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Comment by _bahd | Hacker News Reader

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We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44648436 and marked it off topic.

How is "the author" a hint that it's AI generated? It's a common speech pattern. There are probably thousands of comments on HN articles from before AI that use the term. I'm not even sure what you'd use instead.

It is not AI generated and unlurker just finds articles with active conversations, it doesn't do any kind of comment automation. Upon reading it again, my comment in question maybe didn't add all that much; I just found the article interesting, so maybe I get where you are coming from.

As I mentioned in another reply, the weirdest thing about this comment chain is I saw this article on the front page, not unlurker (there wasn't much conversation yet when I posted so it would not have shown on the unlurker view I use).

Is "the author" a phrase AI prefers? Maybe I'll need to retire that along with "delve" and the em-dash and "you're absolutely right".

Ha - thanks for answering this and clearing it up! Like I said, apologies if I was wrong. I think my AI slop paranoia had kicked in!

No, honestly the comment was more than legitimate, I guess the author part made me think of LLMs summarizing research papers.

Well, at least I've discovered unlurker out of this :)

You should just say straightforward apoligies. Like I said, apologies if I was wrong doesn't cut it.

He is the author of unlurker

https://github.com/jasonthorsness/unlurker

I had no idea what this was... Is this an ongoing problem on HN or something?

yeah, that's how I found it - I had no idea what it was until I clicked on his profile. I personally haven't noticed it, but this comment really stood out, and I really hope this doesn't become a thing

I don't think he's using it to post AI slop, moreso to find himself in actively ongoing conversations on HN.

Now I’m paranoid that my comments sound like an LLM. I write all my own comments without LLM “assistance”. I actually am somewhat anti-AI in that regard so this comment chain is causing me some anxiety :p

Also I use do use unlurker probably mostly as a stubborn insistence on using something I spent a lot of time on and to try to be more active, but ironically I just saw this article on the front page of the real site not on unlurker. I mostly develop in golang so found it pretty interesting albeit a bit extreme.

I respect anyone who uses the tools they made, and actually I didn't even know this tool existed, and will be trying it out after work, so it at least brought some attention to your tool!

I think we're going to see more people being accused of using AI because of word choice. The way I read your message outside of the one word you chose to use, it read like a genuine opinion of yours.

Gotcha, phew. I went through the repo and found no obvious comment posting module

I mean. Not in THAT repo. /s

Still: Seems ripe for abuse.

Bad actors ruin nice toys for the rest of us.

Nothing about unlurker is abusive; it’s just another one of the dozens of front-ends to HN. If anything seems abusive I’ll change it.

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