Show HN: How much of Hacker News is AI?

(hnstats.com)

37 points | by beekthos 2 hours ago

13 comments

  • Dwedit 14 minutes ago
    The topic of an article being AI and an "AI-Generated Article" are two completely different things.
  • caminanteblanco 55 minutes ago
    Would there be some way to see what percentage of the front page meets those qualifications? I don't browse /new very often, so I have less of an idea of how representative that is. It would be interesting to see if they trend similarly.

    Thanks for the cool project!

    • beekthos 46 minutes ago
      Yeah, that's probably the main limitation right now. This is measuring /new, so it's every submission rather than just the stuff that makes the front page.

      lcamtuf's survey (linked in the footer) was looking at the front page, and the number there was quite a bit higher. So there's likely some effect from voting, although I haven't dug into that yet.

      I think Algolia has a way to filter for front-page stories, which should make it pretty easy to add. I haven't tested that yet though but will certainly look into it!

  • noxss 2 minutes ago
    Interestingly, we can deduce that the actual percentage will always be higher since not everyone uses those labels/words.
  • missingpackage 1 hour ago
    At first I thought about how many posts were written by AI
    • whatisthiseven 10 minutes ago
      Multiple times authors have been asked about AI usage on HN, because readers (rightfully) suspected it was AI written. I don't have a problem with AI written articles, or assisted.

      But then the authors lie or make ludicrous excuses for why their article "sounds" like AI. Then I check with Pangram and yep. It is completely AI written.

      You get a few free checks on Pangram each day or so. Just start checking and encourage people to be honest.

      AI has its place. Lying about it and misrepresenting it makes everyone dislike AI more, even as they use it themselves.

    • beekthos 43 minutes ago
      Most of the time things make sense in my head until someone points it out haha. I should have written it as "related to AI" or something like that.
  • rzmmm 44 minutes ago
    It's remarkable how stable 20-30% show HN concentration is after late 2022, for the extended stats.
  • lanewinfield 8 minutes ago
    I expected this to call out the number of links that are obviously vibe coded, like itself!

    If you see:

    - ALL CAPS subheaders

    - a light beige background

    - burnt sienna anchor and/or highlight text

    - a "• LIVE" (or really any pulsing • symbol with an ALL CAPS follow-up)

    - tons of variation in font sizes (this one has 15 different text sizes!)

    - more typically, a lot of overexplaining

    ...you know it's vibe'd, specifically with Claude!

  • hartator 21 minutes ago
    Would be curious to see how many comments are AI generated.
  • bklosky 1 hour ago
    you could fetch the text from linked blog posts over time and run 'em through pangram, I bet >20% of blogs linked on HN today are totally LLM written
    • smokel 16 minutes ago
      An estimated 2,000 articles per month at 2,000 words per article would result in 4,000,000 words, which costs either $200 or $2000 to process at Pangram [1]. It might make life a lot more enjoyable for many users here, though.

      [1] https://www.pangram.com/pricing?category=developers

    • beekthos 23 minutes ago
      Several people have asked for this already, so I'll add it to my to-do list. I just want to be careful about flagging posts that appear to be written by AI. Perhaps I set certain thresholds of certainty to filter by. What I have currently is easily verified and matched by the words we are filtering for.

      It is also interesting to note that I have already received 5 AI written emails to the email I linked in the footer.

  • xpct 41 minutes ago
    Good. Now do what % of posts link to AI generated articles.
    • grey-area 21 minutes ago
      That would be a much more depressing statistic.
  • sharemywin 1 hour ago
    it would be cool to use embeddings to categorize into like 10-20 categories and get a giant pie chart
    • beekthos 1 hour ago
      Not a bad idea. I'd look at creating a separate page for embeddings. Crypto and NFT's would be the next best candidates to add. Something for me to work on over time.
  • ChrisArchitect 27 minutes ago
    Related:

    How Much of HN is AI? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49435728

    • beekthos 15 minutes ago
      Yes! This post was the inspiration and is credited in the footer.
  • noobplus 1 hour ago
    And so comes the AI comments as many as the AI posts just saying for fun
    • beekthos 40 minutes ago
      Something to maybe track later would be /newcomments, but that would only grab the most obvious comments. People can certainly direct an AI to write in a style that sounds human, but I'm sure it'll still catch a fair amount.
    • ForOldHack 1 hour ago
      If you read a lot, you start to get a feel for phone typos vs AI hiccups. I can guarantee that is post was made by a brain designed to eat berries in a cave. Almost all the another posts look a bit scary.

      I think I misunderstood - how many posts were about AI vs how many posts were written by AI.

      I obviously am suffering from berry fog.

      • noobplus 52 minutes ago
        Exactly yep. Maybe even more when time machine has been invented by that AI bot in far future I meant the number of comments by AI(-bots)
  • regexman1 1 hour ago
    Brilliant