[reconnecting]

Hacker News, we need to talk!

"Fixel Smith" is an AI-generated person, with an article that has very little to do with fraud analysis. 'This' is also a music artist (1), novelist (2), fraud analyst (3), influencer (4), and whatever else you can imagine.

220+ points and 70 comments, and very few notice it's quite a fake post — and no one that it's an AI generated person?

1. https://www.amazon.it/Forged-Soundtrack-Explicit-Fixel-Smith...

2. https://fixelsmith.com

3. https://analytics.fixelsmith.com/

4. https://www.instagram.com/fixeltales/

[relevant_stats]

Hacker News has developed recently a frustrating habit of upvoting such low quality AI sloppy submissions.

Makes me wonder if this AI flood uncovers the unflattering truth about this community acuteness, or it's only a failure of existing guardrails and we just need to change them.

[reconnecting]

This is something that genuinely interests me, but from a slightly different perspective. I regularly participate in tech/AI/fraud/security conferences, and I was curious whether people are really listening to and understanding the panelists, or just pretending to.

Last week I was on a privacy panel discussion where one of the speakers had a bad microphone, and honestly no one in the audience could actually hear what he was talking about for five minutes. Afterward, the audience, perhaps out of politeness, perhaps because no one really cared, reacted and applauded as usual.

This post, and especially its reception, feels like a caricature of what's happening in the tech industry right now. Hundreds upvote, very few really try to understand what the context is about, much less have the real experience to judge it, and yet here we are on the front page of HN.

Now the East Coast will wake up, and I'm really curious whether anything will change in this thread.

[Igrom]

I was checking the submission on the phone and only peeked at the comments section. While it's not always easy to judge if something is AI-generated or edited, here it was obvious at first glance from the quotes. Assuming that all of the comments were done in good faith, I think that the low AI literacy even here is really concerning.

[geoduck14]

>Assuming that all of the comments were done in good faith

Well,sure. But some people come here just for the comments and don't read the articles

[diatone]

A cursory glance does make it appear like either a prolific individual, or a bot. The fact that the novel bears little relation to the analytics posts, which seem to bear the style of LLM prose, makes the whole thing fishy. Ironic given the subject matter of TFA

[tdeck]

I'd be more surprised to hear that most folks made a habit of investigating the people whose articles we read. To be honest, I usually don't even look at the byline, let alone the rest of the website.

[reconnecting]

I'm one of the creators of an open-source security framework (1). I've been eating online fraud for breakfast for 8 years. The article is delusional enough that I had to visit the top page of the domain (2).

1. https://github.com/tirrenotechnologies/tirreno

2. https://fixelsmith.com

[jstanley]

> very few notice it's quite a fake post

It's definitely a real post. Yes it's obviously LLM-written, but if the worst thing you can say about an article is that it looks LLM-written, then maybe you don't have any real criticisms.

Whether the contents are made up or not is unclear, but you can criticise the content of the article without needing to speculate on whether it was written by an LLM or whether it is a work of fiction. It has plenty of much more concrete flaws.

[reconnecting]

> It's definitely a real post.

The fact that the 'person' behind this post managed to publish a novel, a music album, and a few posts on fraud prevention all within a few days this month is enough for me to redflag it.

> you don't have any real criticisms.

Please check once again, I've already given my opinion on the article itself below. Here it is again for your convenience.

> I question the described approaches. For example, while impossible travel is a legitimate and widely used technique, it's related to online user behaviour based on IP address. Moreover, tirreno, for example, has separate rules for cases where the IP clearly comes from Apple Relay or VPN/Tor — those are separate flags. I assume some or all examples are LLM-generated, as the context is mixed up and no one actually collects GPS location in bulk for card swipes.

[jstanley]

Yeah the content of the post is totally bogus, but it's still a real post. The post exists, you can read it.

A fake blog post would be something that purports to be a blog post but actually isn't. This is definitely a real post.

[no-name-here]

> A fake blog post would be something that purports to be a blog post but actually isn't.

What would be a possible example of this?

[jstanley]

I don't know, I'm not the one pointing at things and saying they're fake blog posts!

But examples might include something that looks at a glance like a blog post, but actually it's all just squiggles instead of words.

Or a link on the home page that looks like there's a blog post, but when you click it it's just a YouTube video.

[hju22_-3]

I could imagine a person having or doing all of these over time, people do have many interests, but a cursory glance does give an impression of AI. The Instagram account uses a lot of it at least, and the top domain was likely made in conjunction with AI, given the style.

Kind of fascinating, though it could still be a person doing this using AI as opposed to an entirely generated persona. Thanks for bringing it up.

[reconnecting]

If it looks like an AI, writes about fraud like an AI, and sings like an AI, then it's probably not a duck.

[layer8]

The soundtrack album for the novel is so cringe. Also warning: The music starts autoplaying on [2].