[MasterScrat]

I have mixed feelings (as in, I'm unsure how to feel) about projects where the code, the README and the HN/Reddit posts are mostly AI-generated.

I feel the frustration of reading "slop", but on the other hand the projects that surface do usually bring something useful to the table.

Should we simply judge the submission based on its technical merit? Why do I feel annoyed that an otherwise cool project uses typical LLM prose? For how long will we be able to recognize LLM-generated text, and what happens when we can't?

[Aurornis]

Show HN is (or was) one of my favorite parts of this site. I read a lot of submitted projects.

The people who don’t even take 30 seconds to write their own comments aren’t here to share their knowledge or discuss the project. It’s self-advertising. They might be following instructions from the LLM to post it here. There was a project a couple days ago that still had the AI-generated marketing plan in git which instructed the person to post it here and then on some subreddits, including marketing copy to include.

The projects often don’t work, too. Remember the guy who claimed to have uncovered a multi billion dollar Meta influence campaign? When I read the documents they had output from Claude saying that it failed to access the documents, but then it guessed what the document might include. The whole report was full of this, but it was posted here and upvoted as if someone had done deep research.

[electroly]

This OP hasn't done any of those things. They are here discussing the project, and it's clear all of their replies are human-written. The AI use is stated up front in the readme. They posted a 12 minute YouTube video demonstrating that the project works, with narration that indicates English is not their first language. The git commit messages are all classic short human messages. It's a genuinely neat project that obviously has no commercial motivation. Their crime appears to be using AI to clean up their non-native English in the README and then reusing some of that README text in the top-level descriptive comment on their Show HN post. Indeed, they should not have done that for their comment, but the rest of these accusations are just soapboxing about AI. You could have written this comment anywhere; it has nothing to do with this post.

[Aurornis]

> and it's clear all of their replies are human-written. The AI use is stated up front in the readme. The

Very much not the case with the comment I responded to.

There is a stark contrast between the AI written first comment and some of their other comments.

I know many here don’t like any accusations of AI writing because they aren’t as attuned to picking it up, but the comment I responded to was as blatant as it gets.

I tried to give a more friendly encouragement to share self-written comments.

[electroly]

Yes, I'm obviously aware of that. We're all capable of seeing em dashes and staccato sentences. My reply mentions, explicitly, that their top-level comment was AI written (reusing portions of their AI-written readme) and that their replies are human written. I chose my words carefully; HN itself uses the terminology "comment" for top-level messages and "reply" for sub-level messages, and I used the phrase "top-level" to further disambiguate it. I apologize if that was confusing but what I said was accurate and carefully considered. I further agreed that they should not have done that. That one comment seems to be their only crime here. You then took the opportunity to soapbox about a bunch of things that OP did not do, in the message that I replied to.

I don't have anything to add. It just seems like you misunderstood my message.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> HN itself uses the terminology "comment" for top-level messages and "reply" for sub-level messages

Does it? I can't see any distinction in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html or https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Rereading your comment now with this in mind, I can make out the distinction, but I don't think you made it clearly.

[electroly]

The submit button in the post box says "add comment" vs. "reply" depending on what kind of message you're posting, and the link under comments says "reply" while articles don't have that link. I called it the "top-level descriptive comment on their Show HN post" because I agree just "comment" vs. "reply" alone could be confusing. What's a better way to describe the comment that an author posts with their Show HN to begin the discussion vs. replies that are made in response to specific comments? I genuinely don't know how many more terms I could have loaded onto that phrase to make it clear which post I was talking about. That wasn't supposed to be a confusing part of my post.

[ThrowawayR2]

I'm not willing to give the benefit of the doubt to AI generated submissions anymore because the technical merit has too often turned out to be false, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47471647

[LtWorf]

What did you expect on simonwillison.net?

[tech4bot]

Yes, I used AI to help with the README and wording. But the project itself came from actual testing: opening the device, wiring UART, reading logs, understanding the boot flow, adapting the DTB, and debugging hardware issues.

For Wi-Fi, I even contacted the chip factory. They didn’t answer at first, so I wrote again in Chinese with AI’s help and eventually got the drivers.

We are not yet at the point where you give AI a tablet and it magically returns a working image. AI helped a lot, but it also introduced bugs more than once. The real work was still testing, breaking things, fixing them, and repeating.

I posted it here because I think the project is useful and could attract people who want to build on it. All the devices should be more open, repairable, and reusable, so we can actually own the hardware we buy.