Offtopic. I have a concern that this forum is removing stories that have negative connotation on AI.
Few days back, I posted an article[1] that was about how AI threatens natural resources for billions. This was from United Nations and it was flagged. I did not think much about it until I saw two other stories [2] & [3] today that were doing fairly good on front page but they suddenly disappeared. They are not even on 2nd or 3rd page. I have seen this happening at other times as well but did not document it. Just thought you all should know about this.
I was going to create Tell HN thread but I thought the same would happen with it too. I am pretty sure this thread is not going anywhere so I'm posting my concern here.
> how AI threatens natural resources for billions.
The article rests on the claim that water usage of data centers on continent X threaten water availability for humans on continent Y.
I hope you can see how self-evidently illogical that is. The article tries to bend logic into a narrative it is trying to push.
> This was from United Nations and it was flagged.
Indeed! It exposes a level of lack of rigor and critical thinking which is astounding - this is meant to be an organization that thinks clearly, which it clearly does not.
> The article rests on the claim that water usage of data centers on continent X threaten water availability for humans on continent Y.
I don't want to start too much of an off-topic thread within an already off-topic thread, but this isn't a particularly charitable reading. The article itself is mostly laying out information around data centres' resource usage with little prediction for how things would play out. I think statements like:
> The water footprint is equivalent to the minimum annual domestic water needs of roughly 500,000 people in Sub-Saharan Africa
Are clearly just intended as illustrative, rather than a claim that 500,000 people in Sub-Sarah Africa will go without water as a result of AI data centres.
I think the articles head isn't particular good, but it's a fairly moderate take and it's closing message isn't an "AI dooms natural resources" one at all:
> AI within planetary limits is achievable. The report’s central argument is constructive. Capability and stewardship can grow together, but only with measurement, transparency, and shared responsibility across the ecosystem.
At any rate, I definitely don't see any reason this article should be flagged? There's obviously criticisms you can make of it, but that's true of almost any opinion piece that finds itself on the front page here.
> Are clearly just intended as illustrative, rather than a claim that 500,000 people in Sub-Sarah Africa will go without water as a result of AI data centres.
Let's be honest, it's meant to be emotionally manipulative. There are plenty of ways to be illustrative that would make more sense to the target audience, but invoking impoverished folks in Africa is meant to tug at the heart strings.
Go to the continent with more water so they can live in a place with more water (as they can't bring the water back - it's too big and too heavy).
The people in continent Y are likely to use extreme violence to stop this from happening, like we see today in the Mediterranean sea where thousands of people are murdered every year.
Doesn’t desalination require very large amounts of electricity, something that AI also requires large amounts of? Are we at the point where we are no longer concerned with electricity demand outstripping supply? (Let alone the pollution caused by in-place power plants - are we near to getting rid of those?)
Solar is incredibly cheap and it's a perfect match for desalination because you can scale the water flow based on available power. And the places that need it the most are deserts with a lot of sunshine and empty land. We're at a point where generating power is almost never the issue.
The actual problem is making the desalination tech itself cheap and easy to maintain so poor countries can afford it. Right now it's only a large scale thing in relatively rich and tech advanced states like Saudi or Israel.
Honestly power isn't even the biggest problem with desalination, it's the spectacular volume of brine commensurate with the volume of clean water you are trying to extract: figuring out both how to dispose of it without creating new environmental hazards and constantly repairing/replacing the machinery which must filter and plumb that caustic sludge.
Which is all to say in addition to the crazy energy demands of desalinization, there are also problems that dwarf those.
This forum tends to be visited by an intersection of technologists and the VC crowd. The HN algorithm is more open and transparent than Reddit's, but any Reddit-like platform suffers from the whims of the community. Currently, it seems like a disproportionate amount of HN users are hyped up about generative AI compared to people in the real world, so you'll see those whims back in voting and flagging tendencies.
That said, there is also a vocal anti-AI crowd here, or at least there used to be. Most of those people seemed to have left for greener pastures seeing how half the HN front page is "someone made XYZ but now with AI" these days.
There are other places that discuss tech that aren't so focused on making money, and those are probably less biased in favour of the latest AI gadget.
On the other hand, since the day ChatGPT was unleashed upon the general public, you should assume all online interaction is happening through AI and should probably be ignored. The human internet died the day we taught computers how to write a coherent paragraph.
Is that forum good? I have it mentally associated with "Mastodon people" (incredible pedants and overbearing mods), but that's not exactly based on anything so I may have just confused it with some other site.
Lol but Hackernews is the epitome of a forum filled with incredible pedants if anything so it's shocking hearing that. I would say it's the exact same thing over there, maybe with a little less decorum? Are you sure it's not more of an issue you're having with their politics? Because yes, similar to the Mastodon people, it's queer friendly, it's anti-AI, it has a lot of discussions about ethics, ... But as for the rest, yeah, no. Hackernews clone.
Okay that's not Mastodon people, that's Metafilter or Tumblr people. Mastodon people in my head are European Linux users who are only capable of replying to things in the form of a non-constructive disagreement.
> That said, there is also a vocal anti-AI crowd here, or at least there used to be. Most of those people seemed to have left for greener pastures seeing how half the HN front page is "someone made XYZ but now with AI" these days.
There is still a vocal anti-AI crowd here. The problem is that they don't seem to be very good, overall, at upholding HN commenting guidelines. (This is probably just a fatigue effect.) I keep seeing green accounts making pithy, uncivil snipes on this topic, with heavy use of sarcasm and reference to anti-AI "thought-terminating cliches" (e.g. mentioning the topic of water use and expecting that mention to stand in for an entire argument, while not acknowledging any of the well-established refutations).
But the thing about "someone made XYZ but now with AI" is that most of it is posted by "someone", or someone with a connection to "someone". Hence the complaints about the state of Show HN. And the thing about "someone"s is that they do not care how many anti-AI people are lurking around. There's nothing the anti-AI people could do, in principle, to stop it. Consequently, the presence of those posts is not evidence that the anti-AI people are leaving.
> On the other hand, since the day ChatGPT was unleashed upon the general public, you should assume all online interaction is happening through AI and should probably be ignored.
My clear-eyed perspective is that AI companies and their supporters are getting away with a massive crime against humanity, so it’s probably relatively more difficult for me to contain my frustrations than the people who are happy about it. When you plunder a little you get punished according to the rules, but these companies have proved when you plunder enough you get to start writing the rules.
"The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic." is usually misattributed to Stalin, but it says that's not a new phenomenon. Now that you've said it out loud, how does that make you feel? It doesn't change anything. The "crime against humanity" of doing some work and charging money for it, is kind of a non-starter for conversation though.
This is your comment. Is it not? Unless this is not your comment, I don’t understand what could possibly be the confusion.
> There is still a vocal anti-AI crowd here. The problem is that they don't seem to be very good, overall, at upholding HN commenting guidelines. (This is probably just a fatigue effect.) I keep seeing green accounts making pithy, uncivil snipes on this topic, with heavy use of sarcasm and reference to anti-AI "thought-terminating cliches" (e.g. mentioning the topic of water use and expecting that mention to stand in for an entire argument, while not acknowledging any of the well-established refutations).
The point of my comment is to make two observations: one that there is indeed still a vocal anti-AI crowd here, and another about their usual conduct. It did not in any way assert that they don't have a point, just that they often lean on bad arguments.
The confusion is that I was talking on the meta level of what the discourse is like, and you are trying to engage in the object level of that discourse itself.
That said: the fact that you can make your anti-AI argument without being incivil supports my first observation, and doesn't in any way detract from the second. For that matter, your allegation of a "massive crime against humanity" doesn't even specify the crime, let alone attempt to evidence it. And while still civil, it is loaded with emotionally charged rhetoric.
Zahlman doesn't get it. He has been cancelled by industry shills on Python infrastructure and now apparently thinks the industry will appreciate him for backing it up here.
Classic programmer mistake. The industry only understands one thing: Constant opposition like in the 1990s and early 2000s, which were better for the profession and the Internet at large.
There’s a lot of different new usernames with those non-constructive comments, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s just a couple very persistent people making new accounts after given a suspension or something.
I mean, if you pay attention you'll see some pretty awful things said by a very vocal pro-AI crowd as well.
They take it weirdly personally when you aren't sufficiently impressed by what AI made for them, or what it can do in general. They get kind of aggressive (not passive aggressive) and tell people they will be "obsolete" or whatever, or they are "stupid" for not (being able to stand) working with it.
I mean I get it, you thought it was "good enough", I think it's so shitty you can't pay me enough to work on it. That makes you worry I know something you don't know that the AI can't fix for you, and that firmly puts you in a hierarchy of me > AI > you. So you lash out.
You can disagree about this, but don't pretend people like the above do not exist and are a very vocal group, here.
I wouldn't say "stupid", but trying to make AI go away by posting about it on the internet is sort of like… if you were about to get hit by a car and tried to solve it by posting about it on the internet.
I dunno it depends. Letting people know we're not interested in consuming their slop (code, blogs, docs, whatever), that it is revolting to us, should hopefully make them stop peddling it to us.
I'm not trying to "make AI go away", I just want people to stop shoving it in my face.
It's fine if you believe it's the bees knees and the best thing ever, but we don't. We don't see it that way. Not just for ethical reasons, but also because it's just not that good, it truly feels reasonably smart people are being brainwashed by a machine algorithm performing language based supra normal stimuli in order to optimize the loss-function of "how awesome do people report this algorithm is" -- which is of course exactly the red thread of a signal the RLHF has been training for.
I'm not crazy. It's not actually that good. Literally everything that comes out of it, is slightly shitty. When it writes prose, it reads like a dream narrative, without structure or beat, just patches of it that make sense locally, like early Midjourney outputs. Whenever it writes code, it'll make stupid mistakes if you try anything except the things it's been literally RLHF finetuned for, because it lacks spatial insight, temporal insight and anything else that makes the human experience. When I ask it for insight to learn about a new topic, it will "fail to mention" basic key points while also assuming familiarity with jargon words and abbreviations on the subject until I ask and dig deep enough and tell me "thanks for the pushback" after having wasted my time. I tried it so many times, and I hate it. I hate working with it, and I hate people shoving its output in my face.
btw I could also say the same about you -- people like me exist, our experience is valid and we're not going away because you're posting about it on the Internet.
Usually things are flagged on HN for firm reasons and not emotional ones, even if the reasoning isn't transparent.
And while we are off topic, if we could get 1% of the ire of data center haters pointed at the fast fashion / textile industry, lawns or alfalfa production... we might gain some meaningful ground on sane water usage.
All that does is reinforce the existing biases. If you post a lot of things other HN users agree with, you get the ability to silence things HN users don't like.
Your second two had high comments to upvotes, which tends to get articles downranked more quickly. It may simply be that the stuff you're posting is generating disagreement without corresponding upvotes.
Seeing the reception on the first one, maybe "removing stories that have negative connotation on AI" is not the most honest description of what happened there.
It reminds me to how various political movements will complain about being unfairly censored, pointing at their posts being disproportionately removed as evidence of this, then you look at said posts, and discover that they're simply disproportionately questionable in the first place.
There's definitely merit to monitoring something like this, so I do appreciate you surfacing this here, but there's also definitely a wheat and a chaff to this, and so based on just this much I have to disagree.
I understand this is not enough but I don't see a story here that paints AI negatively. If one is posted it gets removed swiftly. And I have seen this happen enough times that I'm considering taking periodic snapshots of the front page and prove this definitively.
> I understand this is not enough but I don't see a story here that paints AI negatively. If one is posted it gets removed swiftly.
Are we reading the same site? There is constant anti-AI content on the front page.
I know you're upset that your submission got flagged, but as most of the comments pointed out it wasn't even a well-argued piece. It got flagged because users here expect to read reasonable arguments, but the commenters called out real problems with the article and the arguments it was failing to make.
I would take it as feedback about what types of articles aren't welcome by the users here, not an indictment of the specific topic you submitted.
It's a good weekend project, just gotta be careful not to fall for motivated reasoning and not to overreach. A heavy prior suspicion of conspiracy doesn't help.
A sibling comment mentioned a few details already, but there's a good amount of information out there about how HN's post ranking system and moderation works, that'd probably be good to also consider. Maybe reaching out to the mods would also be helpful in the way of this.
To give you an anecdotal example, if I see a post mentioning how LLMs are "just next token predictors", I'm basically flagging that by reflex at this point. Not because it'd be literally untrue, but because it's asinine overall. But you won't be able to infer this from data, only the fact that a post using "AI-critical language" was flagged.
Or there was another post about how Ireland's electricity use is so-and-so % data center driven, further suggesting that this is trending up. This was not true, and the article was further horribly unhelpful in actually putting this fact into context, or properly conveying the trends. I think I ended up flagging that one as a result, after posting - what I thought - was a lot fairer picture (and even that was awfully lacking in context). Once again, an "AI-critical" post which on the face of it would have been simply censored if enough flags gathered.
There's also the mundane human angle to this, where people enthusiastic about <thing> won't necessarily be the most receptive to criticism to it, and will be more likely to try and pick that criticism apart. Gotta match the audience on some level.
> You are doing a disservice as people going through AI psychosis should hear that LLMs are just calculators.
Not any more than I do by not going around telling the depressed to simply chin up, or telling people who are frustrated with Trump that they're simply sick with TDS.
There's no world where instigating others through snide insinuations works out in one's favor. You may feel extremely justified in acting like this, but I don't think you'd appreciate if you were met the same way in other subjects either. Unfair as it is, an escalation is an escalation, no matter the context or the justification. It's always a lose-lose.
You can remind people that the conversations are simulated and that LLMs are just programs without reductively handwaving how they work. You can express frustration with the overenthusiasm around LLMs without accusing others of mental illness. I guarantee you that it lands a lot better and provides a significantly better "service" than shouting ragebait into the void ever does. Give others a chance to be better than what you think of them. You may be surprised.
Consider post [3] that the parent commenter cited as an example for a post that had a "negative connotation to AI". In reality, it doesn't take much reading to confirm it was anything but. But even if we pretend that it was, and assume it was some hit piece about how "all the people who are now willingly having their brain fried will have to wake up to a grim reality", it doesn't take much to see that token frugality and business justification of AI-use is very much in the interest of those who do feel enthused about LLMs. So there'd be no reason to present the topic so maliciously; on the contrary, the author could tailor the article around this other perspective, and they'd reach a new audience with the same fundamental message, and have them cooperate too.
There was one about NHS giving all of UK's medical data to Palantir by accident last week that got pulled from the front page about 20mins after it was posted too, feels fishy af
That explains their newbie mistake of getting too much publicity. Municipalities are replacing their Flock cameras with Axon cameras, which are just as bad but don't announce their presence.
> Offtopic. I have a concern that this forum is removing stories that have negative connotation on AI.
The first example was flagged by users. It fits the pattern of other political clickbait stories. The top comment is calling out problems with it. This type of story pops up and gets flagged all the time on different topics.
Some people assume a conspiracy or moderation misbehavior, but when most of the comments in the thread are people calling out obvious problems with the article it leads to a lot of users clicking the flag button. Articles with poor logic or tortured claims don't last long here.
The second one is an Ask HN on a contentious topic with more comments than upvotes. There’s an automatic filter on this website designed to detect flame wars and I suspect it down ranks threads that aren’t getting many upvotes but are attracting a lot of comments. Happens to many Ask HN threads.
The third one doesn't even strike me as anti-AI. I don't know why you included it as an example of an anti-AI agenda because it's still about a future where everyone is using AI. It has other problems though because it's willfully ignoring the fact that inference is getting cheaper at a fast rate. It probably got dropped from the front page because the ratio of comments to upvotes was bad, like the other story.
There isn’t a conspiracy theory to be found in these examples. This is just what happens to tired topics on this site.
Anti-AI topics are on the front page all the time. I think that story you tried to post was just a badly written anger bait piece, it got called out in the comments, and people started flagging it.
> The first example was flagged by users. It fits the pattern of other political clickbait stories. The top comment is calling out problems with it. This type of story pops up and gets flagged all the time on different topics.
If anything, they don't get flagged nearly consistently enough.
In my opinion anthropic doing product feature reveals is a tired topic but it hits the front page every day. This website has a clear pro-AI bias (which is fine).
All flagged stories are flagged by users that are part of an interest group. unric.org is political clickbait? Give me a break, Mr. "nothing to see here".
>That’s what they mean. It’s too easy to flag something here
He didn’t say that at all. He said there was bias towards removing negative AI posts. He showed no knowledge of the flagging system and that it could just be working as intended.
The problem isn’t low quality content, that gets filtered out mostly before it reaches the front page. The problem are people who downvote based on emotional trigger, not argument. And people ganging up. Never had a case where suddenly within a minute you get 4, 5 downvotes? Seems like an organised group.
That seems more like a conspiracy theory. I think the group of people who 1) view this website and 2) click on a thread about certain topics are a heavily conditioned (and therefore more homogenized) group; if you say something that is controversial/low quality, it is likely going to get downvoted by multiple people in that group.
Controversial/low quality are both subjective and i am not a fan of putting controversial next to low quality.
I do agree I dont think there is any larger bias other than a homogeneous group but it does question if such a group will up/down vote similar homogeneous content producing overall lower quality discussion and content.
> Never had a case where suddenly within a minute you get 4, 5 downvotes?
Well, no, I never have, but if I did, my first reaction would be to think I struck a nerve and had a bunch of people react, not that there was a conspiracy.
You’d think so if that was like a continuous process. You wouldn’t if you get a couple of upvotes during the day, then 5 downvotes during 1 minute, and nothing more for hours. What really pisses me off on this site is that continuing arguments (as in a discussion based on arguments, not being argumentative) often leads to people downvoting to kill the convo. So many unproductive discussions here where you know your arguments are fine but people just downvote because they can. Not surprised soma y people are like ”fuck it, throw away account it is”.
It’s really fascinating to me how when the community dislikes certain content people always jump to conspiratorial justifications rather than the much more mundane “this content is not very good”. The first article is poor and all the comments on it say exactly that. The second one actually did fairly well for what is a fairly middle-of-the-road Ask HN. There’s no shadowy cabal removing anti-AI content from the front page.
Thanks for sharing! I’m super skeptical of the claims, but it really deserves careful discussion.
Hope they make comparisons to food and fashion. I measure my AI usage in terms of hamburgers. Makes me feel better about AI and worse about eating meat.
The mods (& many users) like to flag anything that could be "controversial" or lead to "flame wars". It's possible they thought that article could get people "fired up" and it could result in "arguments" in the comments. And this doesn't just apply to stories - if you have an opinion that the mods or some user doesn't like, you'll be accused of posting flame bait.
This "community" (as the mods like to call it) is really a business tool for YC. Attract nerds to the site, funnel them into the YC program, make startups, collect billions. If this was your money-making tool, you'd probably want to quash all controversy too.
During the DOGE massacres last year where various tech bros were destroying the federal government, most of the stories were flagged from the front page of this site.
There is a strong bias at play here, please remember when discussing anything pro- worker or environment.
Yes, because most of them were annoying "look how awful my political outgroup is" ragebait without substantive argument or insight.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Few days back, I posted an article[1] that was about how AI threatens natural resources for billions. This was from United Nations and it was flagged. I did not think much about it until I saw two other stories [2] & [3] today that were doing fairly good on front page but they suddenly disappeared. They are not even on 2nd or 3rd page. I have seen this happening at other times as well but did not document it. Just thought you all should know about this.
I was going to create Tell HN thread but I thought the same would happen with it too. I am pretty sure this thread is not going anywhere so I'm posting my concern here.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49290062
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49318906
[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49319582