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by venzaspa17 hours ago |
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upvoteby otterley16 hours ago|
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The HN Guidelines explicitly forbid posting AI-generated comments; they will be deleted if detected or reported.

I'd like them to go further and delete links to AI-generated content, but I haven't been able to persuade management to do that yet.

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upvoteby miyoji16 hours ago|
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The HN guidelines prohibit a lot of behaviors that remain unmoderated, you can see it in any thread that goes over 80 comments.
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upvoteby Barbing15 hours ago|
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Community mostly keeps us in check though.

(Sharing next sentence for the newbies, since you know-) All our jobs to flag on site & even email the worst offenders to hn@ycombinator.com . That said I rarely flag or even downvote anything. People either really behave, or perhaps the rulebreakers break rules that don’t grind my gears. Politely admonishing good faith rulebreakers is another tactic in the arsenal.

AI-generated comment posters with comment histories of exclusively slop get email alerts from me. Don’t know whether they’re planning to sell or spam but they clearly need help finding the door :)

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upvoteby nick__m15 hours ago|
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If those behaviors bothers you enough you can always mail hn@ycombinator.com because dang is not omniscient even if sometimes it looks like he is...
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upvoteby HDBaseT15 hours ago|
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How many active moderators are there? This site has a lot of comments, far too many for one person to read.
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upvoteby ThrowawayR213 hours ago|
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HN relies heavily on moderation by users through flagging and downvotes. Hacker News is only going to survive if its community is willing to go to the effort to protect it.
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upvoteby plorg16 hours ago|
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I get the sense that people who spend all day interacting with software can start to see every interaction, especially in online text platforms, as a kind of API or user interface. You might learn to instrumentalize your interactions and relationships with people. Chatbots, including coding agents, only reinforce this kind of behavior, as they don't have the kind of limits of patience or of bodily or emotional needs that humans have.
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upvoteby cheschire16 hours ago|
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What drives people to cheat at competitive games? I imagine it’s the same genes.
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upvoteby mister_mort9 hours ago|
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Some people have an inner drive like a rat that likes pushing the reward button in the cell to dose them with opium. They want to see the YOU WIN screen and absolutely do not care what it takes to get them there. Hence the booming market for custom memory modding cheat devices and subscription cheat services. They don't want to improve their skills, they just want to be number one on the board.
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upvoteby xdennis14 hours ago|
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As a previous massive cheater in RPG games (when a was young and it was easy to write your own tools) the reason to cheat is because many games (especially RPGs) have bullshit mechanics. You have to perform a lot of repetitive stuff to get ahead. Cheating is seen as honorable because it's about getting back at a system which forces you into unfair circumstances (this is akin to corruption/graft in real life).

In my opinion, this is not the same as people who use AI comment bots.

Of course, other cheaters had other reasons, but the few I was friends with had similar motivations. (Actually, a few just created tools because they enjoyed creating tools, not so much actually using them.)

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upvoteby account422 hours ago|
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Do you mean MMORPGs or single-player RPGs. Because modifying a game or game state to your likes with the goal of improving your personal enjoyment of the game is very different compared to cheating to get ahead of other people.
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upvoteby rockinghigh16 hours ago|
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Using tools to fix your writing style or grammar is not exactly cheating.
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upvoteby brandon27215 hours ago|
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This implies that writing styles are simply "correct" or "incorrect". I'd prefer to read someone's natural writing style, even if they do not consider themselves a good writer, because it comes from them genuinely. Much better than enduring text that has been fed into an LLM and homogenized.
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upvoteby jackjeff16 hours ago|
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There’s a world of difference between using AI as an editor vs letting it write a whole essay for you. AI;DR is about the latter.
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upvoteby thatjoeoverthr15 hours ago|
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I'll push back and say it's the former. Good business writing is all about the editing, and autoregressive LLMs are terrible editors. They roll dice on every word and put the same tics on every text. They meander.

Suppose you check something with ChatGPT, get nine hundred words, edit that down to three or even one and send that. You won't get AI;DR for "I checked, we're good."

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upvoteby johnnyanmac6 hours ago|
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>Suppose you check something with ChatGPT, get nine hundred words, edit that down to three or even one and send that. You won't get AI;DR for "I checked, we're good."

Maybe. The issue here is we know most people are simply posting 900 words wholesale, maybe editing down 20-30 words to try and sweep some dust under the rug (meanwhile the trash is still fully featured on top of the carpet).

For your style: I'm not a writer but I question if it's even more efficient to edit 900 AI words down to 100. I can see some people finding it easier to change other's words than generate your own ideas, but I don't think it's a majority. I certainly know it's more annoying to edit 900 lines of AI code into a succinct 100 line function/class.

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upvoteby teo_zero7 hours ago|
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> using AI as an editor vs letting it write a whole essay for you. AI;DR is about the latter

I'm sure that's the intention, but the alarming trend, at least here on HN, is crying wolf at the first em-dash.

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upvoteby account422 hours ago|
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Why is that alarming? Your immune system will also do some small amount of collateral damage to your own cells when its in a heightened state.
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upvoteby teo_zero1 hours ago|
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While you went this road of the medical metaphor, taking antibiotics at the first suspect of sickness without checking what's really going on, is a sure way to help develop antibiotic-resistant viruses.

Please note the key item is without checking. I'm not denying that many AI-generated documents are likely to be garbage. But refusing to read them just because of it will result in a lot of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

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upvoteby strbean16 hours ago|
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I've seen it used as a newer evolution of trolling on Reddit. A user hops in to a somewhat nuanced discussion and gives a very curt and rude contradiction, and then just uses an LLM to generate walls of argumentative text after you respond with "What are you talking about and why are you being such a dick?"

Very low effort the ensnare someone and waste their time for a bit, even though it is pretty quickly obvious what they are doing.

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upvoteby 16 hours ago|
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upvoteby asadotzler13 hours ago|
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Attention is all they need. It's ego-tripping, whoring for social status.
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upvoteby tayo4216 hours ago|
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Everyone can use the Internet. Some people are just crazy, neurodivergent or whatever.
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upvoteby 15 hours ago|
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