Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
183
llevkk about 3 hours ago 127 comments
Should HN add the ability to flag articles as AI-generated? This doesn't have to act as a regular flag, i.e., it won't de-rank the article; it could just show up as an indicator, allowing others (like myself) who don't like reading AI-generated text, to skip it.
Open questions:
1. Why is the regular voting system not enough?
2. Should HN change in response to the gen AI era? It has been successful not changing fundamentals.
Discussion (127 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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. I have an optimistic view, but I've already been wrong about this so many times that I have low confidence in it.
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. 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 an homage to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742902.
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.
For example, I think you said "the politics of articles" before I added the thing about a "class distinction". Intriguing overlap!
I don't quite follow what you mean about grim future but if you wouldn't mind reading the edited version of my post, I can respond to anything that isn't addressed there.
(Subconscious training like when we pick up an accent, though eventually folks might automatically code switch - so that’s hopeful.)
That's not a value-judgement of the content, it's something which directly impacts the reader-experience, or possibly lack thereof. (Kind of like how Back In The Day people wanted to know the filesize of something before they clicked, so that they didn't make an blind investment of their dial-up bandwidth.)
But then again, there’s always reddit :)
Slashdot is still around
1st: 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...
> 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. If it's not uncommon, they should be easy to find.
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.
The OP then replied:
> Not AI. Not sure how I feel getting my writing style called out like that though :D
".. 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.
The HN guidelines[1] include:
and I'd argue pointing out that you think an article is AI is very similar in value to pointing out any of the above. None of us like AI slop. 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. As useless as pointing out that the article breaks the scrollbar (which happens often) or that the article is formatted badly or has poor text contrast, or that an article is Chinese propaganda. Probably true, but posting about it adds nothing to the discussion, and is not allowed on HN.All we really need is to add "Don't complain that an article is AI" to the guidelines.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I think the criticism also signals to the submitter or idk co-author? That the article isn't valued
Maybe we need a two-dimensional voting system: good/bad, ai/human. I think the second axis could cut down on meta-discussions over how much of the article was AI-generated.
I imagine the set of articles that are somehow both interesting-enough-to-read but not interesting-enough-to-write is smaller than you'd think.
If there is a great post on a topic and the author used AI when generating it, what’s so bad about that?
agreed.
For me, the issue I have is that a vocal group seems to despise AI-edited content and they can't manage to take their disgust eleswhere.
AI-editing is another tool, just like spellcheck.
"Submit to my knowledge or else!" is abusive.
People can drive a car without needing an expert copilot. Why should they need a software engineer to use a computer?
Spare the appeals to history as the historical record would show software engineers have unemployed many others. Technology moves on; rotary phone makers and travel agents have a seat for in their support group.
Your self selection and vanity could not be more obvious.
AI could provided assistance with building both cars and software, but you still need a decent level of knowledge in either field to get a good result.
Not every person can drive a car.
> but they can't build a car.
Not every person is unable to build a car.
Eg: my father, born 1935, still alive, has built double axle trailers, cars and vehicles that work, medical caravans for St Johns Ambulance, ...
His education was six years of primary school and these were all "side projects" for himself or for his community.
> you still need a decent level of knowledge in either field
and the barrier to picking up sufficient knowledge to safely create software, cars, even ground effect flying boats isn't that high for normal human beings .. although it does require a certain can do attitude.
Conspiracy minded responses are low value, and yours is especially so considering HN bans AI comments.
Hacker News adopting such a feature would likely do more harm than good.
https://github.com/alvi-se/ai-ublock-blacklist
https://github.com/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist
https://github.com/Stevoisiak/Stevos-AI-Blocklist/
That's a good example of the exact problem with such a broad stroke rule.
Depends on your use-case, but most people don't need content used in network nuisances like YC AstroTurf posts. =3
I think the era of the blog is simply dead now and that’s mostly ok. Blogspam and corporate blogs had killed quality bogs ages ago even before AI was a thing. The real question is what replaces it.
Oh and of course the $64k question is this: if an AI generated article is indistinguishable from a human written article and it is accurate and interesting, do you care who wrote it? We want to avoid low quality, not AI generation, right?
having said that, i'd still much prefer a norm of including prompt history with the article, or the codebase for that matter, so people can choose for themselves :)
Whether you agree that a con artist is only a criminal if he gets caught, or you think he’s a criminal the whole time, surely you can see why many people might want to know if they are dealing with a friend and not something simulating a friend.
How do you tell which is the case?
If we don't allow AI help at all, is that perhaps discriminating against those who don't feel comfortable posting with imperfect English?
I agree in principle, but am concerned in implementation... I'm not sure we can be fair without high risk of discrimination
Edit: typo fix
Edit: or am I AI?! And making edits looks more legit.... (To be clear: I'm not, I play by rules)
I have a hard time finding these communities
The issue is complicated by the fact that there can be substantial effort invested in a process outside of the writing itself - and so AI written does not guarantee that the content will not valuable. But I'm inclined to punish it anyway to establish a norm of valuing genuine human communication. I think this norm has always been present but we didn't know until we'd really explored the alternatives.
I spend a LOT of time reading AI generated content because I use AI a lot for various purposes - maybe I'm more sensitive to its voice than some. AI voice always bothers me and its been getting more annoying the more I notice it, but there is a huge difference in reading responses to my own prompts and in reading the response to a prompt I haven't seen, when I don't know how many revisions there were, when I don't know if a human mind reviewed it at all before clicking send.
It becomes an unacceptable distraction because I don't know if I'm investing more time in the content than the author did, when in normal written communication the author would be putting in at least 5x the work.
My entire position: I'm not interested in reading text that sounds like it was written by AI.
The latest codemaxxed models all tend to write in very distinct, instantly recognizable ways unless carefully instructed otherwise (honestly a good thing if you want to avoid wasting time reading AI text). A great example is this submission that's currently #1 on the front page (which is also just a thinly veiled advertisement): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48884853
I think it would be great if AI-generated submissions were outright banned as they fundamentally break the balance of effort that HN was built upon, but as was already stated by another user, YC is heavily invested in AI so there's a conflict of interest there.
And im sure this was designed in order to encourage positive discussion
AI writing is not the problem - low effort is the problem. Low effort AI articles are full of tics which are obvious, if you've done a lot of AI writing. To write well with AI you need to spend a good deal of time editing.
If you submit something that's low effort but has a clickbait headline that appeals to HN, you may well make the front page even if the article is lightweight (it does happen!) This is true both for AI and for human written articles.
On the flip side, somebody could spend an enormous amount of effort creating a masterpiece with AI. Penalizing that because of the tool that was used is arbitrary.
I do think the dead giveaways (em dashes, it's not X it's Y, etc.) are annoying to come across repeatedly. A person not bothering to remove these tells feels 'low effort' to me.
However, a lot of the academic or technical posts on this site have turned out to include AI hallucinations (a problem that is not just on HN, in fairness). If an article or paper contains nonexistent or obviously, blatantly wrong citations, then I feel very strongly that such content is disrespectful to the HN audience, certainly to me, because I've just wasted my time trying to take the author seriously only to discover that the argument was founded on a hallucination. In a sense, it doesn't matter to me whether the hallucination was due to AI or not -- if a person puts in bogus citations, AI-generated or otherwise, my view is that their article or paper fully deserves to be flagged so that we don't waste other people's time.
It got to the point I'm sitting on reviewed and tested patches for Mesa that I'm too ashamed to submit because of Claude's participation in their making.
AI slop is AI slop.
A simple beneficial step that would lead to modest improvements and little downside: partner with Pangram. Either adding it as an automated spam filter, or by simply attaching the detection % to all posts.
Humans? We're not particularly effective at this as a whole...
AI service ? We'd probably have to pay for that AI to detect that AI and well.. Its also not particularly effective
Effectiveness is important, because we dont want real human produced data to be accidentally removed from view, just as much if not more so than having AI gen data being left on the site.
Is it purely just a "human supremacist" desire that fuels the motivation to ban or block such articles?
Voting systems can be gamed and as HN becomes bigger and bigger it'll start to attract unsavory audiences who have an agenda.