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by bakugo 36 days ago
Looks like the moderators are actively deleting comments that call out AI generated articles now. Grim. This comment will probably be deleted too.
2 comments

What did you see that made you think that? (It's entirely untrue btw.)

We haven't said anything specific about genai articles but if you've seen https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079 it shouldn't be hard to extrapolate.

Both comments appeared as [dead] within a few minutes of being made, despite not appearing as [flagged].

They're visible now, but still. What caused them to appear as [dead] in the first place?

There are several possible reasons, so I'd need links to the specific posts in order to answer.
Mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48065850

There was another sibling comment posted around the same time that was also dead.

Your comment was autokilled because our software classified it as AI-generated :) It was a false positive and another user has since vouched for it.

For the record: we never delete anything, aside from very rare cases in which a user asks us to delete something for privacy reasons. Plenty of posts get killed by flags or software filters (spam, abuse, etc), but these can all be seen by turning 'showdead' on in your profile.

[flagged]
Quite the opposite. That user's comment was killed because it was classified as AI-generated. Of course it was a false positive due to the AI-generated text they quoted. These systems aren't foolproof. But we're very serious about preserving HN for curious conversation between humans.
> But we're very serious about preserving HN for curious conversation between humans.

How does that work when most of the articles posted are now AI generated?

I've ranted about this before, but the gist of the problem is that you're expecting humans to put effort into discussing something that the "author" did not consider worth the effort of creating. There's a fundamental imbalance there that causes the whole "the author put effort into creating this so you should put effort into discussing it" system that encourages high-effort posting to fall apart.

If it’s bad writing it’s not a good fit for HN and should be flagged. Writing that’s obviously AI-assisted is bad writing. We’re fine with it being flagged and down-weighted off the front page. We routinely refrain from re-upping posts that are obviously AI-assisted. Things still slip through because we don’t see everything in advance.