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by caaqil 67 days ago
It's currently #1 on the front page too. HN drowning in AI slop, what a sight to behold.
3 comments

The vast majority of HN commentors react to the headline and don't bother to click through.
I support a rule to ban AI-generated/edited posts.

Initially I thought they'd be fine, because AI-generated isn't intrinsically an issue and the comments can be good. But in practice, the AI posts tend to be slop, and usually there's a better human-written source for the same topic (for example, one of the many other recent "age verification is mass surveillance" posts here).

It is not so easy to distinguish this with 100% accuracy though.

For instance, a recent example from yesterday:

https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/21982

Part of this was written by AI, but with a human in "charge" who explained which part of AI was used here. Would that also be a bannable example for you? I am not so convinced that this is bannable per se. Perhaps it may be different if the AI-slop was not announced, but when it was announced and explained?

> one of the many other recent "age verification is mass surveillance" > posts here

Well, it actually is. It taps very much into other similar laws e. g. "chat control", aka chat sniffing.

I should've said "guideline". I think posts can include AI if it's reasonable and/or they're good, while the guideline gives a reason to flag AI posts that are generally bad.

> It taps very much into other similar laws e. g. "chat control", aka chat sniffing.

There are many recent Chat Control posts here too. I agree Chat Control is bad, and poorly-implemented age verification is bad (though it can be implemented in privacy-preserving ways, albeit ineffectively; I commented about this 42 days ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47123507, and it was stale then). I don't want to hear anymore about it. Maybe I need a filter myself, for the lucky 10,000. But the problem even for them, is that the repeated posts (without links to previous posts) have mostly low-effort comments, because people who made high-effort comments can't/won't keep repeating them.

It seems like there are a few stories HN will really bite on:

- age verification

- chat control

- RTO vs. remote work

- AI bubble

- ditching American tech