Where would you draw the line though? Would you want the same for e.g. HTML? HTTP? HN? YC?
I mean personally I'm all in favor of more usage - or even automatic insertion - of the `<abbr>` tag. Can probably be done with a browser addon as well.
"CNN generated Image" sounds like "Images generated by the Cable News Network, CNN" as if the corporation has some software/policy for editing and prepping images in a way they can be detected. It's not so absurd, photojournalism can be quite specific in rules.
The ability to classify photos by news outlet based on identifying their photojournalism rules through computer algorithms sounds like a remarkably clever idea.
I wonder if part of an issue is the generation gap? For older readers, I imagine that they're much more familiar with CNN referring to the Cable News Network. Whereas for younger readers heavily involved in tech, me included, we aren't as heavily tied to the former abbreviation, so CNN referring to neural networks comes more readily to mind.
> Where would you draw the line though? Would you want the same for e.g. HTML?
The day someone uses “HTML” to mean “hyper-threaded machine learning” or whatever, yes definitely.
CNN was unambiguously used for the TV channel for decades now, of course some people are confused when one uses it to mean something else without warning.
It’s all about audience and confusion. My feel of the HN readership is that it’s a vey broad base of mostly technical backgrounds; international but US heavy. That puts the ones you list as perfectly reasonable, and CNN referring to the neural networks is usually ok.
I this case, however, there’s a conflict with the news network which could also plausibly be the subject of the headline. They have interenational recognizability, and have been using the acronym almost exclusively for years; it is effectively their name.
Someone who scanned the front page and didn’t delve into these comments might infere that the American news network CNN artificially generate images for their news stories. That’s how I picked this up.
I mean personally I'm all in favor of more usage - or even automatic insertion - of the `<abbr>` tag. Can probably be done with a browser addon as well.