How to deal with all the low effort AI content online
Online spaces are being flooded with generic, AI-generated posts and comments that lack personal insight and clog up genuine discussions. This wave of robotic noise makes it exhausting to find authentic conversation and forces members to constantly weed out regurgitated text.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1Ignoring or downvoting obvious AI-generated responses
- 2Calling out users who paste unedited AI replies
- 3Using AI strictly as a private writing assistant to polish personal drafts rather than generating whole comments
- 4inspecting background details like shrubbery for anomalies
- 5looking for visual inconsistencies
- 6finding smaller forums that are not big enough to be worth trying to manipulate
- 7Using multiple backup evidence tools like TurnItIn, Pangram, and Copyleaks
- 8Checking version and revision history in Google Docs to spot copy-pasting
- 9Relying on personal experience, teaching style recognition, and 1:1 student interviews
- 10Requiring paper and pencil assignments done in class with no devices
- 11Messaging the seller to obtain a refund
- 12Doing follow-up conversations in person instead of email
- 13Having a friendly chat advising the coworker to use less LLM
- 14Getting the coworker's boss involved to establish firmer rules
- 15Using configuration files like CLAUDE.md or rules to enforce conciseness
- 16Switching to specific predefined concise output styles
- 17Setting up startup hooks to force-read markdown instruction files
- 18Manually asking the model to provide the short version
In their words
Unedited, most upvoted first, each linked to the thread it came from.
“its sad that when I see interesting things like this these days I always have to wonder if its AI”source ↗
“I’m almost positive this is AI”source ↗
“It's getting worse and there are no direct rules against it.”source ↗
“Seriously though if I could go a day without hearing or reading someone regurgitate some AI nonsense, I’d be a lot happier.”source ↗
“I finally sat down to complete it, and there were some pretty major inaccuracies in the design.”source ↗
“It was obvious to me that the listing picture was AI generated before purchasing, but I stupidly purchased it anyway thinking the pattern itself was not AI.”source ↗
“I'm sure I'm not the only one who's noticed, but nearly every post on Hacker News is getting LLM comments now.”source ↗
“But seeing this infestation, and the rate at which it is growing is very demoralizing.”source ↗
“How do you get through to a colleague who is using ChatGPT to outsource ALL of their thoughts and opinions?”source ↗
“2 days later, we'll get AI slop in our inbox for their assigned action items but it ends up meeting NONE of the criteria discussed in our meetings and ultimately overcomplicates the entire point of what we were trying to do.”source ↗
“I genuinely don't know how to approach this moving forward.”source ↗
“I have a personal policy of going off at anyone who pulls the “here’s what the AI said” when talking with me.”source ↗
“I'm not sure AI checkers are reliable to be honest.”source ↗
“There are no reliable "AI checkers." They literally just don't work.”source ↗
“Nope. They do not work well at all. Even Turnitin isn't accurate.”source ↗
“I've accepted that the "Old Internet", the one in which most content was clearly human generated (for better or for worse) is dead.”source ↗
“More people showed up just to argue, rather than to have curious conversations. More zealots and shills, less thought.”source ↗
“I've been messing around with output styles for a bit to try and reduce the madness that is opus 5's extremely disorganized and verbose output.”source ↗
“I've had to put hard rules into Claude - and I still have to reinforce them - not just CLAUDE.md (make sure not over 40k characters) but hooks that force a read of .md files on startup, etc.”source ↗
“I have been using the checked4ai chrome extension for google docs but the results seem a bit unreliable for the ai checking side.”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
- 19Why does fixing AI mistakes take longer than doing it myself?
- 2How to push back against forced AI tools at work
- 6Students forgetting to delete AI chat prompts from school essays
- 2Why am I getting falsely accused of using AI to write?
- 5AI is better at software architecture and patterns than I am
- 4Why am I being forced to use AI at work?