Comment by loufe
12 hours ago
I know I tend to like some takeaway "summary" comments on HN, but this one just feels like snippets from an LLM reading the article. What's the thinking? The original text isn't particularly long or dense, and this isn't commentary.
It's hand curated verbatim extracts designed to encourage HN members to read the full article. The clickbait title does not provide accurate context for the article which details events from 1990.
Reasonable people may differ and your mileage may vary. What were your key takeaways from the article?
I left out the points about shortcomings of Bourlag's wheat and the value of genetic diversity in a population. But my focus was to encourage people to read an article I found significant.
On a side note I don't use AI to craft HN comments beyond sometimes using Grammarly to check them for basic errors.
Ironically that sounds like something an llm would say in a reply. Not saying you did or anything just kinda funny how it reads.
They sure are designed to sound like people
1 reply →
I appreciated it. The article was too verbose in my view
What’s the thinking on pointing out everything that could maybe but probably not be “AI Slop”?
I wasn’t going to click on the click-bait headline without understanding the topic better, so the length of the original was unknown and irrelevant to me. The above comment tersely explains it enough to satisfy my prerequisite.
The comment, “slop” or not, was useful. When slop fills comments with junk and fake commentary, it’s far more annoying and detrimental than a basic summary. Slop-policing is exhausting to read - just downvote or flag trash instead of adding more noise that takes away from the actual content.
My, my, how low we have sunk. It used to be "I won't jump into the comment section without first reading the article", now it's "I won't read the article without first reading (and possibly engaging in) the comment section". Shame.
Also, how is this headline click-bait? If anything, it's anti-clickbait, dull, matter-of-factly, and not really that inviting.
A lot of submissions have comments about how the article is "AI slop" or that a comment comes from an LLM. What is the point of repeatedly pointing this out? One person's AI slop is another person's useful and intriguing submission. In this case someone points out a comment is LLM generated and it turns out it isn't. So what if it was? It was a useful comment either way, and your ability to correctly identify LLM generated content is not perfect, and is likely to become less accurate over time.
Community is oriented around policing each others content (upvote downvote flag vouch). The behaviors spill over into the other lever (reply)
Well yes, the entire point of a link aggregator is to surface content of value to the readers so that necessitates passing judgement on it. It seems that most of us don't come here for slop so that receives negative responses. Everything working as intended I guess.
What do you mean “what’s the thinking?”
I think the meaning was "why did you write this?"