Those guidelines that you reference talk almost exclusively about annoyances on the webpage itself, not the content of the article.

I think it's fair to point out that many articles today are essentially a little bit of a human wrapper around a core of ChatGPT content.

Whether or not this was AI-generated, the tells of AI-written text are all throughout it. There are some people who have learned to write like the AI talks to them, which is really not much of an improvement over just using the AI as your word processor.

Do you agree that bickering over AI-generated vs. not AI-generated makes for dull discussion? Sliding sewing needles deep into my fingernail bed sounds more appealing than nagging over such minutiae.

It’s also dull to brush my teeth, but I still do it because it is necessary.

The problem is that HN is one of the few places left where original thoughts are the main reason people are here. Letting LLMs write articles for us here is just not all that useful or fun.

Maybe quarantining AI related articles to their own thing a la Show HN would be a good move. I know it is the predominant topic here for the moment but like there is other interesting stuff too. And articles about AI written by AI so that Google’s AI can rank it higher and show it to more AI models to train on is just gross.

It's more akin to complaining about how Google search results have gotten worse.

It certainly makes a dull discussion, but frankly we need to have it. Post-AI HN is now a checkbox on a marketing plan - like a GitHub repository is - and I’m sick of being manipulated and sold to in one of the few forums that wasn’t gamed. It’s not minutiae, it’s an overarching theme that’s enshittifying the third places. Heck even having to discuss this is ruining it (yet here I am lol).

I hate to ruin the magic for you, but HN has been part of marketing plans long before AI.

Almost as dull as being spoon-fed AI slop articles, yeah.

There's an idea - create a website which can accurately assess "Slop-o-Meter" for any link, kind of like what FakeSpot of old did for Amazon products with fake reviews.

I've tried doing this, but LLMs are shockingly bad at differentiating between their own slopware and true wetware thoughts.

I'm not the person you're replying to, but for my part I do actually like to hear when people think it sounds like it's AI-generated.

minutiae to me is the effort of loading a page and reading half a paragraph in order to determine the AI tone for myself. The new AI literature frontier has actually added value to reading the comments first on HN in a surprising twist -- saves me the trouble.

"This wasn't written by a person" isn't a tangential style critique.