Basically every article on this site has a comment complaining that the article is AI. Who knows. Maybe “complaining about AI” is the new AI way of fitting in.
This feels different to me than complaining about the font or whatever. I don’t want to read or comment on anything not written by a human. I also agree with GP here that using AI instead of your own words has bearing on the content itself, insofar as it’s a signal that the author doesn’t care enough to write it themself.
As a corollary, I also want to know if a project posted here is predominantly vibe-coded, since that to me is a signal that it may be of lower quality, have fewer edge cases worked out, and is more likely to be abandoned in the near future.
Caring enough to put in the effort of thinking and writing is not a "tangential issue". Laziness is a substantive defect, and sadly, I think that kelseyfrog has clocked this one correctly. There are borderline cases, but the cadence of this tweet thread is unmistakeable.
We don't have to live like this. We don't have to accept it. We don't have to upvote it even if we agree (as I do) with the explicit point. The medium is the message, and the message that this poster is putting out here is that online age verification isn't actually worth getting that worked up about.
AI-generated content being passed off as human-written is not a tangential issue. HN staff agree, because posting AI generated comments is explicitly forbidden. I suspect the only reason this isn't extended to submissions is because pretty much all articles about AI are also written by AI, and effectively forbidding positive discussion of AI is obviously against the interests of a VC firm.
HN's guidelines were written under the assumption that submitted articles about [thing] would be written by people who care about [thing] and made a good faith effort to write something interesting about [thing], so it's only fair that any comments would be expected to respect the author's effort and discuss the article in equally good faith.
This assumption completely falls apart when you add AI generated submissions into the mix. If the "author" didn't care and thus couldn't be bothered to write about [thing] themselves, choosing to instead outsource that work to an LLM while they supposedly did something they deemed more valuable with the time they would've spent writing, then why should commenters be expected to dedicate more effort into their discussion of the article than the author dedicated to writing it? It's a bit unfair towards the commenters, don't you think?
No, it's because authentic writing on HN has been drowned out in an ocean of slop, in such quantities that calling it out is becoming an exercise in futility
There was an article yesterday where people were complaining about "AI smell", the author showed up in comments to state clearly and unequivocally that he didn't use AI to write it, and people wouldn't believe him.
AI didn't get its tropes and tics ex nihilo. Some people just write in a way that "smells" like AI to others.
It's more likely that they're just virtue signaling about {{current-controversial-thing}}, as evidenced by the fact that they often accuse content of being AI generated when it would only appear that way to the most naive readers.
It doesn't feel like virtue signaling. It feels like pointing out a contradiction in the text: I care deeply about this topic; I don't care enough to write it myself.
> Virtue signalling is a pejorative neologism for the expression of a moral viewpoint with the intent of communicating good character, frequently used to suggest hypocrisy.
What virtue am I signalling and what hypocrisy am I trying to hide?
I don’t believe that expressing distaste for something you have observed and find offensive and annoying is “virtue signaling”. That doesn’t really match up with what that term was coined to signify.
Holy crap, I only just saw your license agreement. Oh no. We've argued on here before, although this time we're in agreement. Please don't use this hidden license to dox me!
(It's an unenforceable joke, right? There's no way I'm bound by anything here other than maybe the site ToS.)
