[IgorPartola]

Nobody wants to label their stuff as AI generated because they removed credibility. Communities can flag posts as AI generated based on speculation and telltales but it won’t be 100% and will take extra work.

I think the era of the blog is simply dead now and that’s mostly ok. Blogspam and corporate blogs had killed quality bogs ages ago even before AI was a thing. The real question is what replaces it.

Oh and of course the $64k question is this: if an AI generated article is indistinguishable from a human written article and it is accurate and interesting, do you care who wrote it? We want to avoid low quality, not AI generation, right?

[freehorse]

> Blogspam and corporate blogs had killed quality bogs ages ago

One of the main reasons that I (and I assume others) am here is because I can discover interesting content. It is true that there is a lot of spam in the internet but if I wanted that I would be in x, linkedin or sth. My problem with AI right now is that I consider machine generated content low quality one, and I would like to be able to decide if I want to read such an article without having to waste time before I realise it is ai generated.

> if an AI generated article is indistinguishable from a human written article and it is accurate and interesting, do you care who wrote it

Ideally I would like to know regardless. Practically in such a hypothetical future scenario it may be impossible, but I think that not doing sth right now because of some hypothetical future that may or may not happen is not a very good argument. Right now the AI content is pretty distinguishable, and if one took the time and effort to make it not seem like AI then at least that text contains some more human effort.

[asdff]

Put it this way, if the ai article is indeed so good, why store the article in a dusty long form output mode from a soon to be obsolete model? Just give us the prompt, and in 6 months with some newer, bigger, better model, we can feed that prompt and get an even better article out of it.

[maxaw]

to play devils advocate - i doubt the articles that end up on the front page are one shotted (theres probably a sequence of back and forward refinement). and in any case, i feel the avg reader would actually not prefer to read the prompt, which would be very information dense

having said that, i'd still much prefer a norm of including prompt history with the article, or the codebase for that matter, so people can choose for themselves :)

[throwaway219450]

This is a fascinating thought problem.

On the extreme end you have recipe blogspam, with the tropey life stories and Amazon affiliate spam that precede the meat (pardon the pun). If that pre-filler is inconsequential, why not have an LLM parse the semantic markup - which 99% of recipe sites use for Google SEO - to produce custom content for you? Like a history of the ingredients, or better instructions with an equipment list tailored to your kitchen and timings/temps for your specific oven?

I can see there being a middle ground where you publish some sort of context that a user’s LLM can generate the content from. Is it fundamentally any different from dramatized non-fiction? Think of books like Operation Mincemeat where the facts are thoroughly researched, but the author uses a lot of artistic license to tell the story.

But to your point, if there is back-and-forth, I wish people would pay more attention to the obvious traits of LLM writing. Not everything needs to read like it’s a snappy editorial, but I sense we’re still in the early days where people have been handed this technology and are simply excited that they can pump out 1000 words in a coherent narrative.

[maxaw]

Your middle ground idea is interesting. And maybe inevitable in some ways, if the llm becomes even more of a universal interface to the outside world.

Regarding llm writing, it is disappointing. Especially as people could use it in the “opposite” direction, using the tirelessness of the llm to experiment with the communication with the aim to make it as clear as possible for the reader…

[ruszki]

Interestingly, the average reader wasn’t that annoyed by the magnitudes higher information density of 2 decades ago.

Also, the information density plummeted because of ads, not because it was demanded by readers.

[Leynos]

You'd need the whole edit tree along with all the prompts used along the way, which most people are not yet set up to capture.

[dgellow]

You could also just type the article with your human hands, using your human voice, after having done your LLM interactions. That’s really the best minimum to show that you respect your human audience, use your own voice

[jqbd]

I store all prompts as docs, but I doubt I can rerun the whole prompt history with a better model and get sizable return for the cost, personally. EDIT: I'm referring to a small codebase not articles tho

[hamandcheese]

A lot of my PRs are the result of hours of back and forth between an AI and myself. In many cases the sum total of my prompts is much larger than the final output.

[petesergeant]

The fallacy here is that you can't reduce the wide range of things that “AI generated” means into a single flag. As for why not “show us the prompt”: https://sgnt.ai/p/prompt-is-not-the-work/

[spopejoy]

> Just give us the prompt

Two showstopper problems with this:

1. Many of "us" don't like interacting with LLMs more than we have to, and view reading as a pleasure that would be extinguished instantly at a chat prompt.

2. It lazily implies that the essence of an article is so easy to communicate that it can be compressed into a prompt. There's a reason for titles, subtitles, open sentences, hero images, paragraph openers, etc etc: they pull you in, establish tone and voice and so forth. Where are the prompts that can entice a reader to even skim it much less plug into their favorite chatbot?

[dgellow]

> if an AI generated article is indistinguishable from a human written article and it is accurate and interesting, do you care who wrote it?

I care about the fact that I’m interacting with a human. If an LLM generates content that reads like a human and it isn’t disclosed it is deceptive by nature. It doesn’t matter to me that a human typed the words on their keyboard, they could use text to speech or whatever. But I care that a human crafted the content. A LLM doesn’t just type the words, it takes style, tone, voice decisions, in addition to the choice of framing. That’s everything that matters about human to human communication

[agnishom]

> it is accurate and interesting, do you care who wrote it?

Yes, because I have an interest in traces and mechanisms of human connections being preserved.

[nearlyepic]

Thank you. I swear to god, it’s like half of the people on this site are fucked in the head socially.

Like, of course it matters who wrote it - an author imparts parts of themself onto their work. That’s what makes writing that’s worth reading.

[wartywhoa23]

> I swear to god, it’s like half of the people on this site are fucked in the head socially.

I really hope there's a huge bot army pretending to be those people, but alas, you might be right and the reality is worse than that.

[shimman]

Bro do you know what industry we work in? We work in an industry that openly champions destroying the jobs of others then sarcastically told them to learn how to code. It's no wonder the general public has open disdain towards big tech.

[stronglikedan]

> if an AI generated article is indistinguishable from a human written article and it is accurate and interesting, do you care who wrote it?

Well, yes, because of that "accurate" part. Humans, in general, actually attempt to validate what they publish. I don't feel the need to treat literally everything as a possible hallucination when I read an article published by a human. Less cognitive overhead makes for a more pleasant reading experience. In other words, I trust a human to be accurate most of the time, and I trust an AI to be accurate only some of the time, so there's much more to verify.

[zaik]

> I think the era of the blog is simply dead now and that’s mostly ok. Blogspam and corporate blogs had killed quality bogs ages ago

I simply instruct my RSS Reader to fetch articles only from blogs which I believe to be high quality.

[Sateeshm]

> I think the era of the blog is simply dead now

The era of people caring about knowledge/learning seems to be dead. At least in the way we used to, because a lot of what we needed that for can now be done by the LLMs.

[IgorPartola]

Similar to the era of when people could calculate logarithms on paper or remember exact years of when each Roman emperor ruled? Or is that different?

[archagon]

Pretty trivial for a writer to say “no AI used on this blog.”

[minimaxir]

And what's stopping a AI-written article from also doing that?

[archagon]

Reputation. If it’s not a one-off, they will eventually get discovered and lose their audience.

[mh-]

I believe we're in a fairly limited window of time right now where that's even detectable via tools like Pangram. For small models it'll, maybe not the case. But for anything worth paying for.

[archagon]

They only have to slip up once. And they will, because LLM users are lazy, and LLM content naturally regresses towards the mean.

[derdi]

> Nobody wants to label their stuff as AI generated because they removed credibility.

I don't think this is true. I think most of the people who post LLM content without editing and without even style guidelines are simply of the opinion that the resulting text is genuinely of an acceptable quality.

Agreed with the rest of your post. We should think of this in terms of quality of the result, not the process.

[IgorPartola]

What upside is there to labeling your content as AI generated (except when you are showing some novel way to use AI)?

[derdi]

I don't know, I wasn't saying that there was an upside. Sorry if my post was unclear. My "I don't think this is true" was in response to the assertion that people who use AI would be afraid of losing credibility from labeling.

[IgorPartola]

My thesis on that is just that AI generated content is generally viewed as worse than human-generated content, but it is a lot cheaper. There is a lot of (financial) incentive to create and post a lot of cheap AI generated content and trying to pass it as higher quality human-generated content than to be honest about it.

It’s the same reason recipe websites don’t honestly label that they ripped off other recipe websites: it would train users to go to the source.

[derdi]

OK, I see your point. I think there are (at least!) two categories of content creators here: On the one hand, those that consciously want to generate content spam. On the other hand, those that actually want to do "cool technical stuff" that was previously impossible for most people working alone with limited time on their hands (develop your own programming language etc.). As I argue at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48892642, I think there is really a part of the latter group that are simply unable to recognize LLM-speak as bad style. It's how the LLM speaks to them, it doesn't bother them; since the all-knowing LLM does it, it must be fine. I don't know. I don't understand these people, but I believe they exist.

For example, consider this project where I also complained about atrocious writing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48876506. I think this is really just someone who wanted to "create" something, I don't think this is in the same category as recipe/blog spam. I don't think the person who put this online thinks that this landing page is worse than any other programming language website.

[dspillett]

> I think most of the people who post LLM content without editing and without even style guidelines are simply of the opinion that the resulting text is genuinely of an acceptable quality.

I don't disagree with that assessment, with one extra detail: for many of them their bar of “an acceptable quality” is too low. No higher than “sod it, it'll do” and often lower. To too many, generated content is seen as a gateway to maybe accidentally becoming some sort of influencer, a way to get themselves out there with little or no care about whether their contribution is actually useful overall just as long as it garners a bit of attention.

I don't want to waste time hunting through the extra piles of “it'll do” or worse to find the remaining nuggets of actually good writing, be they entirely human made or created by humans using LLM assistance. There are at lease a few people of agree with me on the matter.

The problem with judging on quality is that you often have to at least start reading the slop to realise and move on to the next thing. Rating systems and flags may help somewhat, but they will all eventually be gamed so it will become yet another battle of attrition: people and systems trying to filter out the crap while other people and their systems finding it more profitable to spend time breaking the filtering mechanisms instead of producing content good enough to not actually be filtered by them.

[derdi]

A little detail to your extra detail :-) I agree that there's a general "it'll do", motivated by just pushing something, anything, out there. But I think that's party because they don't know better. The people who generate the articles that reach the HN front page surely interact a lot with their agents. Their agents will certainly talk to them in "AI-shaped", "LLM-marker-bearing" bot-speak, but they apparently don't mind, because they can't tell that this is bad writing. If they did, if this annoyed them as much as it annoys many of us, they would surely adopt some style guidelines for their agents. And those should apply to their blog posts too.

As for the rating system, we already have many people who first check the comments for things like "AI, don't bother". I think that's OK; it could be better by quoting two or three sample sentences so that others could quickly judge how bad it is. I don't think it needs to be more formal than this.

[wartywhoa23]

> do you care who wrote it?

I do.

> We want to avoid low quality, not AI generation, right?

We want to avoid further dehumanization of the already semi-dehumanized humankind.

[satisfice]

If counterfeit or stolen cash is indistinguishable from real or honest cash, should you accept it? Should you spend it? No. Why? Because doing so erodes and potentially destroys society.

Whether you agree that a con artist is only a criminal if he gets caught, or you think he’s a criminal the whole time, surely you can see why many people might want to know if they are dealing with a friend and not something simulating a friend.

[not-a-llm]

bullshitting has never been a crime

if it were, 90% of startups would be illegal and they founders jailable

[otterley]

Fraud is a crime, but admittedly, not all bullshitting is fraud.

[not-a-llm]

unless you signed a contract with your readers, saying "this article was not LLM written" while being written by LLMs is not fraud, just lying which is legal

but we are not even talking about that, most authors do not claim LLMs were not used

[satisfice]

Bullshitting has potentially severe consequences to the bullshitter. A good reputation is worth a lot.

Of course, Elon Musk makes many millions with his bullshit. I admit that.

[sidkh]

I think the era of blogging is pretty alive. I find most of the signal on agentic coding in articles (Armin Ronacher, Simon Willison, etc.). It's just harder to find because of all the noise.

[throwaway219450]

> Oh and of course the $64k question is this: if an AI generated article is indistinguishable from a human written article and it is accurate and interesting, do you care who wrote it? We want to avoid low quality, not AI generation, right?

Right now, in mid 2026, many of believe that LLM prose is not as good as human output.

The deception is one aspect. AI for spellcheck and proofreading is one thing; AI writing the content wholesale in the first person, which you pass off as your own, is another. I also don’t care for the Tailwind-styled demo sites that have flooded Show HN.

The sort of content that people react viscerally to (as slop) is rarely that subtle. Again, no problem with careful and subtle use (see CGI in movies), but when I see Claude-isms and snappy section headings that nobody used to use, I close the page.

You can/should write for you, to get experience writing, to present a portfolio, to share things you find interesting, a photo a day, whatever. Why does that have to die?

[erikerikson]

https://xkcd.com/810/

I can't believe no one had posted this yet.

[dspillett]

> Blogspam and corporate blogs had killed quality bogs ages ago even before AI was a thing.

That was a two-pronged thing. As well as the blog-spam drowning out what good blogs there were, a lot of people that used to output that way moved to centralised platforms that then either tried to lock their content in, or surrounded it with ad-tech bothers, or both.

> if an AI generated article is indistinguishable from a human written article…

Quite a bit of AI generated output is indistinguishable from crap human writing, often mediocre human writing, and that is actually part of the problem. A lot of people bang something out of their LLM/agents of choice and not bother taking the time needed to lift to good or excellent, so there is a bulk of mediocre or worse stuff flooding the medium because it is so easy to produce. But do we really need 100+ mediocre articles and a few good ones on a subject where there would previously have been a few mediocre ones and still a few good+ ones? It makes the genuinely worthwhile content much harder to stumble upon, especially as the ones taking the lazier approaches to writing seem to be making greater efforts in self-promotion with the time they have saved!

> if an AI generated article is […] is accurate and interesting, do you care who wrote it?

Firstly: maybe not, or at least less so. But I'm not convinced they can be trusted to be that accurate. I don't trust the average human that much either, they are often authoritatively wrong too (which doesn't help the LLMs, which have been at least partially trained on authoritatively wrong content), but I trust good human writers (who may be assisted by LLMs these days, like they've been assisted by spelling & grammar checkers for decades) above other human writers and content almost entirely drawn from LLMs.

Secondly: Yes. I care. I'm still smarting that after years of people being fined heavily, banned from things, and even imprisoned, for copying content, we seem fine with the big companies pirating whatever they want for training purposes⁰. Yes, some fines have been paid, but a few hours worth of income isn't even a slap on the wrist given how much funny money is being sloshed around the sector ATM, and do you know any content makers who got a share of those fines? I'm still trying to avoid being a part of that, to the point of being willing to commit career suicide¹, so yes, I do care who/what made most effort on creating the article. Given a choice between human, human with LLM assist, LLM with minimal human editing, and purer slop, I would morally prefer something from as close to the “just humans” end of the scale over anything else, even if the quality is practically identical.

--------

[0] I wonder how the corporates would take the “we only downloaded and used it ignoring the licence for model training purposes” point being used about their output. After all, I'm only using it irrespective of your licence to train the intelligence model that sits between my ears!

[1] The current corporate overlords have as much said “get with AI or be left behind”, and I'm sure being left behind will involve being PIPed out to pasture. I might be able to argue “the difference is enough to be considered a material change in roll, so you can't force that under UK employment law nor sack me for not playing ball”, but the same change-of-roll argument just opens up the possibility of redundancy instead², which is only marginally better. In either case I'm done for working in development with my current attitudes.

[2] this interpretation, if not legal pigswill entirely, also makes “we need less legacy developers and more agenic developers, your legacy roll is therefore redundant, do you want to change to an agent-based job or do you want to leave?” perfectly legal.