to help detect AI generated content? I think the existence of that page just leaves me confused on whether you actually want people to comment like this or not.
by slg
7/13/2026 at 6:40:52 AM
It's just a list of posts that we tagged manually and then defined a URL endpoint for. We do that sometimes, but rarely enough that I can understand the confusion.Keep in mind that we have a REPL over here and can make any link do anything!
by dang
7/13/2026 at 7:04:59 PM
Thanks for the response, I guess it's rare enough that it was the first time I remember seeing it so it stuck out to me.by slg
7/13/2026 at 6:13:54 AM
It's just a collection of comments pushing back on LLM-generated prose. 'dang sends it in replies to emails that ask him why their comments were flagged when that's the reason. He's offering examples of the broad community sentiment on the matter, to the commenter who was flagged.by mh-
7/13/2026 at 4:08:23 PM
i love the allergy hall of fame and i was expecting to find many comments of mineby croisillon
7/13/2026 at 10:35:15 PM
Why resist tagging?by shomp
7/13/2026 at 10:40:09 PM
A few reasons I guess: (1) it adds complexity; (2) it has always been HN's design to show the same site to everyone rather than shard; (3) there's a quality of pre-digestion about it which conflicts with the principle of curiosity.It seems better if HN users poke around and decide for themselves what the articles and threads are about, and which are interesting or not.
by dang
7/13/2026 at 5:49:23 AM
> This is why we see so many "just show me the prompt" responses, along with others like thisMany are quite a bit more subtle, like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48844062
The more subversive undercurrent is interesting to me. People intentionally fucking with someone's bot, burning tokens for the lulz.
by ryukoposting
7/13/2026 at 5:54:56 AM
If someone were so dumb they didn’t understand the method used in the link… mind explaining?by Barbing
7/13/2026 at 6:30:59 AM
Oh, there's a non sequitir in the parent comment that gives away some kind of leaky context situation, and the commenter is just replying with the same very generic "please elaborate" that we all throw at a language model from time to time. Not because anyone cares what the random text generator has to say, just because it's funny to light a few thousand tokens on fire.by ryukoposting
7/13/2026 at 8:08:57 AM
I dont see that. To me it reads like a genuine question to an actually underspecified part of how much embedded carbon emissions ram entails. I read the question at the time and found it reasonable and genuine, and I see no strong reason to suspect that any of the commenters there is an LLM.by freehorse
7/13/2026 at 9:48:24 AM
We already have tags for PDF and Video so I could definitely see one for [LLM] working!Generally I'd appreciate a top level comment from the submitter saying this is LLM generated but I read it and found it interesting because x,y,z because I'd rather read slop someone vouches for than slop someone hasn't
by sixhobbits
7/13/2026 at 10:17:09 AM
Can we just make it official in the guidelines that "Articles written by genai" should generally not be submitted to HN? (And by extension, that they are okay to flag?)(I already flag submissions I think were written by AI.)
by Wowfunhappy
7/13/2026 at 3:55:42 AM
lots of things happening in this post1st: the presumption that AI generated text is actually unsuccessful, rather than proliferating broadly unchallenged today
2nd: the disposition that negative attitudes towards AI text are unjustified discrirmination, rather than working as a strong latent predictor of low-effort content
3rd: the assumption that human writing is reliably doled benefits, rather than some poor proxy of it (winning the social contest for claiming authenticity)
Operationally, only a very small minority of humans actually successfully identify AI generated text at rates ≥ Pangram. People discriminate against the label of "AI", but mostly fail to vote accurately. It's not uncommon to see bots abusing this gap for their own success -- accusing humans, sympathizing with generated profiles... FUD environment where people routinely get away with dismissing true accusations.
For someone who is mediocre at detection, this would structurally feel like an unhinged, unjustified bias: look at all these good posts, these honest people, getting undermined by discrimination...
by 152334H
7/13/2026 at 3:57:05 AM
Interesting points! though I don't follow them all.> 1st: the presumption that AI generated text is actually unsuccessful, rather than proliferating broadly unchallenged today
I can only talk about HN. If you think this is proliferating broadly on HN itself, I'd like to see such links. Assuming it's "broadly", they should be easy to find.
> 2nd: the disposition that negative attitudes towards AI text are unjustified discrirmination, rather than working as a strong latent predictor of low-effort content
I don't understand this bit.
> 3rd: the assumption that human writing is reliably doled benefits, rather than some poor proxy of it (winning the social contest for claiming authenticity)
Sorry, but I don't understand this either.
> only a very small minority of humans actually successfully identify AI generated text at rates ≥ Pangram.
That's not what we seem to be seeing. I do agree that there's a wide spectrum and a lot of wrong guesses.
> It's not uncommon to see bots abusing this gap for their own success
I'd like to see specific links of this on HN itself. Again, if it's not uncommon, those should be easy to find.
by dang
7/13/2026 at 11:02:44 AM
On the humans (vs. pangram) ability to reliably spot LLM generated content, there was an independent study: https://arxiv.org/html/2501.15654v1by Chu4eeno
7/13/2026 at 5:28:39 AM
What about people who genuinely write their own articles but due to their time spent with AI, they are sounding like AI? I know people like this. They really are writing like that now. Shouldn't there be fairness to them?by handfuloflight
7/13/2026 at 6:44:05 AM
I do hear this sometimes but it's not clear to me how prevalent this is. I'd need to see specific examples.Edit: these are just gut-feeling numbers but we've had many dozens (perhaps hundreds) of email exchanges with users about this to date. Usually when we ask them if their post was genai, probably 90% say "oh yes, sorry, I didn't realize you had that rule". Of the other 10% or so, when we ask further, it usually turns out that they used some other tool (a grammar checker, a machine translation, some kind of toucher-upper, etc.) which left LLM imprints on their post. It's pretty rare for someone to insist that they wrote the text entirely by themselves with no LLM or similar tool. Of those, I'm sure some are false positives.
There have also been a few instances where I didn't fully believe them, mainly because they'd already posted other things that got classified as genai. Fortunately this is rare. The vast majority of users who we have this sort of conversation with are sincere, legit users who don't know much about HN. Our hope is therefore to convert them into informed community members!
by dang
7/13/2026 at 11:05:20 AM
Typical linkedin posts always sounded like that and they were already not well liked.by freehorse
7/14/2026 at 6:21:42 AM
I'm going to 'detach this comment and move it to' the second level because I'm late to the party and the chance you'll see it will drop from slim to almost none (unless you have a reply detector?).https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48887942
> They can't know for sure whether what they're saying is true or false, and we can't know for sure how we should moderate it.
(Regarding people identifying text as genai).
You could moderate like another widespread but hard to prove problem: Propaganda and dis/misinformation campaigns. It's easy to see lots of people repeating well-crafted talking points (too well-crafted for an ordinary person), shouting down those who disagree. Yet users are forbidden from identifying it as such in comments; we're told to email hn@ycombinator.com. You could do that for genai suspicions too (assuming you have unlimited time to review such things).
It seems like a witch hunt to me; I have little reason or evidence to believe people know - because people speaking with no evidence is never reliable, because the angry mob is prone to witch hunts, because genai's are trained on human writing making it harder to distinguish, because some factors people target (e.g., em dashes) have been widely used, and because a highly disruptive technology at this stage of adoption is highly prone to strong emotional reaction and misunderstanding.
I'm not sure it matters: As a rule, we should hold the human who puts their name on it fully responsible. If their assistant, their genai software, or their dog writes it, it doesn't matter. Their name is on it. Speakers don't blame their speechwriters - the speaker said it.
I'm not sure it matters because right now it seems like a big reactionary over-response. I doubt we'll care much in a few years.
The automated spam potential, in posts and in comments, is a problem. One solution is somehow raising the standard of posts and comments: if it's that easy to generate middling crap, it makes better content more valuable and available and it may raise the standard naturally.
Thanks!
by mmooss
7/14/2026 at 8:58:09 AM
> I was rather pleased with the originality of this until I remembered pg had come up with "writes and write-nots" in (…)Is Paul arguing that there will be people who can’t write because of AI? People have been crap at writing before AI, and much of Gen Z (and Alpha) literally don’t know how to write (not just how to write well) at ages where previous generations could.
That’s not his prediction, and not a prediction about technology, as claimed at the top of the post. School teachers could have told him that years ago.
It’s frankly dangerous that so many people lap up Paul’s words, when his world view is so distorted and out of touch with reality and devoid of understanding of regular people. He’s been rich and of high status for too long for his own intellectual good.
by latexr
7/13/2026 at 5:52:57 AM
I don't rely on LLMs and I don't find them useful, hence I don't use LLMs and everything about them deserves to be questioned.by ludicrousdispla
7/13/2026 at 5:56:41 AM
LLMs are unquestionably useful. The number of things I've used them to accomplish on HN—things that I've wanted to do for over a decade—is mind-blowing. Performance optimizations, log file anlaysis, tracking down race conditions—it's quite incredible.by dang
7/13/2026 at 12:03:49 PM
I think you and I have a difference of opinion on what it means to be unquestionably useful, and whether any technology should ever be described as such.by ludicrousdispla