There seems much defensiveness in the comments here along the lines of "not a new thing" and "not unique to LLM/AI".

It seems to deflect, even gaslight TFA.

> For most of the articles Pangram flagged as written by GenAI, nearly every cited sentence in the article failed verification.

So why deflect that into convenient other pedantry (surely not under the guise tech forums often do so)?

WSo why the discomfort for part of HN at an assertion AI is being used for nefarious purposes and creation of alternate 'truths'?

There sure are a lot of green names on this post pushing that agenda. Makes you wonder if its astroturfing. And why its nessecary, is AI so fragile it can't let any criticism stand unchallenged?

Astroturfing or marketing, I’d guess. I’ve noticed you’re no longer allowed to say negative things about AI here without significant pushback, and I’d bet this isn’t an organic shift in perception.

Well, I guess these days there's just a sizeable chunk of users on HN that earn their living with AI, one way or another. It's really only natural that some of them get thin-skinned if you shit on their lawn.

I'm not a fan of certain trends either, but I wouldn't say it's inorganic. It's just a shift in the industry, and humans being human.

I've found that generally people reserve down votes for posts that don't add to the conversation, in general, just like we're supposed to do. Its always been down vote city if you happen to criticize political positions that benefit libertarian technologists. But lately anything critical of AI tends to get a lot of down votes. Even on older posts that you can't find on the front page anymore... It feels inorganic

> Its always been down vote city if you happen to criticize political positions that benefit libertarian technologists.

This varies wildly by timezone. Usually I get upvoted during European timezones and then brace for the Americans to wake up.

netim.com

> divergent complexity of today's abstractions

The vast majority of websites and apps do not have complex divergent abstraction needs.

Some developers however require complex divergent abstractions in order to baffle brains and collect paycheck.

Compilers do not have copyright over the code resulting from instructions given.

LLMs do not have copyright over the ode resulting from instructions given.

That's not the issue. Some people are saying that the outputs of AI are not copyrightable at all.

Less exploit, more fraud. Still, I am surprised it took so long to spot given how huge online shopping is.

Not overly pedantic at all as it highlights that by using venom the hunters were able to eat what they shot.

For other readers' benefit: Girocard is not related to Girobank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girobank or using said Girobank's Girocard to pay bills or collect dole.

While TFA is anecdote, the author mentions maintaining their spend, being gifted adword budget, and getting lower returns so increasing spend.

This suggests adword revenue is up, conversion to adword 'dollar' balances is inflating those balances, so both return per dollar in is down and even more down is return per adword balance dollar.

It's a leading indicator that quarterly-return focused Google must be scrambling to fix right now - they inflated themselves out of Q4 2025 but 2026 is a question mark, or to parle some Boxton Matrix, is the cash cow dying and if so is the extension strategy ad injection in AI responses, product placement in your AI videos, background changes in your family snaps, etc.

Sounds like a very noisy submarine.