[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.