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bogdanyesterday at 11:44 AM2 repliesview on HN

Whilst you and a few other commentators call this AI slop and refuse to engage with it, the rest of us have read something interesting and learned something new. Is anything gained if one points out that it's written by AI? I personally know it's written by AI but the value outweighs the stylistic idiosyncrasies.

Consider also that many people aren't the best at writing blog-like posts but still have things to share and AI empowers them to do that. I can't find anything constructive in your post and I don't understand why you are posting at all.


Replies

Chance-Deviceyesterday at 4:47 PM

What’s not constructive about it, Bogdan? I’ve said exactly what I think is wrong with the article, the framing is AI pattern matching to something that it isn’t. It’s a weird kind of incongruent clickbait, it’s not positioning itself as a piece about cloudflare or turnstile, it’s implicitly saying “look at this sneaky thing OpenAI are doing that I uncovered!” and it turns out they’re not doing much of anything at all.

This may be unintentional and the author simply couldn’t tell it sounded this way. The less charitable interpretation is that they did know it sounded this way and thought that a straightforward blog post about cloudflare bot detection wouldn’t end up on the HN front page.

What’s my constructive criticism to the author? Write your own posts. Use your own voice. Make sure that what you’re creating actually reads like the kind of thing it is. Don’t get the AI to write it for you. It’s annoying.

And I would say that if someone is really so bad at writing blogs that they are unable to do this, which I am not saying this author is, then maybe they shouldn’t be writing them.

nickelproyesterday at 5:15 PM

The intended value is difficult to discern in AI written pieces.

I agree with both of you, there's some interesting tricks here for how a website builds anti-bot protection, but the AI sloppification is framing it as a consumer protection issue but not delivering on that premise.

It is a reasonable criticism that the post does not deliver a "so what?" on its basic framing.