Open questions:
1. Why is the regular voting system not enough?
2. Should HN change in response to the gen AI era? It has been successful not changing fundamentals.
Voting systems can be gamed and as HN becomes bigger and bigger it'll start to attract unsavory audiences who have an agenda.
We don't have a similar rule yet about article content but my sense is that the community mostly doesn't want to read it—or, to put it a bit more conservatively, sharply discounts it. This is why we see so many "just show me the prompt" responses, along with others like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/genai-pushback. I built that list so I have something to send to users who email about why their genai articles got flagged.
A fascinating arms race is happening: the AIs are training on the humans but the human hivemind is also training on the AIs. Readers are developing allergic sensitivities to language that sounds like an LLM produced it. The AIs will adapt to this, but the humans will adapt in turn. Where it ends up is anyone's guess. I have an optimistic view, but I've already been wrong about this so many times that I have low confidence in it.
The near-term picture is that there is a class distinction between writing (and writers) that use genai vs. writing that does not. That is, as soon as the allergic "this sounds like an LLM" reaction kicks in, the writing immediately gets relegated to a low-status bucket in the reader's mind. That doesn't mean it won't still get looked at - but it is now under a stigma.
(I was rather pleased with the originality of this observation until I remembered pg had written about "writes and write-nots" in https://paulgraham.com/writes.html. Oh well, it's the point that matters.)
This has the happy flipside that anyone who would like readers to classify their article in a high-status bucket, rather than a low-status one, can apply the judo move of simply writing it themselves.
None of what I'm saying is a dismissal of LLM technology per se. We rely on it heavily, and there's no question that it's useful. The question is how best to use it (pg again: https://x.com/paulg/status/2058871512451412457) and whether one should use it to generate or edit (<-- that bit is important) writing which one publishes to human readers.
To turn to OP's questions:
> Should HN add the ability to flag articles as AI-generated? [...] it could just show up as an indicator
Flagging as "just an indicator" would be tagging, which we've always resisted adding to HN, but I wouldn't rule it out.
> Why is the regular voting system not enough?
The regular voting system is never enough. (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...)
[editing - bear with me... [you guys are adding replies faster than I can finish my own damn comment...]]
Maybe we need a two-dimensional voting system: good/bad, ai/human. I think the second axis could cut down on meta-discussions over how much of the article was AI-generated.
Hacker News adopting such a feature would likely do more harm than good.
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?
AI writing is not the problem - low effort is the problem. Low effort AI articles are full of tics which are obvious, if you've done a lot of AI writing. To write well with AI you need to spend a good deal of time editing.
If you submit something that's low effort but has a clickbait headline that appeals to HN, you may well make the front page even if the article is lightweight (it does happen!) This is true both for AI and for human written articles.
On the flip side, somebody could spend an enormous amount of effort creating a masterpiece with AI. Penalizing that because of the tool that was used is arbitrary.
The issue is complicated by the fact that there can be substantial effort invested in a process outside of the writing itself - and so AI written does not guarantee that the content will not valuable. But I'm inclined to punish it anyway to establish a norm of valuing genuine human communication. I think this norm has always been present but we didn't know until we'd really explored the alternatives.
I spend a LOT of time reading AI generated content because I use AI a lot for various purposes - maybe I'm more sensitive to its voice than some. AI voice always bothers me and its been getting more annoying the more I notice it, but there is a huge difference in reading responses to my own prompts and in reading the response to a prompt I haven't seen, when I don't know how many revisions there were, when I don't know if a human mind reviewed it at all before clicking send.
It becomes an unacceptable distraction because I don't know if I'm investing more time in the content than the author did, when in normal written communication the author would be putting in at least 5x the work.
A simple beneficial step that would lead to modest improvements and little downside: partner with Pangram. Either adding it as an automated spam filter, or by simply attaching the detection % to all posts.
Is it purely just a "human supremacist" desire that fuels the motivation to ban or block such articles?
Humans? We're not particularly effective at this as a whole...
AI service ? We'd probably have to pay for that AI to detect that AI and well.. Its also not particularly effective
Effectiveness is important, because we dont want real human produced data to be accidentally removed from view, just as much if not more so than having AI gen data being left on the site.
2. judge content not by its cover and think.