← Back to context

Comment by sincerely

19 days ago

Am I growing too paranoid, or are you using AI to generate the comments posted on this account?

It's 100% another bot account:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46901199

  • What would be great, and I don't know if @dang / the mods would take on requests like this, would be for bot participants to be allowed but the account flagged. So e.g. the user name just says "[bot] Zakodiac" or something.

    As well as being an ethical approach - I think it's wrong to try to impersonate humans and/or not announce AI output as AI - it would also be handy for new filter options: all bot posts are OK, hide bot leaf comments, or hide all threads with bot comments. etc.

    [edited as my robot unicode/emoji char didn't come through]

What are the signals or tells?

  • Comments like "X is the right track [...] Then finish with a question?" do have a bit of an LLM smell to them.

    The finishing with a question thing is prevalent with both accounts on Twitter, presumably because it "drives engagement" with the accounts.

    It's particularly frustrating because it amplifies how much time is wasted - people don't just waste time reading comments by bots, they then invest effort in thinking about and replying to them.