The article rests on the claim that water usage of data centers on continent X threaten water availability for humans on continent Y.
I hope you can see how self-evidently illogical that is. The article tries to bend logic into a narrative it is trying to push.
> This was from United Nations and it was flagged.
Indeed! It exposes a level of lack of rigor and critical thinking which is astounding - this is meant to be an organization that thinks clearly, which it clearly does not.
That said, there is also a vocal anti-AI crowd here, or at least there used to be. Most of those people seemed to have left for greener pastures seeing how half the HN front page is "someone made XYZ but now with AI" these days.
There are other places that discuss tech that aren't so focused on making money, and those are probably less biased in favour of the latest AI gadget.
On the other hand, since the day ChatGPT was unleashed upon the general public, you should assume all online interaction is happening through AI and should probably be ignored. The human internet died the day we taught computers how to write a coherent paragraph.
There is still a vocal anti-AI crowd here. The problem is that they don't seem to be very good, overall, at upholding HN commenting guidelines. (This is probably just a fatigue effect.) I keep seeing green accounts making pithy, uncivil snipes on this topic, with heavy use of sarcasm and reference to anti-AI "thought-terminating cliches" (e.g. mentioning the topic of water use and expecting that mention to stand in for an entire argument, while not acknowledging any of the well-established refutations).
But the thing about "someone made XYZ but now with AI" is that most of it is posted by "someone", or someone with a connection to "someone". Hence the complaints about the state of Show HN. And the thing about "someone"s is that they do not care how many anti-AI people are lurking around. There's nothing the anti-AI people could do, in principle, to stop it. Consequently, the presence of those posts is not evidence that the anti-AI people are leaving.
> On the other hand, since the day ChatGPT was unleashed upon the general public, you should assume all online interaction is happening through AI and should probably be ignored.
…And yet you're still here?
1. ycombinator supports many AI companies.
2. There are too many marketers from AI companies.
The first example was flagged by users. It fits the pattern of other political clickbait stories. The top comment is calling out problems with it. This type of story pops up and gets flagged all the time on different topics.
Some people assume a conspiracy or moderation misbehavior, but when most of the comments in the thread are people calling out obvious problems with the article it leads to a lot of users clicking the flag button. Articles with poor logic or tortured claims don't last long here.
The second one is an Ask HN on a contentious topic with more comments than upvotes. There’s an automatic filter on this website designed to detect flame wars and I suspect it down ranks threads that aren’t getting many upvotes but are attracting a lot of comments. Happens to many Ask HN threads.
The third one doesn't even strike me as anti-AI. I don't know why you included it as an example of an anti-AI agenda because it's still about a future where everyone is using AI. It has other problems though because it's willfully ignoring the fact that inference is getting cheaper at a fast rate. It probably got dropped from the front page because the ratio of comments to upvotes was bad, like the other story.
There isn’t a conspiracy theory to be found in these examples. This is just what happens to tired topics on this site.
Anti-AI topics are on the front page all the time. I think that story you tried to post was just a badly written anger bait piece, it got called out in the comments, and people started flagging it.
If anything, they don't get flagged nearly consistently enough.
That’s what they mean. It’s too easy to flag something here, as it is too easy to downvote.
He didn’t say that at all. He said there was bias towards removing negative AI posts. He showed no knowledge of the flagging system and that it could just be working as intended.
Well, no, I never have, but if I did, my first reaction would be to think I struck a nerve and had a bunch of people react, not that there was a conspiracy.
I do agree I dont think there is any larger bias other than a homogeneous group but it does question if such a group will up/down vote similar homogeneous content producing overall lower quality discussion and content.
False. I occasionally flag items, never as part of nor acting on behalf of any particular interest group.
Read the comments. People were actually reading the topic and calling it out. This gets topics flagged.
It’s not coordinated interest groups conspiring to remove stories.
> Give me a break, Mr. "nothing to see here".
Okay, Mr. “I just created an alt account for this comment”
See anything below too?
https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=49290062
https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=49318906
https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=49319582
Edit: previous sibling comments explain pretty well + imagine moving the needle on AI on HN with negative coverage of it!
It reminds me to how various political movements will complain about being unfairly censored, pointing at their posts being disproportionately removed as evidence of this, then you look at said posts, and discover that they're simply disproportionately questionable in the first place.
There's definitely merit to monitoring something like this, so I do appreciate you surfacing this here, but there's also definitely a wheat and a chaff to this, and so based on just this much I have to disagree.
Are we reading the same site? There is constant anti-AI content on the front page.
I know you're upset that your submission got flagged, but as most of the comments pointed out it wasn't even a well-argued piece. It got flagged because users here expect to read reasonable arguments, but the commenters called out real problems with the article and the arguments it was failing to make.
I would take it as feedback about what types of articles aren't welcome by the users here, not an indictment of the specific topic you submitted.
A sibling comment mentioned a few details already, but there's a good amount of information out there about how HN's post ranking system and moderation works, that'd probably be good to also consider. Maybe reaching out to the mods would also be helpful in the way of this.
To give you an anecdotal example, if I see a post mentioning how LLMs are "just next token predictors", I'm basically flagging that by reflex at this point. Not because it'd be literally untrue, but because it's asinine overall. But you won't be able to infer this from data, only the fact that a post using "AI-critical language" was flagged.
Or there was another post about how Ireland's electricity use is so-and-so % data center driven, further suggesting that this is trending up. This was not true, and the article was further horribly unhelpful in actually putting this fact into context, or properly conveying the trends. I think I ended up flagging that one as a result, after posting - what I thought - was a lot fairer picture (and even that was awfully lacking in context). Once again, an "AI-critical" post which on the face of it would have been simply censored if enough flags gathered.
There's also the mundane human angle to this, where people enthusiastic about <thing> won't necessarily be the most receptive to criticism to it, and will be more likely to try and pick that criticism apart. Gotta match the audience on some level.
You are doing a disservice as people going through AI psychosis should hear that LLMs are just calculators.
Not any more than I do by not going around telling the depressed to simply chin up, or telling people who are frustrated with Trump that they're simply sick with TDS.
There's no world where instigating others through snide insinuations works out in one's favor. You may feel extremely justified in acting like this, but I don't think you'd appreciate if you were met the same way in other subjects either. Unfair as it is, an escalation is an escalation, no matter the context or the justification. It's always a lose-lose.
You can remind people that the conversations are simulated and that LLMs are just programs without reductively handwaving how they work. You can express frustration with the overenthusiasm around LLMs without accusing others of mental illness. I guarantee you that it lands a lot better and provides a significantly better "service" than shouting ragebait into the void ever does. Give others a chance to be better than what you think of them. You may be surprised.
Consider post [3] that the parent commenter cited as an example for a post that had a "negative connotation to AI". In reality, it doesn't take much reading to confirm it was anything but. But even if we pretend that it was, and assume it was some hit piece about how "all the people who are now willingly having their brain fried will have to wake up to a grim reality", it doesn't take much to see that token frugality and business justification of AI-use is very much in the interest of those who do feel enthused about LLMs. So there'd be no reason to present the topic so maliciously; on the contrary, the author could tailor the article around this other perspective, and they'd reach a new audience with the same fundamental message, and have them cooperate too.
Tangentially related in its principle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1EVk7k9S7Q
This "community" (as the mods like to call it) is really a business tool for YC. Attract nerds to the site, funnel them into the YC program, make startups, collect billions. If this was your money-making tool, you'd probably want to quash all controversy too.
There is a strong bias at play here, please remember when discussing anything pro- worker or environment.
> 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.