Ask HN: Would it be useful to have a slop button in addition to flag?
In the meantime you can avoid at least some of the slop by using https://hn-ai.org/ or one of the other anti-slop extensions or alternative sites.
> What does [flagged] mean?
> Users flagged the post as breaking the guidelines or otherwise not belonging on HN.
I'd favor having a second type of tag, for submissions, which meant "the linked article is of low quality". Doesn't matter to me whether it's AI slop, or press release puffery, or tedious drivel, or by a painfully unqualified author, or something else.
A lot of the frustration seems to come from content that takes 2,000 words to say something that could have been said in 200, regardless of whether a human or a model wrote it.
If a post is original, useful, and teaches me something, I don't care much how it was produced. What I notice is when a lot of words are used to communicate very little.
That way if it's AI slop it'll say [AI slop], if it's spam it'll say [Spam], if it's dubiously legal/illegal content it'll say that, etc?
You could use that to decide if you want to give the submission a chance or not.
If we wanna know ai opinion we all can get it.
HN and YouTube are basically the only sites I still use. I disabled my watch history on YouTube to kill the recommendations page to get away from a lot of the trash and just focus on my subscriptions. I’ll be unsubscribing to those writing scripts with AI as well, as I notice them.
I’d like to be able to flag things as AI slop on YouTube, so the person gets that feedback and can hopefully get back on the right track. On here, I’m not so sure if that type of reinforcement will matter, or if will be more obvious to the person why a post was flagged.
Its is likely coming, but needed yesterday.
I don’t know that they care, as I still see a lot of engagement on these videos, where only one person will call a video out as AI and not even get many upvotes for it. It takes a lot of scrolling to find it. I expect YouTube might say what is AI, but not have a global filter to remove it… but I hope they prove me wrong.
https://aisloplist.com/ works as well but considering the torrent of AI shite posted on YT it only gets some of it but better than nothing.
I’m of the opinion that the underlying business of YouTube should suffer if they are unwilling to tackle this issue themselves. Shifting the onus to the user to play a cat and mouse game with extensions makes the overall experience worse, while still rewarding YouTube with views.
Maybe I’m too idealistic and my views are a drop in the bucket, but I think I will vote with my wallet/attention and spend it elsewhere.
95% of my viewing time is on the AppleTV as well, so extensions don’t help too much. I tried installed Untrap YouTube into Orion on my phone and using that as a makeshift YouTube app, but it didn’t really make my experience better in a way that made me actually want to use it over the vanilla experience.
People latch onto the word "delve" or an em-dash or the idiom of "it's not X it's Y" as being proof that something was written by AI, without ever considering that AI is largely just writing in the style of how internet commenters write since that's a lot of the training data.
Now we've got students re-writing their homework to avoid looking like AI and commenters self-censoring against words and phrases that trigger AI suspicion.
I'm deeply skeptical that people can correctly identify human-written vs latest AI model written HN comments with sufficient accuracy.