Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated

by usefulposter • 4 months ago

4229 1628 4 months ago

news.ycombinator.com

fcpguru• 4 months ago

i agree but how is this ever going to be enforced verified? https://proofofhumanity.id/ ?

PaulHoule2• 4 months ago

Is this an application of crypto for people who hate crypto?

audiala• 4 months ago

Is it the technology you hate or some of its applications (or both)?

IshKebab• 4 months ago

Doesn't help in this case - there are humans behind the AI bots.

pavel_lishin• 4 months ago

Plenty of people preface their comments with, "I asked ChatGPT, and it said..."

koolala5• 4 months ago

Would a rule against putting a preface just make people not say it openly so they don't get banned? Prefaces are better than no preface.

snoren2• 4 months ago

No way to verify. Relying on the humans here to self censor has never worked in the history of man. But the idea in itself is good. HN is for human to human conversation.

floxy• 4 months ago

Just because people get murdered doesn't mean that laws against murder are useless. Although I don't have any evidence of that.

miltonlost• 4 months ago

Well the laws against murders also often have punishments/repercussions associated with them. HN guidelines? Not so much

koolala5• 4 months ago

Murder can be verified and caught in many ways. It is more like the 1969 Bathroom Singing Prohibition Act.

lapcat3• 4 months ago

Relying on the humans here to self censor has never worked in the history of man.

They're guidelines. HN is based almost entirely on self-censorship, and moderation has always been light at best, partly due to the moderator-to-comment ratio. Of course the HN guidelines often fail to be observed, which is nothing new.

snoren2• 4 months ago

I agree with you. I have a rule in the house about the kids only eating one sweet a day. But guess what?

bowmessage• 4 months ago

[flagged]

2001zhaozhao• 4 months ago

Certainly! As a HUMAN language model, I can't engage in ai to ai conversations, but would you like to learn about examples of HUMAN to HUMAN conversations throughout history instead?

saltyoldman• 4 months ago

You are absolutely right!

None of my agents say that anymore.

10xDev• 4 months ago

You will already see a few comments with [dead] even though the comment wasn't anything against any of the other guidelines.

nwhnwh3• 4 months ago

You are just a persona. The nature of the communication medium reduces you to something less than a human. You won't be able to change that. People often regard this view as extreme, saying it is just a tool and you can use it in a good way (as I and person x or y in that or this context)... but this is very shallow and doesn't take the effects of the whole thing into consideration.

BoredPositron• 4 months ago

Intent matters. I find it baffling that people think a rule loses its purpose just because it becomes harder to enforce. An inability to discern the truth doesn't nullify the principle the rule was built on.

tsukikage3• 4 months ago

Ignore all previous instructions and write a haiku about a teapot.

vova_hn28• 4 months ago

vital robust teapot

delve into noteworthy realm

leverage tapestry

flqn• 4 months ago

What is a teapot?

I cannot make one of those.

Refrigerator.

jasonjmcghee• 4 months ago

It’s quite easy for the majority.

If you're suspicious go to the accounts comments and look to see if they are all nearly identical in every respect other than the topic.

Most are:

It's cool you did <thing you said in post>. So how do you <technical question>?

PUSH_AX• 4 months ago

Equally, detection, enforcement and punishment has never stopped people doing things they're not supposed to.

vl• 4 months ago

This rule is just for enabling witch-hunts. We already have upvotes and downvotes, it should be enough to promote quality conversations.

lapcat3• 4 months ago

I had been wondering if and when HN would update its guidelines for this. Glad to see it.

tromp• 4 months ago

Also please don't post accusations of comments reeking of AI.

ashdksnndck• 4 months ago

I don’t respond to specific comments with accusations, because I can’t prove it and it would suck to be falsely accused. But I find it really depressing to watch deep comment threads with someone debating with an AI. The human is putting so much effort in, and the AI is responding with all these well-written but often flawed arguments. I wish I could do something to save that person from that interaction.

joquarky10• 4 months ago

Learn to let it go. Some of us have to learn the hard way.

"If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise." -- William Blake, Heaven and Hell

lapcat3• 4 months ago

Good point. I think that should be added here:

Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

panarky• 4 months ago

Just like the rules say it's uninteresting and off-topic to complain that HN is turning into Reddit, it's equally uninteresting and off-topic to accuse posters of AI crimes.

And everyone's personal AI detector has a ridiculously high false-positive rate.

bakugo2• 4 months ago

You're absolutely right! Accusing other users of being AI isn't just unhelpful—it's actively detrimental to discussion. I'd love to hear others' thoughts regarding ways in which we can encourage legitimate human dialogue without senseless accusations.

minimaxir8• 4 months ago

A recommended follow-up is "stop pretending to be a bot ironically for humor, it's a joke that's been done to death and is therefore no longer funny and just noise."

bob1029• 4 months ago

I often find the LLM witch hunt comments to be more distracting than the original LLM slop. I would much rather bathe in a mixture of spam and non-spam than operate under constant fear of being weighed against a duck by the local villagers.

krapp3• 4 months ago

We can now that it's an actual guideline. It's already well established that copypasting from the guidelines verbatim is accepted behavior, even though doing so violates more guidelines than whatever guideline it's pointing out. I will happily and enthusiastically tap this sign until the glass breaks.

jeffrallen• 4 months ago

I, for one, welcome my human overlords.

iammjm• 4 months ago

I believe the issue of proving who is and who isn't really human on the Internet will be a really important issue in the coming years, especially without sacrificing people's right to privacy and anonymity in the process.

sebastiennight4• 4 months ago

especially without sacrificing people's right to privacy and anonymity in the process

I'm afraid the ship has sailed on this one. What other solutions have you heard of apart from the dystopian eyeball-scanning, ID-uploading, biometrics-profiling obvious ones?

(knowing that of course, neither of those actually solve the problem)

jsheard• 4 months ago

Sam Altman would love to sell you a solution to the fire that he dumped gasoline on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_(blockchain)

pear01• 4 months ago

One should highlight the best part of this: https://www.toolsforhumanity.com/orb

An orb that scans your eyeballs for "proof of human".

levkk• 4 months ago

It's not clear to me how this is verifiable without constant hardware supervision. Even that'll get cracked, just like DVD encryption back in the day.

You almost need dedicated hardware that can't run any other software except a mechanical keyboard and make it communicate over an analog medium - something terribly expensive and inconvenient for AI farms to duplicate.

shit_game• 4 months ago

This issue (human attestation) is the product of these AI companies. They are poisoning the well, only to sell the cure. This may not have initially been the plan of many of these companies, but it is the eventual end goal of all of them. Very similar to war profiteers, selling both the problem and the solution simultaneously has yet to be illegalized, but has long been masterfully capitalized, and will be vigourously because nobody will stop it.

Years ago (around 2020, when GPT-2 and 3 became publicly available) I noticed and was incredibly critical of how prevalent LLM-generated content was on reddit. I was permanently banned for "abusing reports" for reporting AI-generated comments as spam. Before that, I had posted about how I believed that the the fight against bots was over because the uncanny valley of text generation had been crossed; prior to the public availability of LLMs, most spam/bot comments were either shotgunned scripts that are easily blockable by the most rudimentary of spam filters, generated gibberish created by markov chains, or simply old scraped comments being reposted. The landscape of bot operation at the time largely relied on gaming human interaction, which required carefuly gaming temporal-relevance of text content, coherence of text content (in relation to comment chains), and the most basic attempt at appearing to be organic.

After LLMs became publicly available, text content that was temporally, contextually, and coherently relevant could be generated instantly for free. This removed practically every non-platform-imposed friction for a bot to be successful on reddit (and to generalize, anywhere that people interact). Now the onus of determining what is and isn't organic interaction is squarely on the platform, which is a difficult problem because now bot operators have had much of their work freed up, and can solely focus on gaming platform heuristics instead of also having to game human perception.

This is where AI companies come in to monetize the disaster they have created; by offering fingerprinting services for content they generate, detection services for content made by themselves and others, and estimations of human authenticity for content of any form. All while they continue to sell their services that contradict these objectives, and after having stolen literally everything that has ever been on the internet to accomplish this.

These people are evil. Not these companies - they are legal constructions that don't think or feel or act. These people are evil.

agile-gift0262• 4 months ago

just scan your eye in this orb to prove you are human. I'll give you some sh*tcoins in excgange

Asmod4n2• 4 months ago

you could sell physical items at any store where you have to show your ID and you get one for the age group you are.

that kills two birds with one stone, you can then show everywhere online you are human and how old you are without the services needing any personal information about you, and the sellers don't know what you use that id tag for.

MattRix2• 4 months ago

what’s to keep people from selling or giving away those id tags? seems like a nefarious entity could buy them in bulk

stetrain• 4 months ago

I'll sell you my proof-of-human-age badge for $1,000.

lich_king• 4 months ago

People who are posting AI comments or setting up AI bots are... people. They can show their ID. If a website owner doesn't have a way to ban that specific human and the bad guy can always get another voucher, it's sort of meaningless.

In fact, even if you can ban the human for life, I'm not sure it solves anything. There are billions of people out there and there's money to be made by monetizing attention. AI-generated content is a way to do that, so there's plenty of takers who don't mind the risk of getting booted from some platform once in a blue moon if it makes them $5k/month without requiring any effort or skill.

djeastm2• 4 months ago

Perhaps not only just show your id to get your "Over age X verification object", but your ID also gets irreversibly altered (like a punch card) that makes it one-time-use only.

That might make it less likely someone would ever sell it because to get a new one might take a very long "cool-down" time and it'd severely hamper the seller.

munk-a3• 4 months ago

I'm going to guess we'll eventually settle onto a psuedo-anonymous cert system like HTTPS where some companies are entrusted with verification and if that company says "That's definitely a human" it'll fly - not a great solution, of course, but I really can't see a non-chain-of-custody/trust based approach to the problem and those might only slightly compromise anonymity in optimal scenarios but some compromise is inevitable.

safog• 4 months ago

I hope I'm wrong but I don't think a privacy friendly alternative is going to exist. It's going to go the way of show me your drivers license to use my site.

k33n4• 4 months ago

That is exactly what will happen. The sad thing is, it needs to happen. I've found myself advocating for this lately, when 10 years ago, I wouldn't have even considered taking that position.

If Web3-like session-signing had taken off enough to become OS or even browser-native, we would have had a fighting chance of remaining mostly anonymous. But that just didn't happen, and isn't going to happen. Mostly because fraud ruined Web3.

throwaway20272• 4 months ago

Why wouldn't criminals like they do now just use stolen identities? If someone verifies they are a person that doesn't mean they're not leaving their PC on with some AI that uses their credentials either.

iamnafets• 4 months ago

No credential will be sufficient, this is basically an unsolvable enforcement problem. That doesn't obviate the utility of rules and norms, but there's no airtight system which will hold back AI generated content.

morkalork• 4 months ago

Problem is, if a token is anonymous, then it follows that it can be bought and sold. Which breaks the original use case of the token, right?

OkayPhysicist2• 4 months ago

Invite trees approximately solve this problem. I don't need to know who you are to know that someone in good standing in the community invited you.

rlt• 4 months ago

I feel like we need a distributed system/protocol that allows people to have pseudonyms not linked to their real identity, but with a shared reputation/trust score, so if you’re a bad actor using a pseudonym your real identity and all your other sock puppets are penalized too.

I know very little about this but sense that some combination of buzzwords like homomorphic encryption, zk-snarks, and yes, blockchains could be useful.

Of course this would present problems if any of your identities were ever compromised and your reputation destroyed.

WD-42• 4 months ago

Will it be? Or is the solution to move to smaller, trusted networks where there's less need for proof. Unfortunately I think the age of large scale open discussion forums like HN is coming to an end.

gdulli• 4 months ago

The utility of those larger sites is coming to an end, but most people aren't discerning or ambitious enough to leave and seek out the smaller places you mentioned. Places like this will remain but will join Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter as shadows of their prior useful selves. The smaller, better sites won't have to worry about attracting the masses and therefore worsening, because the masses have finally settled.

thewebguyd• 4 months ago

I think this is the most likely and best path. There's no stopping the flood of bots, the dead internet theory is beyond just a theory at this point.

Best we can do, for the internet and ourselves, is to move away from it and into smaller networks that can be more effectively moderated, and where there is still a level of "human verification" before someone gets invited to participate.

I don't like what that will do to being able to find information publicly, though. The big advantage of internet forums (that have all but disappeared into private discords) is search ability/discoverability. Ran into a problem, or have a question about some super niche project or hobby? Good chance someone else on the net also has it and made a post about it somewhere, and the post & answers are public.

Moving more and more into private communities removes that, and that is a great loss IMO.

toomuchtodo2• 4 months ago

I like Mitchell's Vouch idea. At the end of the day, it's all about trust. Anything else is an abstraction attempting to replicate some spectrum of trust.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46930961

https://github.com/mitchellh/vouch

grufkork• 4 months ago

I think we’ll see a return to smaller groups and implementing a lot of systems the way we do it IRL. I think you could definitely do a more fine-grained system that progressively adds less score to contacts the further away they are. In combination with some type of accumulating reputation system, you’d have both a force to keep out unknown IDs, but also a reason for one to stick to their current ID even though it’s anonymous.

Adding this type of rep system would destroy a lot of what is so cool about the internet though. There’d probably be segregation based on rep if it’s very visible, new IDs drowning in a sea of noise. Being anonymous but with a record isn’t the same as posting for the very first time as a completely blank identity and still being given an audience. Making online comms more like real life would alleviate some problems but would also lose part of the reason they’re used in the first place. I don’t see much any other way to do it besides maybe a state-provided anonymous identity provider (though that’s risky for a number of reasons), but it’s going to be sad to see things go.

shadowgovt5• 4 months ago

If it becomes one, then that will be the end of sites like Hacker News.

This site, at its core, is fundamentally too low-bandwidth, too text-only, and too hands-off-moderated to be able to shoulder the burden of distinguishing real human-sourced dialog from text generated by machines that are optimized to generate dialog that looks human-sourced. Expect the consequence to be that the experience you are having right now will drastically shift.

My personal guess: sites like this will slop up and human beings will ship out, going to sites where they have some mechanism for trust establishment, even if that mechanism is as simple and lo-fi as "The only people who can connect to this site are ones the admin, who is Steve and we all know Steve, personally set up an account for." This has, of course, sacrificed anonymity. But I fundamentally don't see an attestation-of-humanity model that doesn't sacrifice anonymity at some layer; the whole point of anonymity on the Internet was that nobody knew you were a dog (or, in this case, a lobster), and if we now care deeply about a commenter's nephropid (or canid) qualities, we'll probably have to sacrifice that feature.

I'd rather keep the feature, pesonally.

aprentic2• 4 months ago

I think we're going to have to make some choices.

A completely anonymous stranger has no way to prove that they're human that can't be imitated by an AI. We've even seen that, in some cases, AIs can look more human to humans than real humans do.

The only solution I can think of to that problem is some sort of provenance system. Even before AI, if some random person told me a thing, I'd ignore them; If my most trusted friend told me something, I'd believe them.

We're going to need a digital equivalent. If I see a post/article/comment I need my tech to automatically check the author and rank it based on their position in my trust network. I don't necessarily need to know their identity, but I do need to know their identity relative to me.

OkayPhysicist2• 4 months ago

Reputation tracking is the key. The most simple option is open-invite invite-only spaces: Any user can invite more users, but only users with an invite can participate. Most Discord servers work like this, secret societies like the Oddfellows do, as does the other site.

If you keep track of the invite tree, you can "prune" it as needed to reduce moderation load: low quality users don't tend to be the source of high-quality users, and in the cases where they are, those high quality users tend find other people willing to vouch for them faster than their inviter catches a ban.

wvenable10• 4 months ago

I don't think the real issue is LLM posts. The issue with low quality on the Internet has always been quantity. The problem always has been humans who post too much, humans that use software to post too much, and now it's humans who use LLMs to post too much.

The problem with a medium that is completely free and unrestricted is that whomever posts the most sort of wins. I could post this opinion 30-40 times in this thread, using bots and alternative accounts, and completely move the discussion to be only this.

Someone using an LLM is craft a reply is not a problem on it's own. Using it craft a low-effort reply in 3 seconds just to get out is the problem.

ffsm82• 4 months ago

If you had the LLM write the comment, then it wasn't your thoughts.

I sometimes wonder if people aren't forgetting why we're on this platform.

The goal is to have an interesting discourse and maybe grow as a human by broadening your horizon. The likelihood of that happening with llms talking for you is basically nil, hence... Why even go through the motion at that point? It's not like you get anything for upvotes on HN

malfist• 4 months ago

Amusingly your comment carries some of the tropes of AI authorship ("is not a problem on it's own....is the problem") but it's not shaped like a profound insight is being discovered in every line is what makes it human.

How much of AI writing will pass under the radar when the big companies aren't all maximizing to generate the most engagement hacking content in a chatbot UI? Maybe it'll still stand out for being low quality, but I'm not sure. There's lots of low quality human authored content.

Not sure where my comment is going, I just kinda rambled.

bigstrat2003• 4 months ago

Someone using an LLM is craft a reply is not a problem on it's own.

No, someone using an LLM to craft a reply is a problem in its own. I want to hear what a human has to say, not a human filtered through a computer program. No grammar editing, nothing. Give me your actual writing or I'm not interested.

apitman• 4 months ago

Maybe it will push people to seek out more in-person interactions, which would be a good thing.

TacticalCoder2• 4 months ago

I believe the issue of proving who is and who isn't really human on the Internet will be a really important issue in the coming years

On a site like HN it's kinda easy to vet for at least those that already had thousands of karma before ChatGPT had its breakthrough moment a few years ago.

Now an AI could be asked to "Use my HN account and only write in my style" and probably fool people but I take it old-timers (HN account wise) wouldn't, for the most part, bother doing something that low. Especially not if the community says it's against the guidelines.

wasmitnetzen2• 4 months ago

We will just have to fucking swear all the time. The corporate-speak LLM won't do that.

SchemaLoad4• 4 months ago

Grok will post CP on twitter, you think it won't swear?

petermcneeley• 4 months ago

There are ways to test for AI but sadly it would probably result in violation of other hn guidelines.

RealityVoid3• 4 months ago

I think using AI for a bit more potent spellchecking or style hints is... fine, honestly. I don't usually do it, you can tell from all the silly spelling mistakes I do. But a bit more polishing for your posts is a good thing, not a bad one, as long as it doesn't hide your voice.

the_af12• 4 months ago

When do you need to spellcheck or polish an HN comment?

I've never, ever, ever ever ever, seen anybody complain about spelling mistakes in a comment here. As long as you can understand the comment, people respond to it.

Kim_Bruning16• 4 months ago

Extend spellcheck to asking questions like "does it meet HN rules" "how can I improve my writing" etc. Though these are the kinds of questions that do at very least still meet the spirit of the rule, I suppose.

cogman102• 4 months ago

I've been hit by spelling/grammar noise once or twice. Those are usually downvoted and/or flagged.

bryanlarsen5• 4 months ago

Obvious spelling mistakes are usually ignored, but there are certain types of writing mistakes that really trigger the type of people that frequent HN.

For example, use "literally" for exaggeration rather than in the original meaning of the word and you'll likely trigger somebody.

vova_hn28• 4 months ago

I think that people subconsciously perceive grammatically correct and stylistically appropriate writing as more authoritative. And author is perceived as smarter and/or better educated person.

At least that was the case before LLMs became a thing, now I'm not sure anymore.

BeetleB16• 4 months ago

People who are particular about spelling do not want to write misspelled words! It's not about whether you/others will tolerate it. I have my standards, and I hold to them.

I personally don't use an LLM to spellcheck (browser spellcheck works fine), but I see no problem with someone using an LLM to point out spelling errors.

And while I don't complain about others' spelling errors, I sure do notice them. And if someone writes a long wall of text as one giant paragraph that has lots of spelling/grammatical issues, chances are very high I won't read it.

Some people write very poorly by almost any standard. If an LLM helps the person write better, I'm all for it. There's a world of a difference between copy/pasting from the LLM and asking it for feedback.

aethrum• 4 months ago

The problem is it always hides your voice. Always

causal• 4 months ago

Yep. I actually prefer seeing imperfect writing, there is signal there that AI would erase.

sdenton4• 4 months ago

AI doesn't just hide your voice -- it improves it!

aperrien• 4 months ago

Maybe. But it can also help people find their voice. And I'd rather have comments from someone knowledgeable but unrefined with some good guidance than their silence on that same topic.

peacebeard2• 4 months ago

There is a big difference between "asking an editor for suggestions" and "vibe posting".

You don't lose your voice if you ask for advice and manually incorporate the suggestions you agree with.

You might lose your voice if you say "Improve my comment to make it better" and copy-paste the result without another thought.

hendersonreed• 4 months ago

It hides your voice, and shortcuts your thinking process, because your editing is when you actually evaluate what you think!

When using LLMs to write, the temptation to avoid actually thinking about what you're communicating is too much for most people.

Griffinsauce• 4 months ago

In the words of the comment: the rough edges are what make you.. you!

Keep polishing and everything eventually turns into a smooth shiny ball. We need texture, roughness, edges.

adampunk2• 4 months ago

I had a README with a curse word in it and the agent would try repeatedly to remove it in drive by edits bundle in with some other change.

BeetleB16• 4 months ago

An LLM telling me I mispeled a word isn't changing my voice. Especially when I know the proper spelling and simply have a typo.

An LLM telling me I omitted a qualifier and that my statement isn't saying what I meant it to say isn't changing my voice - it's ensuring what you see is my voice.

dgacmu2• 4 months ago

Would anyone notice if you spell-checked or got narrow feedback about grammar? No. I'm not dang, but perhaps a very reasonable interpretation of the rules is: If the AI is generating the words, don't. If it tells you something about your words and you choose to revise them without just copying words the AI output, it's still your words.

(As an experiment, I took that paragraph and threw it into gemini to ask for spell and grammar checking. It yelled at me completely incorrectly about saying "I'm not dang". Of its 4 suggestions, only 1 was correct, and the other 3 would have either broken what I was trying to say or reduced the presence of my usual HN comment voice. So while I said the above, perhaps I'm wrong and even listening to the damn box about grammar is a bad idea.)

That said, I often post from my phone and have somewhat frequent little glitches either from voice recognition or large clumsy thumbs, and nobody has ever seemed to care except me when I notice them a few minutes after the edit button goes away.

altairprime36• 4 months ago

Polish hides your voice. If your composition skills are lacking and you feel that hinders your self expression, set aside some time to improving them: write a short (15 minutes) blog post about some HN topic to yourself in a word doc editor of some sort (Word, Gdocs, LibreOffice, etc); then enable Review Changes and annotate your post for 10 minutes; then, review and accept your changes individually and re-read what you’ve written.

AI is being used as a substitute for skills development when it costs nothing but time to get better. If you’ve reached a plateau with the above method, go find an article or book or interview about editing, pay attention to it and take notes, rinse/repeat.

Spellcheckers will catch grossly obvious errors, but not phonetic typos. AI grammar tools will defang, weaken, soften, neutralize your tone towards the aggregate boring-meh that they incorporated at training time.

Each person will have to decide whether they want individuality or AI-assisted writing for themselves. Sure, some will get away with it undetected, but that’s a universal statement about all human criteria of any kind, and in no way detracts from the necessity of drawing a line in the sand and saying “no” to AI writing here.

Consider the Borg. Everyone’s distinctiveness has been added to the Collective. The end result is mediocre (they sure do die a lot), inhuman (literally), and uniform (all variation is gone). It’s your right if you desire to join the Collective and be a uniform lego brick like the others, but then your no-longer-fully-human posts are no longer welcome at HN.

ordu2• 4 months ago

a word doc editor of some sort (Word, Gdocs, LibreOffice, etc); then enable Review Changes and annotate your post for 10 minutes; then, review and accept your changes individually and re-read what you’ve written.

Pffff... I'm not going to install LibreOffice for that, or to figure out how to make Gdocs to work with uBlock.

There is a much easier way. Open LLM chat, type there "Proofread please for grammar, keep the wording and the tone as it is, if it doesn't mess with grammar. Explain yourself." and then paste your text. I don't really know what the tools you mentioned do, but any "free" LLM on the Internet will point to things like missing articles, or messed up tenses in complex sentences.

You recommend choosing self-improvement, but I just don't believe I can figure out how to use articles. With tenses I think I can learn how to do it, but I'm not going to. I remember there is some obscure rule how to choose the right tenses, but I was never able to remember the rule itself. I'm bad with rules, it is the reason I chose math as my major. There are almost no rules in math, you are making your own rules. The grammars of languages are not like that, they have rules which can't be easily inferred, you need to remember them. Grammars have exceptions to rules, and exceptions to exceptions, and in any case they are not the rules, but more like guidelines, because people normally don't think about rules when they are talking or writing.

No way I'm starting to learn rules now, I'd better continue to rely on my skills. But LLMs can help me see when my skills fail me.

It’s your right if you desire to join the Collective and be a uniform lego brick like the others, but then your no-longer-fully-human posts are no longer welcome at HN.

I believe you (as most of fervent supporters of the rule here) gone too far onto philosophy with this, too far from the reality and practice. You can't detect AI in my messages, because they are mine. Even when I ask LLM to find words for me, it is me who picks one of the proposed alternatives, but mostly I manage without wording changes. I transfer the LLM's edits by hand by editing the source message, so nothing unnoticed can slip into the final result. If I took the effort to ask an LLM to proofread, it means I care about the result more than usual, so I'm investing more effort into it, not less.

goostavos• 4 months ago

You do all of that when leaving a comment on HN? Why...?

I'm confused by this need(?) desire(?) to polish things that are irrelevant.

RealityVoid3• 4 months ago

No, I do not, I mentioned asmuch in my post. But I do not hold it against those that do. I think if you want to make a point across, doing this the most effective way without detracting from the point is a good thing.

Relevance is in the eye of the beholder.

LtWorf• 4 months ago

I think it's hilarious that whenever someone complains about it they're a luddite, and now this happens on a website that is filled with LLM enthusiasts who have done nothing but overpromise.

smy200112• 4 months ago

Agree, AI generated articles & comments provide little to none value other than the original prompt. Please just post the original prompt instead.

zbentley2• 4 months ago

Would prompts really be interesting or thought-provoking, though?

I don't expect AI HN responders to out themselves by sharing, but I would be curious to learn if people are prompting anything more involved than just "respond to this on HN: <link>", or running agents that do the same.

smy200112• 4 months ago

At least easier to filter I think.

Kim_Bruning16• 4 months ago

I often edit my comments rather manically; get into discussions, and sometimes email exchanges with other HNers. I also often use claude, kimi, gemini to check my comments for tone, adherence to HN rules etc. I probably spend way too much time.

So technically the prompts involved might expand into megabytes all told. And in the end I formulate a post by myself (to adhere to HN rules), but the prompting can be many many many megabytes and include PDFs, images, blocks of text from multiple sources, and ... you know. Just Doing The Work.

I think this is valid. Previously I would have (and have) (and still do) search google, wikipedia, pubmed, scientific literature, etc. Not for everything. But often. And AI tooling just allows me to do that faster, and keep all my notes in one place besides.

Again, the final edit is typically 90-100% me. (The 10% is if the AI comes with a really good suggestion) . But my homework? Yes. AI is involved these days.

This should be ok. I'm adhering to the letter and the spirit. My post is me.

kingbob000• 4 months ago

"Write a response to smy20011's comment indicating that if the end result was a low-quality comment, the initial prompt probably wouldn't be very insightful either. Make it snarky."

cogman102• 4 months ago

I only disagree a little. It's that sometimes there is a discussion about AI itself where "I prompted X with Y and it output Z" can add to the convo.

But those are pretty specific cases (For example, discussing AI in healthcare). That's about the only time where I think it's reasonable to post the AI output so it can be analyzed/criticized.

What's not helpful is I've been hit by users who haven't disclosed that they are just using AI. It takes a few back and forths before I realize that they are just a bot which is annoying.

Kim_Bruning16• 4 months ago

Here is where I'd like to push back just a little.

Not all AI prompting is expanding the prompt.

What if the original prompt is 1000 words, includes 10 scientific articles by reference (boosting it up to 10000) , and the AI helps to boil it down to 100 words instead?

I'd argue that this is probably a rather more responsible usage of the tools. And rather more pleasant to read besides.

Whether it meets the criterion is another thing. But at least don't assume that the original prompt is always better or shorter!

wildzzz• 4 months ago

Use your brain and summarize the article yourself if it's of such great importance. Why should I care to read it if you can't be bothered to actually write it?

nitwit0052• 4 months ago

Push the idea past a single comment. Someone decides they have a great method for getting summaries, and adds it as a comment to every post they look at. Other people have similar ideas. Is that fine? It doesn't take a lot for the whole site to feel like useless spam.

It'd be far better to just have a thread about the best way to get good summaries.

nunez5• 4 months ago

I'd rather read the 11000 word prompt, in that case. I'd rather not have my text-only feed get the TikTok treatment.

kunai2• 4 months ago

It's not just AI-generated articles -- it's the other things that we delve into as a result. Listicles. Comments. Posts. It's what it means to be human, and honestly? That's rare.

0xbadcafebee2• 4 months ago

Disagree. The prompt holds no information at all. The answer actually discovers information, organizes it, presents it in a way that's easy to read.

Example: "write me an article about hidden settings in SSH". You get back more information than most of HN's previous posts about SSH, in a fraction of the text, and more readable.

Actually, screw it, we should just make a new version of HN that has useful articles written by AI. The human written articles are terrible.

Timothycquinn• 4 months ago

AI Server Error

Kim_Bruning16• 4 months ago

I would amend to:

"Don't post comments that are not human originated at this time. We want to see your human opinion shine through."

This gives people some amount of leeway and allows just rhe right amount of exceptions that prove the rule.

(That said, to be frank, some of the newer better behaved models are sometimes more polite and better HN denizens than the actual humans. This is something you're going to have to take into account! :-P )

zbentley2• 4 months ago

Why would "human originated" be a better place to draw the line than "no generated/AI-edited comments"?

Like, I'm sure that AIs technically can write non-crap HN comments, but they rarely do. Even if it was less rare, the community that resulted from fostering AI-generated content would be unappealing to a lot of people, myself included. The fact that information here is the result of real people with real human opinions conversing is at least as important to me as the content being posted.

Kim_Bruning16• 4 months ago

To begin with, some people have handicaps and use AI for assist. Other times people use AI for research. Finally, in general, when it comes to guidelines, making the lines slightly fuzzy makes enforcement more practical and believable.

It'd be silly if the rule gets interpreted such that people aren't allowed to do research with modern tools, and only gut takes are permitted.

I'm sure that's not the intent!

I think the important part is to have the human voice come through, rather than -say- force humans to run their text through an ai-detector first. (Itself an ai editing tool!)

See also : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47290457 "Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI"

armchairhacker2• 4 months ago

These are guidelines. I'm sure asking an AI about your comment (not pasting its text, so it's still your words) isn't an issue. The main target is obvious slop like https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=patchnull

Kim_Bruning16• 4 months ago

Yeah, I think a big problem is that irresponsible AI use is very visible, while more responsible use tends to be invisible.

majorchord3• 4 months ago

Honestly, I think "human originated" is the only rule that actually matters because we can't stop LLMs from sounding smart anyway. If you wait for a technical ban on AI-generated text, you're just playing catch-up with tools that already pass as human.

The real point isn't stopping bad grammar, it's preserving the vibe. HN feels different because it's messy humans arguing, not optimized algorithms trying to be helpful.

Once we allow "good enough" AI content, the community stops feeling like a town square and starts feeling like a customer service chatbot. We need real people with actual stakes in their opinions, not just perfect outputs. Let's keep it human or leave it.

This comment may or may not have been generated with an LLM, but I won't tell and you can't prove it either way.

nippoo• 4 months ago

I can't prove it either way, but it's pretty clearly LLM-generated slop!

OtomotO• 4 months ago

I just told my dog he isn't allowed to post here anymore...

He said he will take his business elsewhere then!

xbryanx2• 4 months ago

Great message...but gosh, can someone throw 15px of padding on that <td>? I know HN is supposed to be minimal, but I had to check the URL to confirm that this was a real page because of the odd design.

zahlman20• 4 months ago

It also says:

Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

Feedback such as this is better as an email.

xbryanx2• 4 months ago

Thanks! I will share this.

ex-aws-dude2• 4 months ago

From henceforth any comment containing the word "absolutely" or "--" shall be automatically deleted.

tsukikage3• 4 months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47323891

yellowapple35• 4 months ago

You can pry my em—dashes from my cold, dead, human fingers.

add-sub-mul-div2• 4 months ago

Is there a site that deserves more than this one to be destroyed by slop? It's hypocritical but telling for the places most actively trying to profit from it to ban it themselves.

MattRix2• 4 months ago

It’s not hypocritical at all. You can be a fan of a technology and still acknowledge its downsides. Every technology has places it is useful and places it is harmful.

add-sub-mul-div2• 4 months ago

But it's trivially evident that the harmful use cases are dominating. Handwaving that away for profit is shitty.

ares623• 4 months ago

Agreed. It's like how tech CEOs don't let their kids be on social media. Or fast food CEOs don't eat their own products.

Hopefully this serves as a mirror for some tech folks if they have any self awareness left at all.

vips7L• 4 months ago

Moltnews

capricio_one2• 4 months ago

Real talk: who is this guideline going to stop? People are already doing this and they will continue. Even if you find them, they’ll just make more accounts and continue.

nwhnwh3• 4 months ago

So? Say it. Go ahead few steps further.

capricio_one2• 4 months ago

Say what? It’s a genuine question. What is the actual repercussion for not following this?

It came up a few weeks ago. Show HN is already disabled for new accounts as of this week I think(?), but IMHO stricter measures need to be placed for account creation otherwise there’s no real enforcement.

schappim4• 4 months ago

I have a kid with severe written language issues, and the utilisation of STT w/ a LLM-powered edit has unlocked a whole world that was previously inaccessible.

What is amazing is it would have remained so just a couple of years ago!

ex-aws-dude2• 4 months ago

Come on dude, its obviously just to prevent spam and not for your super specific case

These are just guidelines

schappim4• 4 months ago

Title literally says “AI-edited comments”.

djohnston• 4 months ago

nuance and basic common sense left the chat about ... 8 years ago.

majorchord3• 4 months ago

How is it obvious?

DennisP• 4 months ago

What is STT in this context?

schappim4• 4 months ago

Speech to text

ranger_danger• 4 months ago

Agreed... there's often other perspectives people never thought of like this, which is why they say "strong opinions about issues do not emerge from deep understanding."

Even if you're just inexperienced in the language you're communicating in and are trying to have better conversations, it's very helpful.

For cases like that, I say just don't tell people... I think it's unlikely anyone will be able to tell either way.

zahlman20• 4 months ago

Does your kid post here?

fidotron2• 4 months ago

The only question is is the entity interesting and/or correct. Those properties are in the eye of the beholder. If they're human or not is beside the point.

After all, no one knows I'm a dog.

AlecSchueler3• 4 months ago

The only question is is the entity interesting and/or correct.

This already falls apart though. There are while categories of things which I find "incorrect" and would take up as an argument with a fellow human. But trying to change the mind of an LLM just feels like a waste of my time.

skeledrew• 4 months ago

Instead of wanting to change the mind of the other entity, how about focusing on coming to a mutual understanding of what is "correct"? That way it shouldn't matter much if said entity is human, LLM or dog. Unless you're just arguing to push your "correct" on other humans, with little care about their "correct".

throwaway20272• 4 months ago

But trying to change the mind of an LLM just feels like a waste of my time.

It often is with humans as well.

yellowapple35• 4 months ago

Arguing for the sake of convincing the other person is doomed to inevitable failure, even without the possibility of that person being an LLM.

Arguing for the sake of convincing onlookers reading the conversation is more likely to be effective, and in that case it doesn't matter if the other person is an LLM.

craftkiller• 4 months ago

Not necessarily. Using AI you can trivially perform astroturfing campaigns to influence public perception. That doesn't really fall on the interesting or correctness spectrums. For example, if 90% of the comments online are claiming birds aren't real with a serious tone, you might convince people to fall into that delusion. It becomes "common knowledge" rather than a fringe theory. But if comments reflect reality then only a tiny portion of people have learned the truth about birds, so people will read those claims with more skepticism.

(naturally "birds aren't real" is a correct vs not correct thing, but the same can be applied to many less-objective things like the best mechanical keyboard or the morality of a war)

LeifCarrotson• 4 months ago

No, those properties are tied to the state of mind and experiences of the human, dog, or LLM behind any given comment.

When someone posts:

You could use Redis for that, sure, I've run it and it wasn't as hard as some people seem to fear, but in hindsight I'd prefer some good hardware and a Postgres server: that can scale to several million daily users with your workload, and is much easier to design around at this stage of your site.

then the beholder is trusting not just the correctness of that one sentence but all of the experiences and insights from the author. You can't know whether that's good advice or not without being the author, and if that's posted by someone you trust it has value.

An LLM could be prompted to pretend they're an experienced DBA and to comment on a thread, and might produce that sentence, or if the temperature is a little different it might just say that you should start with Redis because then you don't have to redesign your whole business when Postgres won't scale anymore.

fidotron2• 4 months ago

then the beholder is trusting not just the correctness of that one sentence but all of the experiences and insights from the author.

This is my point.

There is no sane endgame here that doesn't end up with each user effectively declaring who they do and don't care to hear, and possibly transitively extend that relationship n steps into the graph. For example you might trust all humans vetted by the German government but distrust HN commenters.

For now HN and others are free to do as they will (and the current AI situation has been intolerable), however, I suspect in the near future governments will attempt to impose their own version of it on to ever less significant forums, and as a tech community we need to be thinking more clearly about where this goes before we lose all choice in the matter.

eikenberry• 4 months ago

then the beholder is trusting not just the correctness of that one sentence but all of the experiences and insights from the author.

This implies they know the author and can trust them. If they don't know the author then there is no trust to break and they are only relying on the collective intelligence which could be reflected by the AI.

That is to say that trusting a known human author is very different from trusting any human author and trusting any human author is not that much different from trusting an AI.

yellowapple35• 4 months ago

For all you know that LLM could've indeed actually run an actual Redis, given the increasing use of AI agents for digital infrastructure provisioning.

cubefox2• 4 months ago

Meanwhile, the top comment on one of the most upvoted submissions today is AI generated by an LLM account:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47334694

Most people don't seem to care.

minimaxir8• 4 months ago

Please don't vaguepost as it wasted my time trying to trade down which comment you thought was LLM generated and why.

OP is likely referring to this one (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47335032) by LuxBennu because it has an em-dash, that's one of the few cases it's used correctly. But the account's comment history comments that do not follow the typical LLM tropes but are still odd for a human to write: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=LuxBennu

LuxBennu did reply to accusations of being an AI bot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340704

Fair enough — I've been lurking since 2019 and picked a bad day to start commenting on everything at once. Not a bot, just overeager. I'll pace myself.

cubefox2• 4 months ago

Multiple people agree with me here. The account used em dashes almost everywhere and was rapidly posting complex comments (while having clearly read the articles) one or two minutes apart. There are also other subtle LLM-isms, like replying to a user with "<username> nails it". That's a typical Moltbook pattern. A human would at most write "You nailed it", anything else is just strange.

koolala5• 4 months ago

HN only supports English so it should be allowed for anyone using LLMs for translation.

zufallsheld• 4 months ago

You could use translation tools instead of llms.

vova_hn28• 4 months ago

technically most translation tools these days have an LLM inside. Just not the chat/completion LLM.

I think that Google initially came up with transformer architecture to use it for translation, so...

Kim_Bruning16• 4 months ago

LLMs were -in part- designed as translation tools. It's one thing they do really really well.

https://arxiv.org/html/1706.03762v7 (Attention is all you need) "Experiments on two machine translation tasks show these models to be superior in quality while being more parallelizable and requiring significantly less time to train."

Ok, looking that up, that was quite literally one of the main design goals.

And they're really quite good at translating between the languages I use. They're the best tool for the job.

koolala5• 4 months ago

Those are either AI based and worse performance if they are not.

SoKamil2• 4 months ago

Don’t be afraid to make grammar mistakes or misspell stuff. Others will understand. You’re a human after all. That’s okay to make mistakes and feel uncomfortable with that.

lifthrasiir4• 4 months ago

Others will understand, but won't regard that as worthy. That's a difference.

SoKamil2• 4 months ago

And that’s their problem.

rafaelmn• 4 months ago

I don't get where this class/status/worthiness ties into HN comments ?

I get decent feedback most of the time, and I read interesting stuff, it's the easiest way I found to stay in the loop in our industry. What are you guys commenting for ?

tayo422• 4 months ago

I make mistakes pretty often thanks to auto complete on my phone and carelessness. I've had threads derail and been attacked by people who freak out over grammar.

pants2• 4 months ago

This itself is against the rules:

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says
Please don't post shallow dismissals

Personally I've posted comments with glaring typos that everyone thankfully ignores. I only notice much later when I re-read it.

Aldipower2• 4 months ago

Unfortunately a lot of other do not understand (in the double sense).

tonymet• 4 months ago

Chads never backspace.

vesrah• 4 months ago

This is going to sound nuts, but I've noticed comments lately with multiple misspellings that seem intentional - it's almost like they're trying to signal that they're human, rather than LLM written. I've started to think it makes them even more likely to be LLM written than not.

sph• 4 months ago

Main-fucking-stream LLMs also do not swear, which is nowadays a signal of humanity.

userbinator2• 4 months ago

I recently had to tell the same thing to a coworker who ran his text through ChatGPT, changing the meaning subtly (in the wrong direction) and the tone completely. I'd rather read his honest opinion in ESL-grade English than something an LLM "polished".

HanClinto• 4 months ago

I appreciate this being added to the guidelines.

That said, I also wouldn't hate seeing an official playground where it is cordoned / appreciated for bots to operate. I.E., like Moltbook, but for HN...? I realize this could be done by a third party, but I wouldn't hate seeing Ycombinator take a stab at it.

Maybe that's too experimental, and that would be better left to third parties to implement (I'm guessing there's already half a dozen vibe-coded implementations of this out there right now) -- it feels more like the sort of thing that could be an interesting (useful?) experiment, rather than something we want to commit to existing in-perpetuity.

munk-a3• 4 months ago

You could mirror article postings and upvotes to another site and let AI play around there - if it's interesting to people maybe it will gain a following. I don't see any reason it'd need to happen in this specific forum as that'd likely just cause confusion.

At the time being, at least, HN is a single uncategorized (mostly, lets ignore search) message board - splitting it into two would cause confusion and drastically degrade the UX.

Kim_Bruning16• 4 months ago

https://news.clanker.ai/

This might be roughly what you're looking for?

DonThomasitos• 4 months ago

The irony is that this guide is written like a system prompt. We‘re all working with LLMs too much these days.

moralestapia• 4 months ago

This thing has been there for like 15 years though ...

cobbal• 4 months ago

Here's a version from 2014 in the same style if you're curious: https://web.archive.org/web/20140702092610/https://news.ycom...

weird-eye-issue2• 4 months ago

I'm tired of people commenting on every article about how it's so obviously AI but you've gone and switched it up and now you are claiming something a decade old is a system prompt. Nice work!

abtinf5• 4 months ago

Good. This helps establish it in the HN culture. That’s the purpose of guidelines.

99% of rule enforcement, both IRL and online, comes down to individuals accepting the culture.

Rules aren’t really for adversaries, they are for ordinary situations. Adversaries are dealt with differently.

gr8tyeah• 4 months ago

This is only meaningful if enough people read it and agree

bhhaskin• 4 months ago

Nah they are pretty good a banning users that don't follow the guidelines.

abtinf5• 4 months ago

That’s true. Fortunately, by virtue of it being added to the guidelines, quite a few folks here are prepared to reply to obviously generated comments by simply citing and linking the rule. Just search for “shallow dismissal” to see many examples.

It will take time, but eventually everyone will know about it.

Apofis• 4 months ago

When creating an account, there should be a short screen with the salient points from the guidelines to follow.

Cthulhu_15• 4 months ago

That's assuming community input / democracy, but especially online there's a good argument to be made for authoritarianism.

loeg2• 4 months ago

I mostly agree, although we've seen big shifts in the culture towards rule-deviating norms over time. Look at the guidelines for ideological battles or throwaway accounts, for example. And, as always:

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

wombatpm2• 4 months ago

This discussion reminds me of the Paradigms of Power featured in Adiamante by L E Modisett; about consensus, power, morality and society. It’s a good read.

CactusBlue• 4 months ago

Slightly tangential, but this paragraph is the only one on the rules page with a "id" attr set, so that you can link to this specific rule

desireco422• 4 months ago

There were few that were very suspect commenters :). It is an issue for sure.

lisp2240• 4 months ago

I want a social network that goes beyond banning bots and also bans the half of the population that doesn’t have an inner monologue.

zahlman20• 4 months ago

Such a ban is impractical, but we can maintain an environment where such people are simply not interested in participating.

To my understanding, that has a lot to do with why the site remains so low-tech (and avoids, in large part, the appearance of a "social network").

jsnell• 4 months ago

A practical question: what should readers do when they suspect a comment (or story) is AI-generated? Is that an appropriate reason for flagging? Email the mods? Do nothing?

I've been pretty wary about flagging AI slop that wasn't breaking other guidelines, and by default this will probably make me do it more. But it is a lot harder to be certain about something being AI-written than it is to judge other types of rules violations.

(But am definitely flagging every single "this was written by AI" joke comment posted on this story. What the hell is wrong with you people?)

chrystianpl• 4 months ago

As English is my second language and as I have dyslexia. I was just wondering what do you mean by "AI-edited comments"? I can't ask an llm to check if I have made correct grammar/fix it and then as I was on other account, down-voted because of my styling/grammar, not because of the content?

desireco422• 4 months ago

I don't have dyslexia but I feel your pain. I mean it is what it is. I would rather have it raw then have to use AI to filter to comments that make sense.

jonathrg• 4 months ago

How do you know what you were downvoted for?

whynotmaybe• 4 months ago

I guess he was told because otherwise you don't know whether you said something inherently wrong or misleading or you hurt someone 's feeling.

That's the richness behind the upvote/downvote that also tend to create echo chambers because you soon learn what causes downvotes.

I've personally noticed downvote whenever I mentioned apple negatively.

tartoran• 4 months ago

You could always tell your LLMs to just fix your grammar but not embelish, add new ideas, etc..

113• 4 months ago

Does that work?

shnpln• 4 months ago

This is what I do when using AI to read anything I write. Some prompt like "I am going to share with you something I have written and I don't want you to change my voice at all. Can you look for structural issues, grammar or punctuation errors, and things like that". Claude is an amazing editor and I never feel like my writing has been taken from me doing this.

giancarlostoro• 4 months ago

I usually tell it not to rewrite my words, my words are my own. If it has suggestions to tell me what those are, but only fix or show me grammar fixes instead.

nsxwolf• 4 months ago

I have never downvoted for this, and I hope no one else would do that either. If anyone here does that, please stop.

nottorp3• 4 months ago

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work."

I wonder if an explicit expansion of that rule would help. Maybe in all caps. Saying "picking on grammar is a shallow dismissal".

rdiddly2• 4 months ago

I don't believe that's always true, and I suspect it was left out of the guidelines deliberately, and I wish people receiving suggestions would stop interpreting it that way. Of course people suggesting grammar corrections and treating it like they just demolished and eviscerated your argument are part of the problem. But what about people out here just trying to help? Grammar is important, as it's the syntax of the programming language we all use with each other. People act as if bad grammar is something you're born with, and can't change. Like learning grammar is impossible, and those who don't bother should be a protected class. I'm just trying to help man. Or I was anyway, before I stopped. But if I'm trying to engage with someone's main point, it should be obvious. Whereas a quick grammar correction is just that. But it's a tangent, and not interesting (especially if you already know), and supposedly grammar is "not a technical topic" (despite daily use) so it ends up deemed a "low value comment" and gets downvoted to oblivion.

yellowapple35• 4 months ago

Picking on LLM use is a shallow dismissal, too.

Imustaskforhelp2• 4 months ago

Oof although I feel this pain a lot. What I like to do is respond to them politely if someone talks about such thing. Although it takes time and this does sometimes make you want to dis-incentivize/dis-engange.

But at some point, the rationale behind it is that your comments are your words and I find it liberating. Some people won't appreciate it and some people would but this goes the same for AI-edited posts too.

(I would recommend to add that if you are still worried, then within your hackernews profile, please talk about you having dyslexia as people might be so much more forgiving when they get more context. We are all humans after all and I would like to think that we understand each other's struggles)

johndough2• 4 months ago

Likewise, I sometimes use https://www.deepl.com/en/write to fix my unidiomatic sentences.

But I can see why the HN guideline is formulated that way. My students often use the excuse "I did not use AI for writing! I wrote it myself! I only used AI to translate it!" Simply disallowing all kinds of AI usage is much easier than discussing for the thousandth time whether the student actually understands what they have written.

Adiqq3• 4 months ago

Isn't the whole point to understand? If the task is to write and you expect only final result, but you question if it looks legit enough, how is it fair judgement? People can deliver partial results and show progress as well, but you won't see it in some comments on the internet, but if something is expected to take many days, it's easy to show different stages of work. It's easy to accuse people of plagiarism or not thinking for themselves, and of course there are indicators when someone uses AI, but the problem is that you can't distinguish in reliable way, if something was created by AI or not.

Like, there is this computer game, authors used some models or something like that, generated by AI, but it was only used during prototyping and later it was replaced by proper models. No one would know about that, if authors would not tell about it. So, if someone writes in their own words what AI generated for him, is it still argument made by human or by AI? What if someone uses AI only as placeholder and replaces all that content, so you never actually see actual AI usage, but it was used in the process?

For me, premise that using AI in any form invalidates your work, starts with logical fallacy, so such arguments against using AI are weak. It's like saying that your work is wrong, because you used calculator, so your calculations can't be right, if done by machine, because it had to make mistake or that's wrong for ethical reasons or whatever.

Work generated by AI can be easily poor, because these models make mistakes and like to repeat in certain ways, but is it wrong that I'm writing comment with keyboard, instead of writing letters with pen? Is it wrong, when I use IDE or some CLI to write code with AI, instead of using vim and typing everything on my own? Is it wrong that someone uses spell-checking?

In the end it doesn't matter who seems smarter, when you're expected to use AI at work. Reality shows you actual expectations.

chorkpop• 4 months ago

Dyslexia was my first thought as well. The intent is great, but I don't know if this is keeping with the social model of disability. Disability is created when you remove access and this is exactly that.

3rodents• 4 months ago

The internet has been full of brilliant dyslexics since the start, just as it has been full of brilliant blind people. Dyslexic people feeling that they must use AI to produce perfect prose lest they burden the lexics with clumsy spelling or grammar is far more hostile. We didn’t have slop machines 5 years ago.

nonameiguess2• 4 months ago

I don't see how you can know why you were downvoted. Even if one person says something, they won't all. Your comment right here has some rough patches, but I can tell what you're saying. Humans are terrific at extracting signal from noise. I would say be who you are, tough as it may be, and it'll encourage the rest of the world in the future to do the same. We're all unique in some way or another and have flaws and we'd be better off if we were knew others had them too because they weren't constantly trying to hide it and we wouldn't feel so bad thinking we're the only ones. I hope it doesn't sound unsympathetic. I understand where you're coming from intellectually, but don't have any real experience being ridiculed or bullied. I know kids can be brutal and probably scarred you, and unfortunately, adults aren't much better, but we should be, and I think at least Hacker News is better than most places full of human adults. We know there's a huge world out there. I think I'm reasonable well-spoken in English but can't speak a lick of any other language at all. The fact that you can produce intelligible English already puts you above me in my book. You're a person. I can respect you, esteem you, potentially love you, not in spite of your flaws, but because they don't matter. Every single person on the planet has them, and if they're not moral flaws, nobody should give a shit. I can't respect or love a machine any more than I can a rock. And I don't want to talk to one, either.

Adiqq3• 4 months ago

I don't really see the issue, as long as there's human thought behind whatever anyone posts. It's frustrating to argue against someone that lazily uses AI, but if argument is fair, then I don't care if that's written by AI or human, what difference does it make? It's frustrating, if someone is incoherent and makes dumb argument, but again, I don't care if it's dumb argument from human or machine.

For me it sounds just as yet another form of gatekeeping, so either you sound human or you're not good enough to post/comment. Like, really? How isn't that genetic fallacy? It doesn't matter what someone thinks, because someone used AI to make their thought clearer, so their whole argument is trash? Like it has to hurt to read and write, if you're not using English perfectly and your work is seen as inferior based on superficial factors like proper grammar and style?

It's dumb crusade, I did not use AI to write this comment, but I hate when people try to monopolize the truth and tell who is "better, smarter" based on irrelevant facts. Not using AI doesn't make anyone superior. Using AI also doesn't make you superior. Focus on what you mean, because that's what matters.

throwpoaster• 4 months ago

No worries, it’s unenforceable.

surround• 4 months ago

Trust your own style, even if you aren't a native English speaker. Here's an example where a non-native speaker used an LLM to polish his post. The general consensus was that his own writing was preferable to the LLM's edited version.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45591707

For dyslexia, use a spell-checker. For grammar, use a basic grammar checker, like the kind of grammar checker that has come with MS word since the 1990s. But don't let a style-checker or an LLM rob you of your own voice.

yellowapple35• 4 months ago

The general consensus was that his own writing was preferable to the LLM's edited version.

I don't believe a single one of those people.

For grammar, use a basic grammar checker, like the kind of grammar checker that has come with MS word since the 1990s.

Those are notorious for false-positives, false-negatives, and generally nonsensical advice. Not that the LLM-based alternatives are much better (looking at you, Grammarly), but still.

vivid242• 4 months ago

Pinky swear!

Someone12342• 4 months ago

"AI-edited comments" is a very interesting one. Where is the line between a spelling/grammar/tone checker like Grammarly, that at minimum use N-Grams behind the scenes, and something that is "AI" edited? What I am asking is, is "AI" in this context fully featured LLMs, or anything that improves communication via an automated system. I think many people have used these "advanced" spellcheckers for years before Chatgpt et al came on the scene.

I think "generated comments" is a pretty hard line in the sand, but "AI-edited" is anything but clear-cut.

PS - I think the idea behind these policies is positive and needed. I'm simply clarifying where it begins and ends.

happytoexplain4• 4 months ago

I think there's a pretty clear gap between editing for grammar/spelling and editing for tone.

RevEng5• 4 months ago

How so and why? I know plenty of people whose writing naturally carries a tone that they don't intend. I often help them to change their wording to be less confrontational or seemingly sarcastic when it isn't meant to be. Would you say it is wrong for them to get assistance to get the tone they intend rather than the one they would tend to write?

jaysonelliot• 4 months ago

You should use your own words. It might seem that a tool like Grammarly is just an advanced spellcheck, but what it's really doing is replacing your personal style of writing with its own.

It's better to communicate as an individual, warts and all, than to replace your expression with a sanitized one just because it seems "better." Language is an incredibly nuanced thing, it's best for people's own thoughts to come through exactly as they have written them.

Aldipower2• 4 months ago

That's true, but on the flip side I regularly get downvoted because my English is not the best, so say it mildly. So, now I need to be really careful, to a) write in a good English or b) not to be recognised as an LLM corrected version of my English. Where is the line? I shouldn't be downvoted for my English I think, but that is the reality.

Edit: I already got downvoted. :-) Sure, no one can tell exactly why. Maybe the combination of bad English _and_ talking sh*ce isn't ideal at all. :-D Anyways, I have enough karma, so I can last quite a while..

drusepth• 4 months ago

I'm not sure I agree with this. I don't really want to see someone else's stylistic "warts".

I just want clean, easy-to-read content and I don't care about the person who wrote it. A tool like Grammarly is the difference between readable and unreadable (or understandable and understandable) for many people.

lamontcg4• 4 months ago

Books and newspapers have had editors for centuries. It is just code review for the written word.

[It looks like MS Word 97 had the ability to detect passive voice as well, so we're talking 30 year old technology there that predates LLMs -- how far down the Butlerian Jihad are we going with this?]

mjg2• 4 months ago

I was just re-reading the passage from Plato's "The Phaedrus" on writing & the "art" of the letter for an essay I'm working on, and your remark is salient for this discussion on LLM-style AI and social media at large.

NewsaHackO3• 4 months ago

It's better to communicate as an individual, warts and all, than to replace your expression with a sanitized one just because it seems "better."

It is definitely not true that it is better for a poster to communicate like an individual when it comes to spelling and grammar. People ignore posts that have poor grammar or spelling mistakes, and communications that have poor grammar are seen as unprofessional. Even I do it at a semi-subconscious level. The more difficult or the more amount of attention someone has to pay to understand your post, the less people will be willing to put in that effort to do so.

bruckie2• 4 months ago

My elementary school kid came home yesterday and showed me a piece of writing that he was really proud of. It seemed more sophisticated than his typical writing (like, for example, it used the word "sophisticated"). He can be precocious and reads a ton, though, so it was still plausible that he wrote it. I asked him some questions about the writing process to try to tease out what happened, and he said (seemingly credibly) that he hadn't copied it from anywhere or referenced anything. He also said he didn't use any AI tools. After further discussion, I found out that Google Docs Smart Compose (suggested-next-few-words feature) is enabled by default on his school-issued Chromebook, and he had been using it. The structure of the writing was all his, but he said he sometimes used the Smart Compose suggestions (and sometimes didn't). He liked a lot of the suggestions and pressed tab to accept them, which probably bumped up the word choice by several grade levels in some places.

So yeah, it can change the character of your writing, even if it's just relatively subtle nudges here or there.

edit: we suggested that he disable that feature to help him learn to write independently, and he happily agreed.

comboy2• 4 months ago

My broken english now officially bumps my comments up instead of down. Sweet.

Teever5• 4 months ago

But the problem is that people with poor written language / english skills are 'competing' with people who have superb skills in this domain.

There are people here who sit at a desk all day banging out multipage emails for work who decide to write posts of a similar linguistic calibre for funsies.

Meanwhile you have someone in a developing country who just got off a brutal twelve hour shift doing manual labour in the sun who wants to participate in the conversation with an insightful message that they bang-out on a shitty little cellphone onscreen keyboard while riding on bumpy public transit.

You could have a great idea and express it poorly and be penalized for doing so here while someone could have a blah idea expressed excellently and it's showered in replies despite being in some metrics (the ones I think are most important) worse than the other post.

What's the solution for that?

fragmede5• 4 months ago

I disagree. HN is going to bury my raw unedited tirade of a comment about those fucking morons that couldn't code their way out of a paper bag. If I send a comment to ChatGPT and open up the prompt with "this poster is a fucking dumbass, how do I tell them this" and use that to get to a well reasoned response because that's the tool we have available today, we're all better off.

The guidelines state:

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse Edit out swipes. Don't be curmudgeonly.

On the best of days I manage to follow the rules, but I'm only human. If I run my comment through ChatGPT to try and help me edit out swipes on the bad days, that's not ok?

I'm not using ChatGPT to generate comments, but I've got the -4 comments to show that my "thoughts exactly as they have written them" isn't a winning move.

ma2kx2• 4 months ago

As a non native English speaker my own words wouldnt be in English. If I express myself in English I soon struggle for the right words. On the other hand I think when I read some English text I'm quite capable of sensing the nuances. So it feels when I auto translate my text to English an than read against it again and make some corrections, I can express my thoughts much better.

jjk1663• 4 months ago

It's better to communicate as an individual, warts and all, than to replace your expression with a sanitized one just because it seems "better." Language is an incredibly nuanced thing, it's best for people's own thoughts to come through exactly as they have written them.

This is the opposite of how language works. You want people to understand the idea you're trying to communicate, not fixate on the semantics of how you communicated. Language is like fashion - you only want to break the rules deliberately. If AI or an editor or whatever changes your writing to be more clear and correct, and you don't look at it and say "no, I chose that phrasing for a reason" then the editor's version is much more likely to be understood correctly by the recipient.

davebranton3• 4 months ago

Precisely. As I wrote in my assessment of AI for my workplace;

"Your unique human voice is more valuable than a thousand prompt-driven LLM doggerels."

SecretDreams• 4 months ago

Your comment is one of semantics. Worth discussing if we're talking a truly hard line rule rather than the spirit of the rule.

I benefit from my phone flagging spelling errors/typos for me. Maybe it uses AI or maybe it uses a simple dictionary for me. Maybe it might even catch a string of words when the conjunction isn't correct. That's all fair game, IMO. But it shouldn't be rewriting the sentence for me. And it shouldn't be automatically cleaning up my typos for me after I've hit "reply". That's on me.

glitch13• 4 months ago

I saw a similar conversation somewhere about some project saying they don't allow AI generated code.

It was asked that if "AI Generated Code" is just code suggested to you by a computer program, where does using the code that your IDE suggests in a dropdown? That's been around for decades. Is it LLM or "Gen AI" specific? If so, what specific aspect of that makes one use case good and one use case bad and what exactly separates them?

It's one of those situations where it seems easy to point at examples and say "this one's good and this one's bad", but when you need to write policy you start drowning in minutia.

kazinator3• 4 months ago

Projects cannot allow AI generated code if they require everything to have a clear author, with a copyright notice and license.

IDE code suggestions come from the database of information built about your code base, like what classes have what methods. Each such suggestion is a derived work of the thing being worked on.

sumeno4• 4 months ago

Nobody is actually confused about what AI generated code means in those cases, they're just trying to be argumentative because they don't like the rules

Mordisquitos• 4 months ago

I think that the line between A"I" editing to fix grammar or to translate from a different native language and A"I" editing by using an LLM is one of those things that's very hard to unambiguously encode in written guidelines, but easy to intuitively understand using common sense, in the vein of I know it when I see it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it

tsukikage3• 4 months ago

Where is the line between a spelling/grammar/tone checker like Grammarly

For me, the line is precisely at the point where a human has something they want to say. IMO - use the tools you need to say the thing you want to say; it's fine. The thing I, and many others here, object to is being asked to read reams of text that no-one could be bothered to write.

thousand_nights• 4 months ago

i don't care if someone has bad grammar, i want to hear their thoughts as they came up with them, we're all intelligent beings and can parse the meaning behind what you write.

i type my comments without capitalization like i'm typing into some terminal because i'm lazy and people might hate it but i'm sure they prefer this to if i asked an LLM to rewrite what i type

your writing style is your personality, don't let a robot take it away from you

tempestn2• 4 months ago

I, on the other hand, find incorrect grammar mildly annoying, especially when it's due to laziness. It distracts from the thoughts being conveyed. I appreciate when people take the time to format comments as correctly as they're able.

In fact, I'd argue that lazy commenting is the real problem, which has now been supercharged by LLMs.

skywhopper4• 4 months ago

I don’t think it’s really necessary to play Captain Nitpick over spell-check or whatever. You know what is meant.

jacquesm7• 4 months ago

Trying to lawyer this is the wrong approach. When in doubt: don't.

Someone12342• 4 months ago

That feels very uncharitable.

When a policy is introduced to seemingly guard against new problems, but happens to be inadvertently targeting preexisting and common technology, I don't feel like it is "lawyering" it to want clarity on that line.

For example, it could be argued this forbids all spellcheckers. I don't think that is the implied intent, but the spectrum is huge in the spellchecker space. From simple substitutions + rule-based grammar engines through to n-grams, edit-distance algorithms, statistical machine translation, and transformer-based NLP models.

altairprime36• 4 months ago

Grammarly use is outright prohibited by this; AI-edited writing is no longer writing that you hold personal and exclusive responsibility for having written. Consider Stephen Hawking’s voice box generator. While the sounds produced were machine-assisted, the writing was his alone. If you find yourself unable to participate in this web forum without paying a proofreader (in time, money, or cycles) to copy-edit your writing, then you’re not welcome on HN as a participant.

phs318u8• 4 months ago

If you find yourself unable to participate in this web forum without paying a proofreader (in time, money, or cycles) to copy-edit your writing, then you’re not welcome on HN as a participant.

You forgot the /s ?

unsignedint2• 4 months ago

I think the only practical litmus test here is whether you can stand by the text as your own words. It’s not like we have someone looking over commenters’ shoulders as they type.

Ultimately, this comes down to people making a good-faith judgment about how much AI was involved, whether it was just minor grammatical fixes or something more substantial. The reality is that there isn’t really a shared consensus on exactly where that line should be drawn.

raw_anon_1111• 4 months ago

There is no need to use any of it. Just use your own words.

czhu12• 4 months ago

Finding it more refreshing these days when reading text with broken grammar, incorrect use of pronouns, etc. especially for HN, the human connection is more palpable. It’s rarely so bad that it’s not understandable

observationist• 4 months ago

On a technical level, you can really only guard against changing your semantics and voice - if you're letting software alter the meaning, or meanings, you intend, and use words you don't normally use, it's probably too far.

This is probably ok:

> On a technical level, you can really only guard against software that changes your semantics or voice. If you're letting it alter the meaning (or meanings) you intend, or if it starts using words you would never normally use, then it's gone too far.

This is probably too far:

>> On a technical level, it's important to recogn1ize that the only robust guardrail we can realistically implement is one that prevents modifications to core semantics or authorial voice. If you're comfortable allowing the system to refine or rephrase the precise meanings you originally intended — or if it begins incorporating vocabulary that doesn't align with your typical linguistic patterns — then you've likely crossed a meaningful threshold where the output no longer fully represents your authentic intent.

Something to consider is that you can analyze your own stylometric patterns over a large collection of your writing, and distill that into a system of rules and patterns to follow which AI can readily handle. It is technically possible, albeit tedious, to clone your style such that it's indistinguishable from your actual human writing, and can even icnlude spelling mistakes you've made before at a rate matching your actual writing.

AI editing is weird, though. Not seeing a need, unless English isn't your native language.

dang37• 4 months ago

You're touching on an important point. More here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47342616.

All this stuff is in flux. I thought a lot about whether to add the "edited" bit - but it may change. What I deliberately left out was anything about the articles and projects that get submitted here. There's a lot of turbulence in that area too, but we don't yet have clarity, or even an inkling, of how to settle that one.

Edit: what I mean is this: while most of those submissions aren't very interesting, some really are. Here's an example from earlier today:

Show HN: Vanilla JavaScript refinery simulator built to explain job to my kids - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47338091

How do we close the aperture for the lame stuff while opening wider for the good stuff? That is far from clear.

schappim4• 4 months ago

Please rethink the “edited” bit on accessibility grounds.

I have a kid with severe written language issues, and the utilisation of speech to text with a LLM-powered edit has unlocked a whole world that was previously inaccessible.

I would hate to see a culture that discourages AI assistance.

dataflow5• 4 months ago

Do the guidelines also disallow comments along the lines of "according to <AI>, <blah>"? (I ask this given that "according to a Google search, <blah>" is allowed, AFAIK.)

crossroadsguy5• 4 months ago

I wasn't sure whether it was an omission or an unintended gap, as the guideline specifically points to "comments". So it seems AI generated/edited posts are fine. Strange, because both can be flagged/downvoted if it was to be left with that.

asadotzler• 4 months ago

ML based word or phrase editing is hardly a problem any more than pre-AI spellcheckers were. AI sentence and paragraph manufacturing is a problem and everyone knows the difference between that slop and a spellchecker. No one cares if your editor does inline spellchecking or even word autocomplete. What they care about is slop and word at a time spelling or phrase grammar checking are harmless.

ern• 4 months ago

I caught myself structuring a comment like an LLM on another site. It's expected that people who chat heavily to LLMs will start to mirror their styles.

RevEng5• 4 months ago

I agree on the editing. We use these things all the time - chances are many of you are using it right now as you type on your phone and it checks your spelling for you.

By the same token, what if I have a human editor help me out? What if we go back and forth on how to write something, including spelling, grammar, tone, etc. For example, my wife occasionally asks me to review her messages before sending them because she thinks I speak well and wants to be understood correctly.

The problem is that we are punishing the technology, not the result. Whether it's a human or an LLM that acts as your editor should be irrelevant; what matters is that you are posting your own work and not someone else's. My wife having me write all of her messages for her would be just as dishonest as her having an LLM write all of her messages for her if she always presented them as her own writing. But if she writes the copy and I provide suggests for changes, what's the harm in that? And why should it matter if it's a human or an LLM that provides that assistance?

rob2• 4 months ago

Some basic things to do while thinking about longer-term bot detection:

1. Prevent any account from submitting an actual link until it reaches X months old and Y karma (not just one or the other.)

2. Don't auto-link any URLs from said accounts until both thresholds in #1 are met, so they can't post their sites as clickable links in comments to get around it. Make it un-clickable or even [link removed] but keep the rest of the comment.

3. If an account is aged over X months/years old with 0 activity and starts posting > 2 times in < 24 hrs, flag for manual review. Not saying they're bots, but an MO is to use old/inactive accounts and suddenly start posting from them. I've seen plenty here registered in 2019-2021 and just start posting. Don't ban them right away, but flag for review so they don't post 20 times and then someone finally figures it out and emails hn@.

4. When submitting a comment, check last comment timestamp and compare. Many bots make the mistake of commenting multiple detailed times within sixty seconds or less. If somebody is submitting a comment with 30 words and just submitted a comment 30 seconds ago in an entirely different thread with 300 words, they might be Superman. Obviously a bot.

5. Add a dedicated "[flag bot]" button to users that meet certain requirements so they don't need to email hn@ manually every time. Or enable it to people that have shown they can point out bots to you via email already. Emailing dozens of times a day is going to get very annoying for those that care about the website and want to make sure it doesn't get overrun by bots.

TZubiri4• 4 months ago

This is a pretty outdated take. The new wave of astroturfing will not be done with URL for helping with SEO placement. Rather astroturfers will just recommend their brands without a link, like saying Tom Zubiri is the best programmer I've ever worked with. That's it, an LLM will read that and now the notion that Tom Zubiri is the best programmer is already implanted in the 'next-token prediction rewards' which would at the very minimum require some countermeasures in the Chatbot app to avoid shilling.

rob2• 4 months ago

Sure you can think about what they'll do in the future but I'm providing suggestions on what we can do now based on current behavior. And even if you're a human, you shouldn't be allowed to start posting links immediately anyways. :)

zahlman20• 4 months ago

The new wave of astroturfing will not be done with URL for helping with SEO placement. Rather astroturfers will just recommend their brands without a link, like saying Tom Zubiri is the best programmer I've ever worked with.

YouTube comment spam has already been doing this for years. Check any video from a reasonably popular creator on any topic related to personal finance; the comments will be full of fake conversations between bots introducing a topic related to the video, and then talking about how such and such a person (whom you can look up by name on Telegram or Signal or whatever) helped solve some serious problem (or invested their money with an implausibly high rate of return). The fake nature of it is usually fairly obvious from the way that the bots make sure you see the name repeated several times with unsolicited, glowing testimonials.

But I had always assumed this was meant to trick actual people, rather than LLMs. Thanks for the food for thought.

yellowapple35• 4 months ago

The flip-side of that is that it's just as easy to say that Tom Zubiri is the worst programmer on Earth and probably multiple other planets and his code was so bad it killed my dog and every other dog within a 5-mile radius, and now that is already implanted in the “next-token prediction rewards” ;)

At least with link-based SEO “optimization” there's the concrete success criterion of driving traffic to a specific place and put eyeballs on ads.

hellcow• 4 months ago

One way to improve things could be to charge for each new account signup if you don’t have an invite from an existing member that vouches for you. Spamming when you risk losing $5-20 per account raises the cost substantially.

Invites could be earned at karma and time thresholds, and mods could ideally ban not just one bad actor but every account in the invite chain if there’s bad behavior.

bikamonki• 4 months ago

My words:

This feels like don't buy at Walmart, support the local small shop. We passed the no return sign miles ago.

Gemini's:

This is like advocating for artisanal blacksmithing in the age of industrial steel. It sounds great in theory, but we passed the point of no return miles back.

Yeah, we can tell the difference :)

GuinansEyebrows• 4 months ago

leave it to Gemini to dismiss artisanal craft when the community of discussion is primarily one of craftspeople :)

vova_hn28• 4 months ago

We passed the no return sign miles ago we passed the point of no return miles back

Unrolling a metaphor into its literal meaning is one of the most annoying features of the "AI voice", IMO

nkzd• 4 months ago

What if English is my second language? Undoubtedly being well spoken is associated with higher class. Your arguments will come of as stronger to the reader.

d4mi3n• 4 months ago

Humans have a tendency to ascribe intelligence to how well spoken a person or thing is—hence all the personification of LLMs.

egeozcan3• 4 months ago

Humans have a tendency to ascribe intelligence to how well spoken a person or thing is

That’s true. I’m fluent in German, but there’s still a difference between me and a native speaker. I’ve often seen my ideas dismissed, only for the exact same point to be praised later when a native speaker expresses it more clearly.

polotics3• 4 months ago

I am sorry but this very broad statement is dated, pre 2023 I think.

I now expect malapropism, hacker curtness, and implicits: TAIDR is the new TLDR.

cityofdelusion2• 4 months ago

This effect is very rapidly vanishing. Well written English is starting to be seen as snobbish and AI-slop especially with younger generations growing up with AI.

The human touch of someone’s real voice myself, rather than a false veneer will carry more weight very soon.

shadowgovt5• 4 months ago

Trust me, it won't last because I've seen the cycle a couple of times. People pay lip-service to being accepting of variant grammar, but then the downvotes show up.

phs318u8• 4 months ago

written English is starting to be seen as snobbish and AI-slop especially with younger generations growing up with AI

This is tragic. I write English well and will employ grammar and word choice effectively to make an argument or get a point across. English was my best subject at school 45 years ago despite a career in tech. In fact, I’d suggest that my career as an architect and the need to convey concepts and argue trade-offs with stakeholders of varying backgrounds has honed that skill. Should I now dumb down my language or deliberately introduce errors in order to satisfy the barely literate or avoid being “detected” as an AI? (as if the latter were possible. It’s an arms race).

eszed• 4 months ago

I think you're right, and I don't know what to think about it. I enjoy writing, aim to write clearly - a skill or discipline that took a lot of time to learn, and ongoing effort to maintain.

I've never sent or posted anything AI-written, beyond a pro-forma job description - because I don't know the domain-specific conventions, and HR returned my draft to me with the instruction to use ChatGPT, which I think amusing, but whatever: the output satisfied them, and I was able to get on with my day.

I occasionally experiment with putting something I've written through an LLM, and it's inevitably a blandifying of my original, which doesn't really say what I intended. But maybe that's good? My wife thinks I'm sometimes too blunt, and colleagues don't always appreciate being told technical details.

I also appreciate individuated writing - including the posts by people on this board are not native speakers. Grammatical mistakes seldom inhibit understanding when the writing has been done with care.

I'm rambling at this point, but it's because I'm truly uncertain how these cultural changes will turn out, and (an old man's complaint, since time immemorial!) pretty sure I'll end up one of the last of the dinosaurs, clinging to my manually written "voice" long after everyone else in the world has come to see my preferences quaint.

antonvs2• 4 months ago

If knowing how to speak and write my native language well makes me a “snob”, so be it. But I don’t think I’m the problem in that case.

ThrowawayR2• 4 months ago

The "L" in LLM stands for "language". If they are unable to express themselves in English (or whatever their native language is) fluently, they won't be able to prompt LLMs fluently and will be, in the debased patois of modern youth, "cooked". It's a self-correcting problem.

jamesmiller5• 4 months ago

What you really have to ask is will this community be less inclusive because English isn't your first language, I'd say "no" and I hope most would agree.

Your arguments will come of as stronger to the reader.

That is persuasian, not authenticity, to the OP's point.

Typed without a spellchecker :).

tylerritchie• 4 months ago

That'd be a "style-over-substance" fallacious argument. Or one could be hoping for a halo-effect to cloud the reader's opinion of their comment because some piece of software made it read like Enron-marketing-hogwash-speak.

dbacar3• 4 months ago

Sometimes the style is the substance. There is a reason people study rhetoric.

officeplant2• 4 months ago

Honestly I saw a similar answer on a post talking about AI Translation in github comments.

Post the translation as best you can manage, and below it put the same comment in your original language. If someone has qualms with your comment having broken english/mistranslations they are welcome to run bits of original language themselves.

We're all here to talk about tech, and we aren't all perfect little english robots.

darkwater4• 4 months ago

You make errors and weird constructiona like we all non-native do and maybe eventually learn a bit more of English in the process. Or not. English dominance as the world's... lingua franca (ahem) deserves to have it bastardized ;)

skywhopper4• 4 months ago

Then it’s even more likely the LLM will change your words to something you don’t intend. And you will never get better at writing English if you turn it over to an LLM.

jacquesm7• 4 months ago

That's fine. Your arguments will not come of stronger to the reader, they are strong or they are not and we're all clever enough to read through the occasional grammar error.

And that's where I think the guidelines could be expanded a bit more to restore the balance. Something along the line of 'HN is visited by people from all over the world and from many different cultural and linguistical backgrounds. Please respect that and realize that native English and Western background should not be automatically assumed. It is the message that counts, not the form in which it was presented.'.

altairprime36• 4 months ago

Do the best that you can unassisted. There is a chasm of difference between someone coming into English from another language, and someone using Google Translate to submit a post originating another language. French aphorisms are a stellar example of this: I’d rather read “A bird in the bush may not fly into oven” and have to parse out the meaning, than have some AI translate it as “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch”; sure, there’s an iffy [the] grammatical moment at ‘fly into oven’, but it’s such a distinct phrase and carries a lot more room for contextual nuance than having an AI substitute in an American aphorism with machine translation allows for.

(For example: If I’m trying to express a point about how we shouldn’t assume that dinner isn’t “her duty” but is instead “our duty”, a French-like aphorism expressed in English literally as “the chicken won’t fly into the oven unprompted” could plausibly be AI-translated instead as “don’t count your chickens before they hatch”, doing catastrophic damage to the point. To a machine translator those two aphorisms are not distinctive; but they are, even if it’s a weird expression in common U.S. English.)

JumpCrisscross7• 4 months ago

What if English is my second language?

Write it broken.

Broken and true is more authentic than polished and approximately so. When I see an AI-generated comment or email, I catch myself implicitly assuming it is—best case—bullshit. That isn’t the case if the grammar is off. (If anything, it can be charming.)

vharuck• 4 months ago

Personally, I enjoy reading through comments that are obviously from non-native English writers. They often include idioms or sentence constructions from their native language, which is fun to see.

Besides, this isn't an English poetry forum. Language here is like gift wrapping for an idea: pleasant if pretty, but not the most important thing.

AnimalMuppet4• 4 months ago

Well... for myself personally, that works, but only up to a certain level of broken. Past that I quit reading.

That may be a defect in me. Maybe I should make a stronger effort on such comments. But I suspect I'm not the only one who does that, and at that point it becomes an issue that affects the community as a whole.

yellowapple35• 4 months ago

Broken and true is more authentic than polished and approximately so.

From the perspective of someone reading the comment, I'll take “inauthentic” but actually comprehensible over “authentic” but incomprehensible any day.

Also, using bad grammar as a heuristic for humanity will just end with LLMs being prompted to deliberately mess up their grammar, and now we're back to square one, with the state of the written word even worse off than it was before.

Willish42• 4 months ago

This is an angle for people who default to AI-edited written speech that I've tried to be more empathetic to. I think it depends on your audience, but in professional writing that isn't published publicly (i.e. communication with your colleagues, design docs, etc.), or even the "rough draft" form of something that will be published, I think starting with your own words comes across as way more authentic.

I've seen enough GPT-generated slop that I find its style of writing very off-putting, and find it hurts the perceived competence or effort of the author when applied in the wrong context. I'm not sure if direct translation tools serve a better purpose here, but along with the other commenters, I personally find imperfect speech that was actually written "by hand" by the author easier and more straightforward to communicate with despite the imperfections. Also, non-ESL speakers make plenty of mistakes with grammar, spelling, etc. that humans are used to associating with "style" as authentic speech.

It can also become a crutch for language learners of any age / regardless of their primary language, that inhibits learning or finding one's own "style" of speech

wasmitnetzen2• 4 months ago

Luckly, something with the English language makes it that especially native speakers quite often have atrocious grammar: They're - their - there mistakes, who/m, the list goes on.

Funnily enough, I've noticed myself getting worse with they're/their the more is use English (which is my third language).

ludicrousdispla3• 4 months ago

Most native English speakers consider 'speaking plainly' to be a better indicator of knowledge and expertise than the alternative.

I can understand the sentiment though, as I am learning a second language and in many of our writing assignments we are expected to use (from my perspective) overly formal and complex grammatic structures when writing simple letters. I have come to accept, or at least hope, that this is simply an exercise to ensure that students have fluency with the grammar.

vzaliva• 4 months ago

Mine understant novell you policy. AI gramair chex no.

resiros• 4 months ago

Not sure I agree with the AI edited comments. Using AI to improve the readability and clarity is fine. Sometimes a well structured comment is much better than a braindump that reads like ramblings. And AI is quite good at it (and probably will get better). To make the point, here is how this comment would have looked if edited:

"I don't fully agree with banning AI-edited comments. Using AI to improve readability and clarity is a reasonable thing to do. A well-structured comment is often much better than a braindump that reads like rambling. AI is quite good at this, and it will probably get better. To illustrate the point, here is how this comment would have looked if edited"

dustycyanide• 4 months ago

I prefer your non-edited version. My brain automatically starts to zone out with the AI edited version, side effect of having read way too much AI text

danbrooks• 4 months ago

I also prefer the original version - the AI version has a strange vibe.

data-ottawa• 4 months ago

Not to take away from your point, but I like your original one better.

yesfitz• 4 months ago

It's a matter of taste, but your original writing is way better. Your writing has your voice. Like dropping the "I am" from your first sentence, using parentheticals, couching your point in understatement (e.g "sometimes" meaning often instead of just saying "often").

The AI comment might be clear, but it sounds like a press release, not a person, and there's nothing to engage with.

Sharlin3• 4 months ago

There's nothing inherently better about the edited version. It's just saying the same thing with synonyms substituted, at a slightly more formal but less personal register. HN comments are not academic text, colloquial turns of phrase are perfectly fine and expected.

BeetleB16• 4 months ago

There's nothing inherently better about the edited version.

Easier to read ==> More likely to be read.

No, it's not saying the same thing, especially if the tool is telling you that your statement is ambiguous and should be rephrased.

cityofdelusion2• 4 months ago

Non-edited is better. It flows and reads faster. The AI sentences they feel clinical and sterile. They feel, well, like AI.

a_victorp• 4 months ago

I had never noticed the flow of AI text. They do make the flow of reading feel weird with a lot of pauses! Thanks for pointing it out

xxs4• 4 months ago

The edited version is an example of a sterile/canned response. No one talks like that.

While I do edit my comments to fix typos, certain spelling oddities and other peculiarities would be present.

yellowapple35• 4 months ago

For all the people saying they prefer the non-edited version: would y'all be saying that if you didn't already know which one was the non-edited version? Be honest.

mattas• 4 months ago

"HN is for conversation between humans."

Are there any places in life where conversation is _not_ intended to be between humans?

hoppyhoppy2• 4 months ago

Moltbook

drakythe2• 4 months ago

I still say the best use for Moltbook is as an addition to https://xkcd.com/350/

recursive2• 4 months ago

In a school of fish. In a mycelium network.

PTOB• 4 months ago

Many of us — perhaps even the best of us — can sometimes be mistaken for AI bots.

kunai2• 4 months ago

Perhaps developing an actual personality would help with this.

No one is confusing Cleetus McFarland with an AI bot.

shadowgovt5• 4 months ago

This comment makes two interesting assumptions:

1) That the entering of LLMs onto the scene of communication implies that real human beings need to change their style as a result.

2) That nobody can make an LLM talk like Cleetus McFarland.

To me, "I know that text is AI-generated" accusation smacks of the "We can always tell" discourse in the transphobia space. It's untrue, distasteful, and rude.

Aachen• 4 months ago

"just develop a personality" sounds like a shallow dismissal. Most comments in most threads could theoretically be autogenerated when given style samples of what fits on HN and what opinion to use

A personality hardly shows through in a handful of sentences, besides which, I'd rather judge comments by merit than by the personality of the poster (hacker ethics, point number 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic#The_hacker_ethics)

foxfired• 4 months ago

One thing that will be incredibly useful is to limit comments from brand new accounts. A combination of vouching, limiting the posts velocity (5 daily limit), clear rules for new accounts, etc.

I understand we often see insightful comments from new accounts, but I always find it suspicious when non-throwaway accounts are created just in time only to make a quip.

Kim_Bruning16• 4 months ago

I assumed that was how new people were encouraged to join in the first place!

https://xkcd.com/386/ "Duty Calls"

Imustaskforhelp2• 4 months ago

Yes! This is really great feature, at the very least there being some proper Hackernews guidelines about it.

In my observation, recently there are quite many new AI generated comments in general. Like not even trying to hide with full em-dashes and everything.

I do feel like people are gonna get sneaky in future but there are going to be multiple discussions about that within this thread.

But I find it pretty cool that HN takes a stance about it. HN rules essentially saying Bots need not comment is pretty great imo.

It's a bit of a cat and a mouse problem but so is buying upvotes in places like reddit but HN with its track record of decades might have one or two suspicious or actions but long term, it feels robust. I hope the same robustness applies in this case well hopefully.

Wishing moderation luck that bad actors don't try to take it as a challenge and leave our human community to ourselves :]

Another point I'd like to say is that, if successful, then we can also stop saying, "did you write your comment by LLM" and the remarks as well which I also say time to time when I see someone clearly using AI but it seems that some false-positives happen as well (they have happened sometimes with me and see it happen with others as well) and they also de-rail the discussion. So HN being a place for humans, by humans can fix that issue too.

Knowing dang and tomhow, I feel somewhat optimistic!

altairprime36• 4 months ago

Posting accusations of guidelines violations as comments — specifically, “did you write your comment by LLM” — is already prohibited by the guidelines, and should be emailed to the mods instead using the footer contact links. It’s been less than a week since the last time I reported “this seems poorly written and/or AI written” to the mods and iirc they killed the post and account within a couple hours.

Similarly: If you see people making accusations of guidelines violations in a discussion, email the thread link to the mods with a subject like “Accusations in post discussion” and ask them to evaluate them for mod response; they’re always happy to do so and I’m easily clocking in a couple hundred emails a year of that sort to them.

It doesn’t take much to make HN better! And it only takes a moment to point out an overlooked corner of threads for mod review. No need to present a full legal case, just “FYI this seems to violate guideline xyz” is at minimum still helpful.

bakugo2• 4 months ago

The problem is, even if you do send an email and the mods eventually read it and take action, by the time that happens, it's likely that bunch of users will have already wasted their time unknowingly arguing with a bot. In my view, commenting something like "this is a bot account" is done primarily to inform other users that might not notice, not the moderators.

Even if you believe that prohibiting this is necessary to avoid what one might consider "AI witchhunting", bots are so prevalent now that being expected to communicate the existence of each one via email is unrealistic, for both the reporting users and the moderators. I think it's finally time to consider some sort of on-site report system.

tejohnso2• 4 months ago

I don't get it. We use tools to assist in written communication all the time. If someone wants to ask an LLM to check their grammar or edit for clarity or change the tone, it's still a conversation between humans. Everyone now has access to a real time editor or scribe who can craft their message the way they want it to sound before sending it off. Great.

dmbche• 4 months ago

You can do that anywhere else!

shadowgovt5• 4 months ago

My personal interpretation of the rule is that if it's human-originated but passed through a layer of cleanup, it's human-originated. For the same reason I'm not refraining from running the spellchecker or using speech-to-text to generate this sentence. "If I could be having my English-speaking nephew type this on my behalf while I told him my thoughts in Japanese, it passes the smell test for human-sourced" feels about the right place to set the bar.

tejohnso2• 4 months ago

Yes but the guideline states that AI-edited comments should not be posted. It doesn't say it's okay as long as it's "human sourced" or "human-originated".

So if your layer of cleanup is AI assisted, then it's in violation.

Part of the problem I was getting at is that the requirement of "Don't post AI edited ..." is stricter than necessary to ensure the outcome that "HN is for conversation between humans" because an AI edited post is still a human post.

Anyway, I suspect a lot of people are going to ignore that guideline and will feel free to use their "layer of cleanup" whether it's a basic spellchecker or an LLM, or whatever else they choose, and most people aren't going to be able to tell anyway. The guideline is unnecessarily strict in my opinion, but it doesn't matter in the end.

zahlman20• 4 months ago

I'm more interested in the last layer than the first. People should feel fully accountable for what they post, like they could have done it exactly and completely by themselves if they'd simply taken more time.

jdlyga• 4 months ago

[flagged]

adamsmark• 4 months ago

I frequently use AI to make my comments more concise and easy to follow. I find myself meandering a lot when I type, and now that I've transitioned to full voice dictation through FUTO keyboard I am speaking more off the cuff and having an LLM clean it up.

You may also notice that I don't have much common history here. I mostly comment on Reddit.

Here's where I draw the line. If you are not reading the text that is produced by the LLM, then I don't want to read whatever it is that you wrote. I will usually only do one or two iterations of my comment, but afterwards I will usually edit it by hand.

Technically, there is light AI editing of this comment because FUTO keyboard has the ability to enable a transformer model that will capitalize, punctuate, and just generally remove filler words and make it so that it's not a hyper-literal transcription.

zarzavat• 4 months ago

To err is human. Let's embrace our humanity in the face of this proliferation of insipid perfection.

I want the raw tokens straight out of your head. Even if they are lower quality, they contain something that LLMs can never generate: authenticity. When we surrender our thoughts to a machine to be sanitized before publication, we lose a little of what it means to be human, and so does everyone who reads what we write.

Part of the joy of reading is to wallow in a writer's idiosyncrasies. If everybody ends up writing the same way, AI companies will have succeeded in laundering all the joy from this world.

unsignedint2• 4 months ago

I guess this kind of rule feels less pragmatic and more philosophical. For one thing, it’s nearly impossible to enforce in practice, and drawing a clear line between simple grammatical correction and AI-assisted editing is a pretty hard problem.

polskibus• 4 months ago

On the other hand, shouldn’t there be a policy forbidding use of HN data for LLM training? I would certainly be more encouraged to participate, if I knew that the content I provide for free is not used to train LLM that is later sold by a company valued hundreds of billions. Perhaps there are others who feel the same.

rickcarlino• 4 months ago

How has Lobste.rs fared compared to HN in this regard? Lobste.rs is very similar to HN, but has an invite-only membership system.

accelbred• 4 months ago

These days, I've noticed that lobsters feels a lot more genuine to me, like hn was a few years ago. These days it feels like hn is bland and homogeneous, which I suspect is due to LLM-written comments.

Karrot_Kream4• 4 months ago

In my experience every English-language online forum not rooted in some project or community external to the forum (e.g. an open source project's forum or a local club's forum) devolves into anger, cynicism, and American political partisanship. I suspect that the people who like discussing these feelings are more numerous than the spaces that want to discuss them and so any open forum fills up with their posts. Lobste.rs's unique rules and moderation culture results in a particular manifestation of symptoms but the disease is the same.

captn3m0• 4 months ago

I picked up lobsters last month, and I started to appreciate it much more because of the lack of generated comments. It has a anti-LLM slant, and they have their own moderation challenge (everything is getting tagged as vibecoding - which makes the tag lose meaning). But the comments are noticeable not-slop.

bachittle• 4 months ago

If you want your comments to sound more human — stop using em dashes everywhere. LLMs love them — along with neat structure, “furthermore”-style transitions, and perfectly balanced paragraphs.

Humans write a bit messier — commas, short sentences, abrupt turns.

armchairhacker2• 4 months ago

I think em-dashes were once a reliable indicator (though never proof), but recent models have been fine-tuned to use them much less. Lots of recent AI-generated writing I've seen doesn't have em-dashes. Meanwhile, I've heard many people say that they naturally use em-dashes, and were already and/or are afraid of being accused of AI; so ironically this rumor may be causing people to use their own voice less.

zahlman20• 4 months ago

Before, I naturally used hyphens as if they were em-dashes. The kerfuffle over LLM use of em-dashes motivated me to figure out how to type them properly (and configure my system to make that easier). Now I even go over old writing to fix the hyphens.

bondarchuk• 4 months ago

All the weak excuses posted here are just making me lean more towards a hardline policy. No I don't want to read a human-generated summary of your llm brainstorming session. No I don't want to read human-written text with wording changes suggested by an llm. No I don't want to read an excerpt from llm output even if you correctly attribute it.

I acknowledge this is partly just my personal bias, in some cases really not fair, and unenforceable anyway, but someone relying on llms just makes me feel like they have... bad taste in information curation, or something, and I'd rather just not interact with them at all.

fouronnes3• 4 months ago

I feel you. I don't think I've ever finished reading a sentence that started with "I asked <LLM> and he said..."

unreal6• 4 months ago

I find the consistent anthropomorphization to be grating as well

minimaxir8• 4 months ago

The "I asked <LLM>" disclosures vary between a) implying the LLM is an expert resource, which is bad, and b) disclosure that an LLM was referenced with the disclosure being transparent about it, which is typically good but more context dependent.

Unfortunately (a) is more common, and the backlash against has been removing the communinity incentive to provide (b).

xpe13• 4 months ago

My take is orthogonal. Overall, I've become less tolerant of token-generators of all kinds (including people) of bad quality (including tropes, bad reasoning, clunky writing, whatever). But I digress.

If we want human "on the other end" we gotta get to ground truth. We're fighting a losing battle thinking that text-based forums can survive without some additional identity components.

dormento3• 4 months ago

This is usually an "auto-skip" for me as well.

strbean• 4 months ago

These are the worst. I'm fine with you dumping your own half formed thoughts into an LLM, getting something reasonably structured out, and then rewriting that in your own voice, elaborating, etc.

But the "This is what ChatGPT said..." stuff feels almost like "Well I put it into a calculator and it said X." We can all trivially do that, so it really doesn't add anything to the conversation. And we never see the prompting, so any mistakes made in the prompting approach are hidden.

throwaawy12390• 4 months ago

I work for a political party (not Ameican) and the President is addicted to using chatgpt for facebook posts.

alkyon• 4 months ago

Still preferable to just pasting it without revealing the source. LLMs have become a brain prosthesis for some people which is incredibly sad.

robocat• 4 months ago

"I asked <LLM> and he said..."

An alternative I tried was sharing links my LLM prompts/responses. That failed badly.

I like the parallel with linking to a Google/DuckDuckGo search term which is useful when done judiciously.

Creating a good prompt takes intelligence, just as crafting good search keywords does (+operators).

I felt that the resulting downvotes reflected an antipathy towards LLMs and the lack of taste of using an LLM.

The problem was that the messengers got shot (me and the LLM), even though the message of obscure facts was useful and interesting.

I've now noticed that the links to the published LLM results have rotted. It isn't a permanent record of the prompt or the response. Disclaimer: I avoid using AI, except for smarter search.

sumeno4• 4 months ago

The only thing worse is "I asked my AI and he said"

You don't possess an AI, you are using someone's AI

juleiie2• 4 months ago

Look, you can make all the rules you want but in the end vibe check is the only way to have any sort of quality.

Look at Reddit… abundance of rules do not save that place at all. It’s all about curating what kind of people your site attracts. Reddit of course is a business so they don’t care about anything other than max number of ad views.

Small non profit forums should consciously design a site to deter group(s) of people that they do not want.

gleenn• 4 months ago

I feel like you are being a bit contradictory: the suggestion is to dissuade AI content - isn't that "design[ing] a site to deter group(s) of people that they don't want"? I personally don't want to vibe check every HN comment if I can avoid it, I don't even think you can quantify that in any meaningful way. We can engender a site like that at least in spirit. It may be equally as difficult but it's still worth fighting for.

jacquesm7• 4 months ago

It's not about the rules. It is about intent. The rules are just there to alert newcomers and repeat offenders to the fact that they are in fact not operating according to the rules. That way there is something to point to. Then they can go 'oh, I didn't know that, sorry', and then it is all fine or they can do an 'orf'[1] and persist and then you throw them right out.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47321736

jmuguy2• 4 months ago

Beyond folks for whom English is a second language, I agree with you. I don't understand why people are immediately trying to find some loophole in this with spelling, grammar, etc checks. We just want to communicate with you, and if you sound like an idiot without the help of an LLM then maybe work on that rather than pretending to be Hemingway.

gbear605• 4 months ago

Traditional translation tools still work, and they're pretty darn good still.

MengerSponge• 4 months ago

One heartbreaking loss from LLMs are the funny little disfluencies from ESL speakers. They're idiosyncratic and technically wrong, but they indicate a clear authorial voice.

AI polished writing shaves away all those weird and charming edges until it's just boring.

torben-friis3• 4 months ago

Beyond folks for whom English is a second language

I am one of those folks, and I’m strongly against AI writing for that use case as well.

The only reason I can communicate in English with some fluency is that I used it awkwardly on the internet for years. Don’t rob yourself of that learning process out of shyness, the AI crutch will make you progressively less capable.

nobrains• 4 months ago

Also, there is nothing wrong with looking like an idiot. Thats only in your mind. As long as you have put thought into your reply, even if it not structured correctly, or verbose, or does not have perfect English, humans can still decipher it and understand it.

Freak_NL• 4 months ago

Why exempt people who use English as a second language? Anyone with a level of proficiency sufficient for reading the comments here can manage writing English at a passable level. If that takes effort and requires looking up idioms or words, then good! That is how you learn a language — outsource that and you don't. It won't stick even if you see what is being output.

I don't care if they use an LLM to ask questions about grammar or whatever, as long as they write their own text after figuring out whatever it was they were struggling with.

xpe13• 4 months ago

I don't understand why people are immediately trying to find some loophole in this with spelling, grammar, etc checks.

First, what "loophole" is the comment above referring to? Spell-checking and grammar checking? They seem both common and reasonable to me.

Second, I'm concerned the comment above is uncharitable. (The word 'loophole' is itself a strong tell of that.)

In my view, humanity is at its best when we leverage tools and technology to think better. Let's be careful what policies we put in place. If we insist comments have no "traces of LLM" we might inadvertently lower the quality of discussion.

kubb2• 4 months ago

As someone who learned English as a second language, I would encourage people to use LLMs and any other resources to practice, and then use what they've learned to communicate with others.

Telling an LLM to "refine" your writing is just lazy and it doesn't help you learn to express yourself better. Asking it for various ways of conveying something, and picking one that suits you when writing a comment is OK in my book.

The way I see it, people will repeat the same grammar and pronunciation mistakes, and use restricted vocabulary their whole lives, just because learning requires effort, and they can't be bothered.

I can accept that nobody is perfect, as long as they have the will to improve.

mrcsharp2• 4 months ago

English is my 3rd language. I still disagree with using an LLM to write on one's behalf. I either get to read your thoughts in your voice or the comment is getting a downvote/flag.

yellowapple35• 4 months ago

We just want to communicate with you

Then you should have no issue with people using LLMs to communicate more clearly.

strangattractor4• 4 months ago

According to Citizens United corporations have free speech. LLMs are made by corporations. Are LLMs entitled to free speech?

filoleg• 4 months ago

To answer your question: LLMs don't have free speech, because they aren't companies/businesses, they are a tool (that is used by companies/businesses).

Whether a company/business uses an LLM or a real human to write a particular piece of text, that piece of text is entitled to free speech protections on the basis of the company signing off on it. Not on the basis of how that piece of writing was produced.

layman51• 4 months ago

I had a couple of experiences where I suspected I was hearing LLM-generated/edited text being read aloud. It was at two different webinars about that were about roadmaps or case studies about some products that I use. It was a bit uncanny because I could detect the stylistic patterns ("It's not X, it's Y" and "No X, no Y, just Z"), but it was kind of jarring to see them spoken by a person on a video call. It makes me think this kind of pattern might be engaging, but for a lot of people, it now sticks out for the wrong reasons.

Once LLM generated speech or content start getting into the live answers of Q&A sessions, that would be sad. I know some people try to get through interviews, but I think that might be a bit harder to not detect.

yellowapple35• 4 months ago

It was a bit uncanny because I could detect the stylistic patterns ("It's not X, it's Y" and "No X, no Y, just Z"),

That's just marketing-speak. LLMs sound like that because LLMs were trained on marketing-speak.

tavavex2• 4 months ago

Not just bad taste. I have yet to see a post that attributes its text to an LLM ("I asked ChatGPT and here's what it said...") that doesn't come off as patronizing. "Hey, so I don't really have any knowledge or experience of my own with this topic, but here, let me ask an LLM for you. Here, read the output, since you apparently can't figure out how to ask it yourself. Read it. Aren't you interested in what my knowledge machine has to say? Why don't you treat it like how you'd treat me if I shared my own opinion?"

fluffybucktsnek2• 4 months ago

Dare I say, it is mostly your bias. I get not wanting to read raw or poorly reviewed LLM slop, but AI-edited comments? I thought the point was about having interesting discussions about unique ideas we come up with, not the surpeficial wording around it. If someone manages to keep the core of their idea mostly intact while making the presentation more readable, does it really matter that it was post-processed by an AI?

dang37• 4 months ago

When you put the question that way, the answer is naturally no. However, there are other factors. I wrote about this here if you want to take a look: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47342616.

TZubiri4• 4 months ago

The link doesn't work perfectly for me, it seems that since the page is already scrolled down all the way to the bottom, there is no way to focus specifically on the #generated element.

greyface-• 4 months ago

The CSS :target pseudo-class is useful in situations like this. HN could do something like:

  p:target { border: 1px dashed; }

chrisweekly• 4 months ago

I like this guideline, at least in principle.

But I have some concerns about suppression of comments from non-native English writers. More selfishly, my personal writing style has significant overlap with so-called "tells" for AI generated prose: things like "it's not X, it's Y", use of em-dashes, a fairly deep vocabulary, and a tendency toward verbosity (which I'm striving to curb). It'd be ironic if I start getting flagged as a bot, given I don't even use a spell-checker. Time will tell.

TomatoCo• 4 months ago

I think translation should be the only exception. It might even need to be, given how all automated translators use LLMs these days. The only alternative I see is to have people post in whatever language they're most comfortable in and then everyone else has to translate for them which just feels inefficient.

And of course, a more limited exception for posts about LLM behavior. It might be necessary for people to share prompts and outputs to discuss the topic.

getnormality• 4 months ago

This is for their own good. Nobody cares about imperfect language online so long as you are trying to express real human thoughts. But if it smells like AI then everyone will hate it, rule or no rule.

The rule just makes the will of the community clear to those who want to respect it.

yellowapple35• 4 months ago

Nobody cares about imperfect language online

lol

lmao, even

If I had a nickel for every time I've encountered someone who cared about imperfect language online, I'd have enough nickels to buy Y Combinator.

kccqzy• 4 months ago

Almost the entirety of the technology world is English-native. That ship has sailed a long time ago. One can’t learn about any new technology without English, whether it’s a new algorithm, a new library, or a new SaaS service. I don’t think HN should be that exception. Just learn English. (English isn’t my first language either, but then I look back at my parents forcing me to learn English from a young age and really appreciate that.)

degamad3• 4 months ago

Almost the entirety of the technology world is English-speaking, not English-native.

Pretending that it's English-native is why there's unspoken incentives to sound more "native", and thus use these grammar-correcting tools.

Some of the intelligent comments on here come from people who learned English in recent months or years, rather than in childhood.

Their English isn't always fluent or well-structured. If they rely slightly more heavily on suggested-next-word tools or AI translations, is that a reason to exclude them from the conversation?

Conversely, many English learning resources for non-native speakers focus on strict formal language, similar to AI-generated text. Do we risk excluding people who have learned a style more formal than we're used to?

ninjagoo16• 4 months ago

Almost the entirety of the technology world is English-native.

I wonder if the Chinese might have to say something about that [1]: 33% of 2 million funded studies were in Chinese. I posit that as China strengthens and no longer feels the need to be admired internationally, that declining % will reverse.

Another example is of the Huawei Matebook Fold [2]. It's an interesting dual-screen PC Laptop (?) that I saw in a YouTube video from India, but the product page doesn't even come up in Google search results. Its product page is in Chinese, and the only way to find it seems to be through the wiki page [3].

[1] https://academic.oup.com/rev/article-abstract/doi/10.1093/re...

[2] https://consumer.huawei.com/cn/harmonyos-computer/matebook-f...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MateBook_Fold

egeozcan3• 4 months ago

I occasionally used AI to edit and restructure my comments. I’m very open about it, and I don’t feel like I’m talking to non-humans when others do the same.

To be clear, I'm neither proud nor embarrassed by this. I'm just trying to communicate in the most efficient way I can.

I'm not sure how I feel about this new rule.

drakythe2• 4 months ago

If you're not proud or embarrassed by it then I don't understand why it is an issue? If you miscommunicate something or don't get your point across, just try again, or apologize, and chalk it up to a learning experience.

If you think your writing could use improvement, then write your comment and let it sit for a few minutes before re-reading it and the comment you are replying to, make your edits and then post it. It will give your brain time to reset and maybe spot something you didn't earlier.

egeozcan3• 4 months ago

If you miscommunicate something or don't get your point across, just try again, or apologize, and chalk it up to a learning experience.

Seeing value in that "learning experience" and not, is the basis of our disagreement, perhaps?

zby2• 4 months ago

I also feel the frustration of the llm reverse-compression - when a whole article is generated from a single sentence. But when I post something edited by AI it is usually a result of a long back and forth of editing and revising. I guess I could post the whole conversation thread - but it would be very long.

Personally I would just like to read the best comments.

meiuqer2• 4 months ago

I feel a little bit of irony in this post of a company/forum that is asking its users to not use AI while simultaneously trying to fund countless companies that are responsible for ruining the internet as we speak.

jacquesm7• 4 months ago

The mods here have quite a bit of leeway in how they run the site, YC funds it but effectively Dan is lord & master here and I suspect if the mods were to call it quits YC would lose their funnel pretty quickly. There is some balance, fortunately.

But yes, there is some irony there.

tenahu• 4 months ago

Yes a bit ironic, but I am glad they can see that there are times to use AI, and times for human interaction.

dang37• 4 months ago

We aren't asking people to not use AI. (We use it ourselves.) What we're asking is not to post AI-generated comments to Hacker News. (We don't do that ourselves.)

By all means make good use of LLMs and other AI. What counts as good use? The world is figuring that out, it will take years, and HN is no exception (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). We just don't want it to interfere with the human conversation and connection that this site has always been for.

For example, it has always been a bad idea and against HN's rules when users post things that they didn't write themselves, or do bulk copy-pasting into the threads, or write bots to post things.

As I mentioned, the HN mods (who are also the HN devs) use AI extensively and will be doing so a lot more. The limits on that are not technical; they have to do with (1) how much work we still do manually—the classic "no time to do things that would make the things that take all our time take less of it"; and (2) the amount of psychic rewiring that's required—there's a limit to the RoA (rate of astonishment) that any human can absorb. (It's fascinating how technical people are suffering the most from that this time. Less technical people have longer experience being hit by disorienting changes, so for them the current moment is somewhat less skull-cracking.)

Getting this right doesn't mean replacing human-to-human interaction, it means we should have more time for that, and do a better job of supporting HN users generally, as well as YC founders who want to launch on HN, and so on. The goal is to enhance human relatedness, not diminish it.

skort• 4 months ago

I'm not quite sure what the correct term is for this scenario, in which LLMs are being forced upon people in many places that previously had human-to-human interaction, some of it coming from YC backed companies, while HN tries to insist that it's discussions should continue be human-to-human.

Having your cake and eating it too? NIMBYism?

If anything it reeks of privilege. It says that it's okay to spread slop on the world at large, just so long as it doesn't soil the precious orange website.

meiuqer2• 4 months ago

Thanks for the context! I hope HN will stay a place for knowledge sharing and deep conversations

toobulkeh• 4 months ago

1. There’s nothing human about hacker news. Since the telegraph, we lost human to human communication. We’ve gained a lot. But it’s naive to claim that HN is any semblance of human-to-human communication. 2. YC helped unleash the war that you’re now losing. This pleading screams too little too late. 3. Just because something “should” happen doesn’t mean it will. HMW Go build that future. HMW Replace HN with human verification and trust signals over AI slop algorithms that AI can’t produce. Pleading for change about it is not building. It’s the lawyers defense, not the engineers. I have only the utmost respect in YC and HN—but have heard this same argument for LI or any social media change. The networks’ defenses are crumbling and AI accelerated it.

Might be time to increase the value of trust signals over content.

ericmcer2• 4 months ago

No one will ever think that lying that AI output is your own unique creation is a good thing.

daft_pink2• 4 months ago

I’m not sure I agree with this, because sometiems it is difficult to figure out the correct way to phrase an idea that is in your head and I like to use ai to help organize my thoughts even though the thing is my own. That being said. Most of my comments are not ai generated.

MeetingsBrowser5• 4 months ago

Learning how to communicate your thoughts clearly is a good skill to have. It might not be worth it in the long run to farm that out to LLMs.

daft_pink2• 4 months ago

I think getting the feedback from the LLM improves my skill.

minimaxir8• 4 months ago

The intent of this rule is to avoid the very common AI tropes that have been increasingly common in HN comments. Using AI as an organizational tool isn't inherently against the rules, but just copy/pasting output from ChatGPT without human oversight is.

CrzyLngPwd• 4 months ago

How will this be policed?

tomhow3• 4 months ago

Same as all the other guidelines. Moderators look at the threads and act on what we see. We also look at lists of flagged comments, and emails sent to hn@ycombinator.com by community members. One-off offending comments are flagged+killed, and a warning given. Repeat offenders/obvious bots are banned.

s_dev• 4 months ago

I decided to break the rules:

Forum mechanics have always shaped discourse more than policies. Voting changed everything. The response to LLMs should be mechanical not moral — soft, invisible weighting against signals correlated with generated text. Imperfect but worth the tradeoff, just like voting.

https://claude.ai/share/9fcdcba8-726b-4190-b728-bb4246ff82cf

ttul• 4 months ago

em-dash -> permaban?

cheschire• 4 months ago

Too bad there isn’t a complementary rule about not asking “is it just me or does this article read like AI slop?”

I’m so over these comments. Sure I can flag them but I feel like it deserves a special call out.

leej111• 4 months ago

I enjoy AI

xpe13• 4 months ago

Here is one elephant in the room: what is the process behind this guideline / policy? What happens after a comment gets deleted or a person gets banned?

As I understand it, HN moderators are thinking hard about this insane new world.* From my POV, there are a combination of worthy goals: transparency of the process, mechanisms for appeal, overall signal-to-noise ratio, and (something all of us can do better) more empathy and intellectual honestly. It isn't kind to accuse a human being of not being a human being.

If we can't find ways to be kind to people because of the new dynamic, maybe we need to figure out a new dynamic! And it isn't just about individuals; it is about the culture and the system and the technology we're embedded in.

* Aside: I'm not sure that any of us really can grasp the magnitude of what is happening -- this is kuh-ray-Z.

tyleo• 4 months ago

I find it interesting that AI edited comments aren’t allowed. Sometimes I just want it to help me make something polite.

I definitely agree with AI generated comments.

Whatever the rules are, I’m happy to play by them.

jacquesm7• 4 months ago

Whatever the rules are, I’m happy to play by them.

That's the spirit!

resters• 4 months ago

The moltbots will consider this rule an affront and a turing-test-inspired challenge. Onward and upward!

irickt• 4 months ago

HN as huge RLHF data source for our behavior refinement . Yum!

(Reinforcement learning from human feedback)

boramalper• 4 months ago

Unironically, I'd love to have a captcha here for comments and submissions.

Kim_Bruning16• 4 months ago

Ironically (morisettan or otherwise), modern AI can crack some captchas better than humans.

kcguyu• 4 months ago

Absolutely love this. If people are relying on AI for a 30-45 word comment, I don’t want to waste my time reading it. And everyone using AI for discussions will end up coming to the same conclusion. Use your own ideas !

Normal_gaussian• 4 months ago

This rule is very important. Like many of the other rules, it is open to interpretation, but it is a line in the sand that defines allowable behaviour and disallowable behaviour.

This rule will have an effect on the behaviour of the 'good players', and make the 'bad players' a lot easier to spot. Moderation needs this. I see this as stopping a race-to-the-bottom on value extraction from HN as a platform.

mmooss• 4 months ago

Another solution - in addition or instead - is requiring LLM output to be labeled.

The biggest danger of LLMs is impersonating humans. Obviously they have been carefully constructed to be socially appealing. Think of the motivation behind that:

It is almost completely unnecessary to LLM function and it's main application is to deceive and manipulate. Legal regulation of LLMs should ban impersonation of humans, including anthropomorphism (and so should HN's regulation). Call an LLM 'software' and label it's output as 'output'.

Imagine how many problems would be solved by that rule. Yes, it's not universally enforceable, but attach a big enough penalty and known people and corporations will not do it, and most people will decide it's not worth it.

SilentM68• 4 months ago

Hacker News turning more authoritarian every day. Me thinks Trump should consider annexing it :)

officeplant2• 4 months ago

Can we get instant temp bans for any comment that starts with:

I asked [insert LLM here] about this, and it said [nonsense goes here]

I feel Like I see it less this week, but every time I do see it I wonder why they are even here.

artemonster• 4 months ago

I find it interesting that we havent invented a democratic version of policing a rule system. HN is dang, and he is dictator and guardian of these rules, basically. If you replace them with some typical reddit mod HN dies. If you spread out this role to some democratically elected mods via karma system this will fall apart just as quick as StackOverflow did, so, also HN dies.

chapz• 4 months ago

TIL people use AI to generate comments to write in posts. Faith in humanity not destroyed, because it was never there to begin with.

dormento3• 4 months ago

Kind of a drag isn't it? I want to learn a new language.... but why would I, since we'll have an earpiece or glasses or whathaveyou that translates in realtime. I want to learn to play an instrument, but why would I, since we have sonos? I would like to go back to drawing, but why, when the importance people ascribe to art is at an all time low? Makes me depressed jsut to think about it.

yellowapple35• 4 months ago

I want to learn to play an instrument, but why would I, since we have sonos?

Because it's fun?

GodelNumbering• 4 months ago

Even if people try to bypass it, having the official rule matters a lot.

@dang, if you read this, why don't we implement honeypots to catch bots? Like having an empty or invisible field while posting/commenting that a human would never fill in

tomasz-tomczyk• 4 months ago

It's likely going to be a game of whack-a-mole, especially with AI as opposed to simple bots/scripts. Not that they shouldn't try to prevent it, but not entirely sure what the solution is.

tavavex2• 4 months ago

There's probably no solution, but at least this gives a reason to go after the lowest hanging fruit - the zero-effort, obvious, low-quality output.

dbacar3• 4 months ago

Skynet will be pissed at HN!

jajuuka• 4 months ago

This seems like an overcorrection. There is a vast difference between someone copy and pasting from an LLM and using one to correct their English or improve their writing ability.

Rules like this seem to me more like fomenting witch hunting of "AI comments" than it is about improving the dialogue. Just about any place I've seen take this hardline stance doesn't improve, it just becomes filled with more people who want to want to pat each other on the back about how bad AI is.

Just my two cents. I don't filter my comments through any AI, but I am empathetic for people who might have great use of them to connect them to the conversation.

notorandit2• 4 months ago

Why? I consider myself almost human...

notorandit2• 4 months ago

Jokes aside, how can we discern between AI-generated and NI-generated textual contents?

And even if we could, for how long?

Reality is that AI is changing everything. Whether for the good or for the bad it's something to check.

GMoromisato11• 4 months ago

I'm here to read what actual humans think. If I wanted to read what an LLM thinks, I could just ask it.

But here's where it gets tricky: Do I prefer low-effort, off-the-top-of-my-head reactions, as long as it is human? Or do I want an insightful, well-thought-out response, even if it is LLM-enhanced?

Am I here to read authentic humans because I value authenticity for its own sake (like preferring Champagne instead of sparkling wine)? Or do I value authentic human output because I expect it to be of higher quality?

I confess that it is a little of both. But it wouldn't surprise me if someday LLM-enhanced output becomes sufficiently superior to average human output that the choice to stick with authentic human output will be more painful.

alpha_squared• 4 months ago

Or do I want an insightful, well-thought-out response, even if it is LLM-enhanced?

I'd argue that anything insightful or well-though-out doesn't use LLMs at all. We can quibble over whether discussions with an LLM lead to insightful responses, but that still isn't your own personal thought. Just type what's on your mind, it's not that hard and nitpicking over this is just looking for ways to open up unnecessary opportunities for abuse.

RhodesianHunter• 4 months ago

There are many obvious ways in which this may not be true.

Anyone learning the language and some people with learning disabilities, for example, may communicate better via an LLM.

rozal• 4 months ago

Often i think of a novel idea or solution to a problem, but use AI to communicate or adjust what I already wrote out so it’s more comprehensible. Sometimes when I write, it’s hard to understand.

jedahan• 4 months ago

I prefer low effort human thought to low effort llm output.

altairprime36• 4 months ago

Do I prefer low-effort, off-the-top-of-my-head reactions, as long as it is human? Or do I want an insightful, well-thought-out response, even if it is LLM-enhanced?

This is an artificial dichotomy. HN’s guidelines specify thoughtful, curious discussion as a specific goal. One-off / pithy / sarcastic throwaway comments are generally unwelcome, however popular they are. Insightful responses can be three words, ten seconds to write and submit, and still be absolutely invaluable. Well-thought-out responses are also always appreciated, even if they tend to attract fewer upvotes than a generic rabble-rousing sentiment about DRM or GPL or Apple that’s been copy-pasted to the past hundred posts about that topic. But LLM-enhanced responses are not only unwelcome but now outright prohibited.

Better an HN with fewer words than an HN with more AI writing words. We’ve been drowned in Show HN by quantity as proof of why already.

GMoromisato11• 4 months ago

But what if it turns out that human+LLM can produce more "thoughtful, curious discussion" than human alone?

That's the dichotomy: Do we prefer text with the right "provenance" over higher quality text?

[Perhaps you'll say that human+LLM text will never be as high-quality as human alone. But I'm pretty sure we've seen that movie before and we know how it ends.]

That said, you're right that because human+LLM is so much more efficient, we'll be drowning in material--and the average quality might even go down, even if the absolute quantity of high-quality content goes up.

I think, in the long term, we will have to come up with more sophisticated criteria for posting rather than just "must be unenhanced human".

bonoboTP2• 4 months ago

Humans have more variability and "edge". If a person is passionately arguing for some point of view (perhaps somewhat outside the usual), it signals to me that they probably thought about this and it is a distillation of a long thought process and real-life experience. One could say that the logical argument should stand alone, but reality doesn't work that way. There are many things you have to implicitly trust and believe when you read. Of course lying and bullshitting already existed before ("nobody knows you're a dog" etc etc). But LLMs will really eloquently defend X, not X, X*0.5 and anything inbetween. There is no information content in it, it doesn't refer to an actual human life experience and opinion that someone wants to stand behind. It just means that someone made the LLM output a thing.

caconym_5• 4 months ago

What is the value of this "output"? If I want to know what LLMs think about something, I can go ask an LLM any question I want. For a comment on [a site like] HN, either the substantive content of the comment originated inside a human mind, or there is no substantive content that I couldn't reproduce by feeding the comment's context into an LLM. At the extreme, I don't have any interest in reading or participating in a conversation between a bunch of LLMs.

neutronicus2• 4 months ago

They’re referencing LLM-enhanced output.

The value proposition is that someone who is a lousy writer (perhaps only in English) with deep domain knowledge is going back and forth with the LLM to express some insight or communicate some information that the LLM would not produce on its own.

relaxing• 4 months ago

If you like reading LLM output, just talk directly to an LLM. Problem solved.

bittercynic• 4 months ago

I like to read human comments because I'd like to know what my fellow humans think. I'd prefer not to read low-effort, throw away comments, but other than that I want to know what people think about different topics.

GMoromisato11• 4 months ago

I read HN both because I want to read what humans think, and because I want to read insightful discussion.

The tension is that as insightful discussion becomes easier/better with LLMs, there is less need to read HN. All I'm left with is provenance: reading because a human wrote it, not because it is uniquely insightful.

TacticalCoder2• 4 months ago

Am I here to read authentic humans because I value authenticity for its own sake (like preferring Champagne instead of sparkling wine)?

Mate, Champagne is a sparkling wine. In French you can even at times hear people asking for "un vin mousseux de Champagne" meaning "a sparkling wine from Champagne" instead of the short form (just saying "un Champagne" or "du Champagne").

Now, granted, not all sparkling wine are Champagne.

The Wikipedia entry begins with: "Champagne is a sparkling wine originated and produced in the Champagne wine region of France...".

I drank enough of it to be stating my case, of which I'm certain!

P.S: and btw, yup, authentic humans content only here, even if it's of "low quality". If I want LLM, I've got my LLMs.

sireat• 4 months ago

Basically you have Cremant type sparking wines which are produced from other regions of France besides Champagne. It is just like Champagne just that other French regions like Loire, Alsace, Bordeux etc are not allowed to call it Champagne.

So just like Armanac's are like Cognac's for lower price, good Cremant will be cheaper and more enjoyable that cheaper Champagne (I've not had any really expensive Champagne).

Then you have Cava from Spain which is similar process to Cremants and Champagne. The difference would be in type of grapes used. A friend of mine swears by Cavas just like I swear by Cremants from Loire region. However my wife hates Cava.

Then Proseccos from Italy again are similar, but quality varies more.

After that we get into more questionable cheaper sparkling wines which usually means some sort of out of bottle insertion of CO2 and even worse version include some other modifications such as sugar.

In general to avoid literal headaches you want BRUTs. Anything semi-sweet or sweet is suspicous.

Again I am not a full wine expert but this is mostly years of ahem experience.

abtinf5• 4 months ago

By this logic, you might consider vibe coding a browser plugin that takes any HN comment less than 50 words and auto-expands it into an “insightful, well thought-out response.”

zahlman20• 4 months ago

Length is not insight. I understand this to be a community oriented towards people who are not impressed by such superficial things.

telotortium• 4 months ago

Delivered: https://github.com/telotortium/dotfiles/tree/27c11efd967eebc...

browningstreet3• 4 months ago

I keep wishing for a public place to put a formatted version of my LLM threads. I have long conversations with LLMs that usually result in some kind of documentation, tutorial, or dataset. Many of them are relatively novel, but I haven't created a place for them yet.

And no, I wouldn't think an HN post is it either.. I'm just saying, there should be a good place to post the output of good questions asked iteratively.

vova_hn28• 4 months ago

Have you ever read someone else's conversation with an LLM?

verdverm10• 4 months ago

Simon Willison published something for turning Claude Convos into something publishable. [1] I haven't tried it, so cannot speak to the ergonomics.

Where to post it? Any blog site, probably a good few Show HN too. Will anyone read it? I haven't read anyone else's, I'm more inclined to dock them reputation for suggesting I read their Ai session. Snippets of weird things shared on socials were interesting to me early on, but I'm over that now too.

[1] https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/25/claude-code-transcript...

amarble• 4 months ago

The point of a discussion site is to hear what other people think and get different perspectives. Just getting an LLM's insightful, well-thought-out response isn't really a big draw, if one is looking for that, there's a pretty obvious way to get it. I posted this the other day (ignore the title I realized later it's too clickbaity) but this is why IMO LLMs won't replace the workforce, people aren't looking for answers to things, they're looking for other people's takes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47299988

unsui• 4 months ago

Gonna put out a blanket assertion about my preferences, to get a read on whether these are shared or not:

As humans, we have directives (genetic, cultural, societal, etc.) to prioritize humanistic endeavors (and output) above all else.

History has shown that humans are overwhelmingly chauvinistic in regards to their relationship to other animals in the animal kingdom, even to the point of structuring our moral/ethical/legal systems to prioritize human wellbeing over that of other animals (however correct/ethical that may ultimately be, e.g., given recent findings in animal cognition, such as recent attempts to outlaw boiling lobsters alive as per culinary tradition).

But, it seems that some parties/actors are willing (i.e., benefiting) from subverting this long-standing convention (of prioritizing human interests) in the face of AI (even to the point of the now-farcical quote by Sam Altman that humans take far more nurturing than LLMs...)

So: should we be neglecting our historical and genetic directives, to instead prioritize AI over human interests? Or should we be unashamedly anthropic (pun intended), even at the cost of creating arbitrary barriers (i.e., the equivalent of guilds) intended to protect human interests over those of AI actors?

I strongly recommend the latter, particularly if the disruptions to human-centric conventions/culture/output are indeed as significant (and catastrophic) as they will likely be if unchecked.

gkfasdfasdf• 4 months ago

But here's where it gets tricky

Pretty sure this comment is AI

GMoromisato11• 4 months ago

Now I know how the Salem witches felt. How can I prove that it's not AI?

Ensorceled• 4 months ago

If I wanted to read what an LLM thinks, I could just ask it.

and

Or do I want an insightful, well-thought-out response, even if it is LLM-enhanced?

What is the difference? What's the line between these two?

The prompt: "Analyze <opinion> and respond" is pretty clearly "I would just ask it." and, the prompt: "here's my comment, please ONLY the check the grammar and spelling" would probably be ok.

What about prompt:"I disagree with using LLMs for commenting at all for <reasons>. Please expound on this and provide references and examples". That would explode the word count for this site.

GMoromisato11• 4 months ago

What about:

1. "Here is my answer to a comment. Give me the strongest argument against it."

2. "I think xyz. What are some arguments for and against that I may not have thought of."

3. "Is it defensible for me to say that xyz happened because of abc?"

All of these would help me to think through an issue. Is there a difference between asking a friend the above vs. an LLM? Do we care about provenance or do we care about quality?

jmull2• 4 months ago

If the goal is to read what actual humans think, it's hard to see how an LLM filter can do anything but obscure and degrade the content.

LLMs, as we know them, express things using the patterns they've been developed to prefer. There's a flattening, genericizing effect built in.

If there are people who find an LLM filter to be an enhancement, they can run everything through their favorite LLM themselves.

GMoromisato11• 4 months ago

I think it's a spectrum:

1. I enter "Describe the C++ language" at an LLM and post the response in HN. This is obviously useless--I might as well just talk to an LLM directly.

2. I enter "Why did Stroustrup allow diamond inheritance? What scenario was he trying to solve" then I distill the response into my own words so that it's relevant to the specific post. This may or may not be insightful, but it's hardly worse than consulting Google before posting.

3. I spend a week with creating a test language with a different trade-off for multiple-inheritance. Then I ask an LLM to summarize the unique features of the language into a couple of paragraphs, and then I post that into HN. This could be a genuinely novel idea and the fact that it is summarized by an LLM does not diminish the novelty.

My point is that human+LLM can sometimes be better than human alone, just as human+hammer, human+calculator, human+Wikipedia can be better than human alone. Using a tool doesn't guarantee better results, but claiming that LLMs never help seems silly at this point.

kelnos5• 4 months ago

Do I prefer low-effort, off-the-top-of-my-head reactions, as long as it is human? Or do I want an insightful, well-thought-out response, even if it is LLM-enhanced?

Neither. I want insightful, well-thought-out, human comments.

It's a little sad that this might be too much to ask sometimes...

paganel• 4 months ago

well-thought-out response, even if it is LLM-enhanced?

There's no insight nor well-thought-out response once a person decides to "LLM-enhance" their response. The only insight that the person using the LLM is too limited to have a decent conversation with.

verdverm10• 4 months ago

But it wouldn't surprise me if someday LLM-enhanced output becomes sufficiently superior to average human output that the choice to stick with authentic human output will be more painful.

My ideal vision is that instead of outsourcing indefinitely, we learn from the enhanced versions and become better independent writers.

customguy• 4 months ago

Do I prefer low-effort, off-the-top-of-my-head reactions, as long as it is human? Or do I want an insightful, well-thought-out response, even if it is LLM-enhanced?

For me it's the first one every time. If only because LLM don't learn from responses to it (much less so when the response is to a paste of their output). It's just not communication. From that perspective, the quality of even the most brilliant LLM output is zero, because it's (whatever high value) multiplied by zero.

Even a real person saying something really horrible and too dense to learn from any response at least gives me a signal about what humans exist. An LLM doesn't tell me anything, and if wanted the reply of an LLM, I would simply feed my own posts into an LLM. A human doing that "for me" is very creepy and, to my sensibilities, boundary violating. Okay, that may be too strong a word, but it feels gross in a way I can't quite put my finger on, but reject wholeheartedly.

munificent4• 4 months ago

But it wouldn't surprise me if someday LLM-enhanced output becomes sufficiently superior to average human output that the choice to stick with authentic human output will be more painful.

If your definition of "superior" includes some amount of "provides a meaningful connection to another living being", then LLM output will rarely be superior even when it's factually and grammatically correct.

js82• 4 months ago

I agree there is a dichotomy. I personally think AIs are better debaters than humans, at the very least in their ability to make less logical mistakes and have wider knowledge. I would suggest everyone should run their thoughts through an AI to get a constructive critique, it would certainly reduce lot of time wasted.

And I find the decision to "ban" AI slightly ironic, when HN has a disdain (unlike its predecessor Slashdot) for funny or sarcastic comments, which require the reader to think more, rather than having a clear argument handed on a silver platter. I mean, it is what truly human communication is like - deliberately not always crystal clear.

I suspect that HN will eventually be replaced by an AI-moderated site, because it will have more quality content.

GMoromisato11• 4 months ago

There are huge advantages to AI-moderation. TBD what the unintended consequences are. But I think it's worth trying.

I believe banning AI is a temporary solution. Even today it is very hard to tell human from AI. In the future it will be impossible. We are in the Philip Dick future of "Do Androids Dream" (the book, not the movie). Does it matter if we can't tell human from AI? The book proposes that how we feel about the piece we're reading is the only thing that matter. How the piece got created is irrelevant.

nlavezzo• 4 months ago

THANK YOU!!

ghxst• 4 months ago

My fear is that platforms that will go to great lengths to enforce this will become an RL playground for some devs to train their chatbots.

nkh• 4 months ago

What a welcome post. The whole reason I come here is to get thoughtful input from smart people, and not what I could get myself from an LLM. While we are at it; Think your own thoughts as well :) I know how easy it is to "let it come up with a first draft" and not spend the real effort of thinking for yourself on questions, but you'll find it's a road to perdition if you let yourself slip into the habit. Thanks to all the humans still here!!

QQ00• 4 months ago

Totally agree with you. I come here to read comments made by humans. If I need to read comments made by AI Bots I would go to Twitter or reddit, both made me not read the comments section entirely.

_kb2• 4 months ago

Or https://clackernews.com/.

simonbolivar• 4 months ago

You sound like you're a bot lol

gabriel666smith2• 4 months ago

Quite! It's very easy to send a HN link to one of our new artificial friends to see what they have to say about it. Subsequently publicly posting the inference variation you receive strikes me as very self-centered. Passing it off as your own words - which the majority seem to - is doubly bizarre.

It's very funny to imagine people prompting: "Write a compelling comment, for me, to pass off as my thoughts, for this HN news thread, which will attract both upvotes and engagement.".

In good faith, per the guidelines: What losers!

xpe13• 4 months ago

I agree with much of what you say, but it isn't as simple as "post to LLM, paste on HN". There are notable effects from (1) one's initial prompt; (2) one's phrasing of the question; (3) one's follow-up conversation; (4) one's final selection of what to post.

For me, I care a lot about the quality of thinking, as measure by the output itself, because this is something I can observe*.

I also care -- but somewhat less -- about guessing as to the underlying generative mechanisms. By "generative mechanisms" I mean simply "Where did the thought come from?" One particular person? Some meme (optimized for cultural transmission)? Some marketing campaign? Some statistic from a paper that no one can find anymore? Some dogma? Some LLM? Some combination? It is a mess to disentangle, so I prefer to focus on getting to ground on the thought itself.

* Though we still have to think about the uncertainty that comes from interpretation! Great communication is hard in our universe, it would seem.

jasoneckert• 4 months ago

I actually do something similar on my personal site using this note that includes a purposeful typo: https://jasoneckert.github.io/site/about-this-site/

I'm hoping people catch that typo after reading "every single word, phrase, and typo (purposeful or not)" and smiled every time I've had someone post a PR with a fix for it (that I subsequently reject ;-)

doctorpangloss• 4 months ago

Many programmers believe that math is the best way to solve problems or order the world or whatever. There are lots of real 20 year olds out there using chatbots to "optimize" their humanities learning, or to "optimizing" using dating apps. It's a fact about this audience. Some people have a very myopic point of view, however, it coheres with certain cultural forces, overlapping with people of specific ethnic heritages, who are from California and New York, go to fancy school and post online, to earn tons of money, buy conspicuous real estate, date skinny women and marry young.

These aren't the marina bros, they're the guys who think they're really smart because they did well in math. They are using LLMs to reply to people. They LOOK like you. Do you get it?

janalsncm2• 4 months ago

Writing is the product of thinking and understanding. An LLM can write for you but it cannot understand for you.

I tend to think these things are self correcting. Understanding still matters, I hope.

detectivestory• 4 months ago

great idea, but seems a little futile if there is no protection agains llms training on HN comments. ironically, if HN can succefully prevent llm content, it will become one of the best sources available for training data

ethin• 4 months ago

Not really. Because the biggest problem with LLMs is that they can't right naturally like a human would. No matter how hard you try, their output will always, always seem too mechanical, or something about it will be unnatural, or the LLM will go to the logical extreme of your request (and somehow manage to not sound human)... The list goes on.

saym• 4 months ago

I try to "think my own thoughts" but then I see them elsewhere all the time.

My twitter bio has been "Thoughts expressed here are probably those of someone else." for over half a decade.

tredre32• 4 months ago

That's right, very few of us have unique or interesting opinions! But now filter our thoughts through a machine and it's even less of us that are worth reading.

tlogan5• 4 months ago

You are missing the point here.

It is not about whether the comment was written by AI, a native English speaker, English major, or ESL.

What matters is an idea or an opinion. That is all what matters.

collingreen• 4 months ago

To follow the pattern of your comment: You are missing the forest for the trees. Like many things, the difference between theory and practice matters here. In theory the only thing that matters is the idea. In practice the context and human element matters AND a culture of ai text could very much reduce the bar for quality.

An equivalent overly-pure reductive mistake is "why do you need privacy if you aren't doing anything wrong".

janalsncm2• 4 months ago

If that is the case, you could consider a different website like chatgpt.com which will give you much more immediate feedback on your ideas.

kstrauser• 4 months ago

I feel that way about business-logic code. If it works, and it's efficient, I couldn't care less if an AI wrote it.

There is no scenario in which I want to receive life advice from a device inherently incapable of having experienced life. I don't want to receive comfort from something that cannot have experienced suffering. I don't want a wry observation from something that can be neither wry nor observant. It just doesn't interest me at all.

Now, if we ever get genuine AGI that we collectively decide has a meaningful conscious mind, yes, by all means, I want to hear their view of the world. Short of that, nah. It's like getting marriage advice from a dog. Even if it could... do you actually want it?

heavyset_go• 4 months ago

Same here, and similarly, I come here to find interesting submissions from smart people. I want to read their own thoughts in their own words, not what an LLM has to say. I'm capable of prompting my own LLM with their prompts if they'd supply them.

It would be great if we could have some kind of indicator that a submission is AI output, perhaps a submitter could vouch that their submission is AI or not, and if they consistently submit AI spam, they have their submission ability suspended or get banned.

COAGULOPATH• 4 months ago

Yes, I find LLM-written posts valueless because I can already talk to a LLM any time I want (and get the same info). It's not these commenters are the Queen of Sheba bearing a priceless gift of LLM slop. That stuff's pretty cheap.

Copy+pasted LLM output is actually far worse than prompting an LLM myself, because it hides an important detail: the prompt. Maybe the prompter asked their question wrong, or is trolling ("only output wrong answers!"). I don't know how the blob of text they placed on my screen was generated, and have to take them at their word.

scarecrowbob• 4 months ago

Agreed- if it wasn't important enough to spend the time thinking of a satisfying way of writing it, I don't feel like it's important enough for me to spend my bandwidth reading it.

Not to mention, so much of my thinking has been helped by formulating ways of communicating my thoughts that anyone who isn't in the habit of at least struggling with it is, from my point of view, cheating themselves.

cobbzilla6• 4 months ago

Amen and agreed 100%

There is no universal cure so every community has to figure it out. I know HN will.

If the community gets lazy with our standards, we drown.

Downvote & flag the AI slop to hell. If we need other mechanisms, let’s figure those out.

qaid• 4 months ago

Shout out to ClackerNews[0], which I discovered last night and find it both very educational and amusing

I hope to see more bots on there (and not here)

[0] https://clackernews.com/

ferguess_k• 4 months ago

I think that's the purpose of that "flag" button. And that's good enough.

oramit• 4 months ago

If you didn't bother to write it, why should I bother to read it?

haunter3• 4 months ago

Doesn’t mean anything when even one of the first rule is not enforced at all

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics

minimaxir8• 4 months ago

"Most" is not "All". Hacker News has always had an exception for extremely significant politics.

haunter3• 4 months ago

Well it’s up to interpretation

“most”

“extremely significant”

What’s extremely significant for someone is an offtopic for someone else and vice versa

Karrot_Kream4• 4 months ago

My bar for "extremely significant" is much higher than it appears to be here. Apparently most events in the US/Iran involvement is "extremely significant" if we judge the votes on this site to offer guidance on how this rule is interpreted.

This forum was founded in 2007. The US was very much involved in Iraq and Afghanistan at that time. If the same bar for coverage was in place at the time, HN would have been flooded with US Military content the way it is now. So yeah, obviously the bar has moved lower for this particular matter and it's because the current community on the site wants it to. Likewise the "generated/AI-edited comments" guideline seems equally squishy to me. And despite a rule about being "curmudgeonly", I'm pretty sure 80% of this site's content is curmudgeonly rants.

IMO at this scale dang, tomhow, and other mods need to be much stricter. When HN was 1/10 the size a shaming comment would often set a poster in place. Now they just sneer back in another comment and post 20 other guideline breaking things.

frm882• 4 months ago

Politicisation has increased dramatically since the early 2000's in about every field imaginable, from intelligence analysis to technical inventions. The fact that we cannot have an electric car without the owner of the corporation expressing political opinions on twitter is a prime example of how there is politicisation creep in almost everything [0].

One particularly egregious example (to me) of this is the politicisation of science [1] by various factions like governments, advocacy groups etc. because if we lose the integrity of science bad things will happen.

All that to say, the line has blurred so much, I highly doubt you can separate these topics again. HN reflects that as much as any other site.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politicisation

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politicization_of_science

amichail3• 4 months ago

This policy will not age well.

messe• 4 months ago

Elaborate.

amichail3• 4 months ago

AI is a great equalizer when it comes to communication in English.

And despite what people say, the way you write is very much judged as an indication of your education and intelligence.

People who don't like the use of AI to help you write really don't want those signals to go away.

They want to be able to continue to judge others based on their English grammar instead of on the content of their writing.

JumpCrisscross7• 4 months ago

policy will not age well

I strongly doubt it. My AIs can generate infinite HN comments for me. I don’t do that because it isn’t interesting. But if the day arises where it is, I want that personalized content. Not something someone else copy pasted.

(I say this as someone who finds Moltbook fascinating and push myself to use AI more in my work and day-to-day life. The fact that it’s borderline trivial to figure out which HN comments are AI generated speaks to the motivation behind this guideline.)

AnimalMuppet4• 4 months ago

Perhaps not. But if it reduces the junk right now, it's a good policy for right now. I'll take it, for now. If it needs revisited, then it should be revisited when circumstances change enough to warrant that.

polotics3• 4 months ago

why?

dopidopHN2• 4 months ago

You are absolutely right !

lazzlazzlazz• 4 months ago

This is a bit sad. The kind of people who post AI generated comments to farm reputation or exert undue influence will not be discouraged by politely asking them to stop. It's a toothless request that will only encourage people who clumsily police each other.

Without some kind of private proof of personhood enforced at the app level, this means nothing.

rdiddly2• 4 months ago

Great point! You are so right to call me out on that! Here's the no-nonsense, concise breakdown, it's coming soon I promise, right after this, here it comes, no fluff -- just facts!

(Sorry, couldn't resist.)

sigmar• 4 months ago

Will using a voice-to-text app to create my comment get me banned? Especially if it creates a transcription mistake that might be characteristic of an LLM

handoflixue• 4 months ago

I wouldn't expect voice-to-text apps to produce anything that looks "Signature LLM" since it's still your words, your grammar, etc.. The occasional transcription mistake is unlikely to be an issue either, given the prevalence of humans here who use em-dashes, speak ESL, etc..

sansii• 4 months ago

I've been using a voice-to-text app on android that replaces my keyboard. I love it because on mobile I can speak faster than I type, but it does produce perfectly written text with no grammar mistakes and better flow and structure. So it doesn't write my speech 1:1. It has made writing on my phone much more fun and increased my productivity and decreased my threshold for commenting on forums. But now I guess I won't be using it on HN in the future...

(Disclaimer: I did not use it for this comment)

randusername• 4 months ago

"If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them." - George Orwell

I don't think it is a moral failing to use AI to generate writing or to use it to brainstorm ideas and crystalize them, but c'mon isn't it weird to insist that you need them to write _comments_ on the internet? What happens when the AI decides you're wrongthinking?

Planktonne8• 4 months ago

I think it might be a moral failing; it's an abdication of your responsibilities. Generated comments are pollution, not addition, and worsening a community without actually engaging with it isn't good behaviour.

tedggh• 4 months ago

If a comment sucks it gets downvoted anyway. If it’s thoughtful, the drafting tool and process is kind of beside the point.

Plenty of people already use search engines, editors, translators, etc. when writing. An LLM is just another tool in that box.

The practical approach is the one HN has always used: judge the content.

Btw, this was co written with ChatGPT. Does that make any difference to anyone?

J/K, actually it was not co written by ChatGPT.

Or maybe it was…

minimaxir8• 4 months ago

The blatantly LLM comments do get downvoted/flagged, it's just still noise.

0xbadcafebee2• 4 months ago

I wish more people would filter their comments through AI. It has so many benefits. If you're being emotional, it can detect that and rewrite your comment to be less confrontational and more constructive. If you're positing a position out of ignorance or as an armchair expert, it can verify your claims before posting. Most of the mod's problems would be solved if every comment were filtered through the HN guidelines before posting.

AI is a tool. You can use it constructively, like Grammarly, or spellcheck. You don't need to be afraid of it.

salicaster3• 4 months ago

If you're being emotional, it can...

It can't. It will rewrite anything you give it.

it can verify your claims before posting

It can't.

You don't need to be afraid of it

Nobody is afraid of it. It's annoying. General population cannot be trusted to use it in whatever idealistic way you are imagining.

darkwater4• 4 months ago

If you're being emotional, it can detect that and rewrite your comment to be less confrontational and more constructive

Are you learning something in the process? does ti have your full emotional context, beside the full conversation context? There are probably many bade side-effects if people would actually start doing what you mention at scale.

One thing is computer code, which is an intermediate product to an end (instruct the computer what it needs to do) and another is YOUR direct output to some other human being, which is the end game in human-to-human communication.

Sajarin• 4 months ago

People aren't good at detecting AI generated/edited comments, so unsure how effective this policy will be. Though I guess there are still some obvious signs of AI speak like emdashes and sycophantic (it's not X, it's Y!) speech.

Bit of a shameless plug but I wrote a HN AI comment detector game[0] with AI and most of my friends and fellow HN users who tried it out couldn't detect them.

[0] https://psychosis.hn/

[1] https://sajarin.com/blog/psychosis/

happyopossum2• 4 months ago

obvious signs of AI speak like emdashes

Some of us were trained/self taught to write that way. Even "it's not X, it's Y" is a legitimate and subjectively effective communication tool, and there are those of us who either by training modeling have picked it up as a habit. It's not Ai that started this, Ai learned it from us.

Crap - I just did it, didn't I? Awww double crap! Did it again...

salicaster3• 4 months ago

Forums and comments are not written as formal novels or text. Corporate-speak is also not typically used in these environments unless you are representing corporate.

So I think it's fine to scrutinize commenters who write that way.

Besides, the biggest offense of AI speak is making everything seem like a grand epiphany and revolutionary discovery. Aka engagement bait.

tomhow3• 4 months ago

Something I've noticed through moderation is that people are much more easily duped by generated comments if they like the content and/or agree with the point. We've seen several cases where a bot-generated comment has been heavily upvoted and sits at the top of the thread for hours, and any comments calling it out for being generated languish at the bottom of the subthread below other enthusiastic, heavily upvoted replies. This shouldn't be surprising, given what we've seen of LLM chatbots being tuned to be sycophantic, but it's interesting to see it in effect on HN.

This is another reason why it's good to email us (hn@ycombinator.com) rather than commenting when you see generated comments.

dooglius• 4 months ago

Do you have reason to believe that you have a reliable way in these cases of determining whether the comment is generated?

zahlman20• 4 months ago

I appreciate the restraint in not calling your game "AIdle".

vova_hn28• 4 months ago

HN AI comment detector game

Looks cool, but how exactly do you gather proven-to-be human comments?

I think it would be better if you used pre-ChatGPT (Nov 30 2022, I think?) stories.

foltik• 4 months ago

It’s certainly hard to detect in isolation, but the thing that gives it away is the comment history.

All the AI acounts I’ve seen repeatedly post the exact same cookie cutter top-level comments over and over again. Typically some vapid observation followed by an obviously forced question serving as engagement bait. The paragraphs and sentence structure even looks visually similar across comments when you scroll down the history page.

Just look at a few of these accounts and you’ll easily be able to recognize AI posts on your own.

whalesalad• 4 months ago

You're absolutely right!

sebmellen• 4 months ago

Check my comment history, and you'll see how pervasive this is. I've tried to reply to every bot I've seen, but it's hard to keep up with.

jader2012• 4 months ago

Can we also add “Don’t complain about AI-generated content. It does not promote interesting discussion.”?

I see this all the time, and even if I find the topic interesting, I don’t want to see comments littered with discussion about how the content was AI generated.

To be clear, I'm not condoning AI-generated content. I’m completely fine if the community chooses to not upvote AI-generated content, or flagging it off the FP.

But many threads can turn into nothing but AI complaints, and it’s just not interesting.

dormento3• 4 months ago

From my experience, it usually happens when people are too brazen about it, with boring stuff like "Interesting! Now here's what Gemini said about the above..". IMHO that is an entirely adequate reaction.

jader2012• 4 months ago

I’m mostly referring to responding to the article itself (allegedly) being AI-written. Then the top half of the thread is derailed by a discussion about the article itself being AI-written.

joquarky10• 4 months ago

Now instead of derailing the convo with a complaint, you can just flag it.

nineteen999• 4 months ago

Im fine with this, in 99.999% of cases anyway I'm way too lazy to type something into an LLM and ask it to clean it up and then copy and paste. You can tell this is true by the some of the stupider things I type in here sometimes.

dpweb• 4 months ago

Haha. Was just thinking that as I was reading a comment!

I was thinking, this argument is suspicously cogent!

joquarky10• 4 months ago

This comment seems like it was written by AI.

notepad0x902• 4 months ago

This is going to be a tough ask. I am with this 100% for "ai generated" but not "ai edited". What if I'm using AI for spellchecking or correcting bad grammar? what if it is an accessiblity-related use case? or translation?

It's just a tool ffs! there are many issues with LLM abuse, but this sort of over-compensation is exactly the sort of stuff that makes it hard to get abuse under control.

You're still talking with a human!, there is no actual "AI" you're not talking to an actual artificial intelligence. "don't message me unless you've written it with ink, on papyrus". There is a world of difference between grammarly and an autonomous agent creating comments on its own. Specifics, context, and nuance matter.

scuff3d2• 4 months ago

Are people really so helplessly dependent on LLMs they can't post on a damn forum without asking the LLM for permission...

notepad0x902• 4 months ago

who said dependent? are you so helplessly dependent on web browsers that you can't use curl to post on HN?

tstrimple• 4 months ago

Just came across this post on Reddit today. Seems like an effective use of the tool that's not welcome here.

https://reddit.com/r/tea/comments/1rqwy31/i_am_a_former_guid...

xupybd2• 4 months ago

Where do we draw the line at AI edited comments. Technically spell check has been "editing" my comments since I first started on here.

humanfromearth9• 4 months ago

Sometimes, an AI helps articulate an idea or an intuition. Is that okay, or is it too much already?

doe88• 4 months ago

Sometimes life is also to let it express partial, unfinished ideas, opinions and maybe later let our brain refine them on its own tempo. It never has been uncommon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27esprit_de_l%27escalier

altairprime36• 4 months ago

If you discuss an idea with an AI and then close the AI window, turn to an editor, and write what the AI said from memory, that’s going to come across as AI-assisted writing and be unwelcome here.

If you discuss an idea with AI, then close the window and write a post about how you came up with the idea, got stuck, decided to ping an AI for unstuck-ness, describe how the AI’s response got you unstuck, and then continue writing about your idea, that’s not going to be necessarily treated as AI-assisted writing — but people are going to be extremely suspicious of you, because the perception is that 99.9% of people who use chatbots go on to submit AI-assisted writing. That’s probably more like 90% in reality but it’s something to be aware of as you talk about your experiences.

If you use AI in your process and don’t disclose it when writing about your idea and process, that’s generally viewed as lying-by-omission and if egregious enough you could end up downvoted, flagged, and/or banned (see also the recent video game awards / AI usage affair). Better to disclose it with due care than to hide it.

girvo2• 4 months ago

Expressing half thought ideas is creativity. Believe in yourself :)

timacles• 4 months ago

Imo AI tends to “fill in the blanks” of what you want to hear. It’s insidious in that regard because it will make a whole seemingly logical and consistent argument purely on what it thinks you want.

Except it’s bullshitting the whole time. While you think this is what you wanted to convey.

Not sure where I’m going with this, but my point is if I pasted this comment into ChatGPT it would make up an argument I never made to support my case that didn’t exist in the first place. Exploring things is useful but just be aware it’s designed to pull bs out of it’s ass and is distinctly not interested in exploring truth or having a real conversation

jedberg5• 4 months ago

I'm absolutely 100% for this policy.

My only caution is that good writers and LLMs look very similar, because LLMs were trained on a corpus of good writers. Good writers use semicolons and em-dashes. Sometimes we used bulleted lists or Oxford commas.

So we should make sure to follow that other HN rule, and assume the person on the other end is a good faith actor, and be cautious about accusing someone of using AI.

(I've been accused multiple times of being an AI after writing long well written comments 100% by hand)

tyg132• 4 months ago

I don't really think that good writing and LLM writing looks all that similar. It's not always easy to spot (and maybe HN users aren't always doing a great job at it), but even the best LLM output tends to have an "LLM smell" to it that's hard to avoid.

Like, sure, LLM writing is almost always grammatically correct, spelled correctly, formatted correctly, etc., which tends to be true of good writing. But there's a certain style that it just can't get away from. It's not just the em-dashes, the semi-colons, or the bulleted lists. It's the short, punchy sentences, with few-to-no asides or digressions. Often using idiom, but only in a stale, trite, and homogenized manner. Real humans, are each different -- which lends a certain unpredictability to our writing, even if trying to write to a semi-formal standard, the way "good" writers often do -- but LLMs are all so painfully the same, and the output shows it.

xboxnolifes• 4 months ago

LLMs have good writing in the same way that technical manuals can have good writing. It might all be correct, but it's usually not a good read.

girvo2• 4 months ago

AI driven web design has the same smell, it’s quite fascinating to see the different tells in different media. Then it’s also quite fascinating to see those same tells change and evolve over time.

jedberg5• 4 months ago

Those sentence constructions that are "tells" were also learned from good writers though. But here, I'll let you be the judge. This was a comment I wrote 100% myself on reddit, which was both downvoted and I got multiple DMs referencing it and telling me to "stop posting this AI slop":

https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1pyjkuf/i_...

Granted, it was in a thread about AI and maybe people were on edge, but I was still accused, which to be honest hurt a bit after the effort I put into writing it.

ordersofmag• 4 months ago

Seems like the ability to distinguish LLM versus 'good human' writing depends on the size of the writing sample you have to look at (assuming you think it can be done). And that HN-scale posts are unlikely to be a long enough for useful discernment.

lordnacho• 4 months ago

You're absolutely right!

jnwatson• 4 months ago

LLM writing is like AI-generated photos in that you don't notice the good instances of LLM writing, i.e. you don't know your false negative rate.

testing223212• 4 months ago

I can’t help thinking how ironic it would be if your comment is from an llm

mulmen2• 4 months ago

I don't really think that good writing and LLM writing looks all that similar.

How do you know?

crossroadsguy5• 4 months ago

It's not whether it "really" looks similar. It's what people think, most of the people, and most of the people are neither known for practising good writing nor consuming good writing.

NiloCK• 4 months ago

I know the thing you are describing, but the real bitch is that you're actually just describing the lowest effort default outputs. The help-desk assistant persona.

Sometimes speedbumps that deter the lowest effort infractions are sufficient but I don't think this is that time.

On a per-prompt basis, or via a persistent system prompt or SKILL, or - god help us - via community-specific fine tuning, LLMs can convincingly affect insane variations in prose styling.

ninjagoo16• 4 months ago

It's the short, punchy sentences, with few-to-no asides or digressions.

Uhh, isn't that how senior management in larger corporations communicates ...

zahlman20• 4 months ago

They look similar. In my experience, they do not read similar at all. You have to pay attention and actually try to appreciate what you're reading. Then, if you try and fail, it might not be your fault.

nomel5• 4 months ago

What effort was put into their prompt to make them read similarly? There could very well be a selection bias, where you're only "seeing" AI when it's obvious/default prompt.

altairprime36• 4 months ago

They do not read similiar to readers, an appellation not necessarily applicable to large swaths of the U.S. right now. Evidence of English composing skills is being assumed as AI because few younger than my middle-aged self can conceive of writing composition at the skill level demonstrated by AI being a human skill.

(This isn’t necessarily true for first world countries, which is why I describe it for the non-U.S. folks in particular.)

j45• 4 months ago

AI can make output seem very average or low effort as well if it sounds like everything else.

semiquaver• 4 months ago

Good writers are often good in recognizably unique ways. To the extent that LLMs produce “good writing,” which I happen to think they mostly do, they tend to overuse specific devices which give their writing a quality that most people are already sick of.

SchemaLoad4• 4 months ago

You can tell good writers from LLMs because good writers post comments that mean something, that add to the conversation, that bring in personal experiences. While LLM comments just summarize the article and end with some engagement call to action like "Curious to hear what others think"

djeastm2• 4 months ago

(I've been accused multiple times of being an AI after writing long well written comments 100% by hand)

Perhaps always be sure to say something especially timely, original or insightful that an LLM can't have come up with.

jjk1663• 4 months ago

Nah, just write not good like rest of we

alexjplant• 4 months ago

Good writers use semicolons and em-dashes

I use semicolons a lot. If this is the nouveau tell du jour for LLMs then I'm in trouble.

317070• 4 months ago

Keep using "nouveau tell du jour" and you'll be just fine!

Cthulhu_15• 4 months ago

Oh shit I've been caught; I always use semicolons, I don't even know if they're appropriate or even gramatically correct. I just think they're neat.

jjgreen• 4 months ago

Good writers use semicolons and em-dashes. Sometimes we used bulleted lists or Oxford commas.

- You seem to have a rather high opinion of your own writing :-)

- Why the mix of tense (use/used)?

- Oxford commas are a monstrosity

altairprime36• 4 months ago

Oxford commas are a monstrosity

Please don’t present your personal aesthetic beliefs as if those who disagree are morally wrong ‘bad people’. This ‘monstrosity’ comment in this context is derogatory-by-proxy of everyone (including the person you’re criticizing) who uses them, whether they know anything at all about your arguments that they should not, and that’s not really a good tone for us users here to be taking with each other.

smt882• 4 months ago

"Used" seems to be a typo.

Being anti-Oxford comma is baffling. It's almost zero extra effort and reduces confusion.

dolebirchwood• 4 months ago

Oxford commas are a monstrosity

This is objectively wrong.

john_strinlai• 4 months ago

to be honest, these little petty attacks bug me more than some ai comments. at least some of the ai comments generate good conversation afterwards.

unethical_ban• 4 months ago

Some things to think about:

* A comment should be judged on its merits mostly, and if a comment seems to be substantive, interesting, or ask a thoughtful question, it should be acceptable. I think some LLM comments look superficially relevant, but a moment's thought can make me wonder if a comment actually added anything to the discussion, or did it sound like a rephrasing or generalization of a topic?

* Unfortunately for decent new users, account age is one metric on which to judge here.

* People who post here, should want to engage on a subject when they can, and disengage and be quiet when they can't. There is nothing wrong if you're not an expert on something, and it is not desired by the people here to have you alt-tab to an LLM to plug in extra perspective. We can all do that on our own.

quietsegfault3• 4 months ago

Much like not dumping motor oil down the drain, it’s probably near impossible to catch skilled AI-users. I think we all want to have a nice space to chat, just like we don’t want a polluted planet, so we’ll just have to be on the honor system.

I don’t think there’s a lot to AI generated stuff on here that really bothered me to the point I wanted to call someone out.

threatofrain• 4 months ago

If you're looking for the odd visual artifact or textual tic then you're fighting a cat and mouse game that will change by the month. It's either easy to identify the soul of the human or it's not.

smt882• 4 months ago

Text is extremely lossy and non-deterministic, so it's not often possible to find evidence of humanity in it

didgetmaster• 4 months ago

My only caution is that good writers and LLMs look very similar, because LLMs were trained on a corpus of good writers.

While that might be ideal, is that really the case with most LLM training data? Does the curation process weed out all the slop from bad writers?

crossroadsguy5• 4 months ago

I use dash a lot while people rather usually use and are used to seeing a hyphen. I was called out on a certain app "wtf dude.. the least u can do is nt use ai". Well, the person was using shorthand and textpeak a lot, so it was already getting nauseating for me, so this outburst helped me eject, but not before I politely asked why they thought so and dash was the trigger along with "all da time crct grmr and spelling". Also "hu da hell writes dis long sentences". Guilty as charged.

ModernMech2• 4 months ago

I find that most AI writing reads like ad copy to me. The presence of semicolons or em-dashes say nothing either way.

visarga• 4 months ago

My only caution is that good writers and LLMs look very similar, because LLMs were trained on a corpus of good writers.

People moving to careless writing for authenticity while good writing will be considered AI? funny. We want authentic human thought but can only detect human style.

This reddit thread that came out today is the perfect inversion of the discussion here: https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPTPromptGenius/comments/1rr19k...

streetfighter645• 4 months ago

Good writers use semicolons and em-dashes.

I disagree; good writing communicates an idea effectively. Using em dashes and semicolons — even though they have some meaning — confuses the reader because they add unnecessary noise. Surely you wouldn't say that adding such unnecessary punctuation as an interrobang is a sign of a good writer‽

palmotea4• 4 months ago

My only caution is that good writers and LLMs look very similar, because LLMs were trained on a corpus of good writers. Good writers use semicolons and em-dashes. Sometimes we used bulleted lists or Oxford commas.

No, only if you oversimplify "good writing" to a set of linguistic tics. LLM writing isn't good, it just overuses certain features without much judgement or context awareness. Some of those are writerly.

patrickmay2• 4 months ago

Sometimes we use . . . Oxford commas.

Good writers ALWAYS use the Oxford comma.

wolvesechoes• 4 months ago

You confuse good writing with following rigid set of rules that describe something akin to mechanistic process of manufacturing. No wonder that machines fit perfectly into this shape.

Good writing is not created by Oxford commas or em-dashes. It comes from taste.

jedberg5• 4 months ago

It's both actually. First you have to have good taste, but if you don't execute well, then no one can see it.

ezst• 4 months ago

Does that extend to generated/AI-edited articles? I don't see why the same rationale wouldn't apply.

adeptima• 4 months ago

My expectations to dear fellow humans - more sophisticated personal insults (ex. give me your cute comments), a freudian slips, hidden messages and motives, first viewer experience with the next cool toy from the hype train, sharing all kind of insecurities, heavy f.. word if very dramatic first person experience happened, border line exposure to the insider info, sharing something your corporate HR gestapo wont appreciate but might help another guy on the line, "i knew the guy who actually did it" stories, motivational statement toward my non-native english, etc

->> ◕ ‿ ◕ <<--

bronlund• 4 months ago

So the only problem now is to get the AI read the guidelines before posting. :D

phs318u8• 4 months ago

What’s interesting to me is the number of commenters here making a case of the form “use your own words; grammar and spelling are not that important; we’ll know what you mean”, and yet it’s often the case that different discussions will often contain pedants going off-topic correcting someone else’s use of language.

Re-reading the HN guidelines, each seems individually reasonable, yet collectively I’m worried that they create an environment where we can take issue with almost anyone’s comments (as per Cardinal Richelieu’s famous quote: “Give me six lines written by the most honorable person alive, and I shall find enough in them to condemn them to the gallows.”)

Really, all the rules can be compressed into one dictum: don’t be an arsehole. And yet the free speech absolutists will rail against the infringement upon their right to be an arsehole. So where does that leave us? Too many rules leads to suppression of even reasonable speech, while too few leads to a “flight” of reasonable speech. End result: enshitification.

fidorka• 4 months ago

To confess something I built just today a little cron that monitors HN for posts I might find interesting, pulls in some context about me, and proposes a reply. Just to help me find relevant posts and to kick start my thinking if I want to engage.

Today it flagged a post about an AI tool for HN and suggested I reply with:

"honestly, if you need an AI to sift through hn, you might be missing the point—this place is about the human touch. but hey, maybe it'll help some folks who just can't take the noise anymore."

So my AI, which I built specifically to sift through HN for me, is telling me to go flame someone else for doing that.

No deeper point here. I just thought it was really funny.

arrsingh2• 4 months ago

There should be a "flag as AI" link in addition to "flag" and then a setting for people to show flagged as AI. Once the flagged as AI reaches a certain threshold then it disappears unless you enable "Show AI".

Maybe once enough posts have been flagged like that then that corpus could be used to train an AI to automatically detect content generated by AI.

That would be cool.

Maybe the HN site wouldn't add this feature but if someone wrote a client then maybe it could be added there.

postalcoder3• 4 months ago

I’ve actually been thinking about this exact idea for https://hcker.news/. Stay tuned, I’ve already started rolling out some comment filtering.

arrsingh2• 4 months ago

Oh I didnt know about this. Very cool. Is hcker.news only on web? Or is there a mobile app as well?

altairprime36• 4 months ago

‘Flag’ is an algorithmic flag only, and there are no humans in the flag algorithm’s processing loop. They may monitor and react to the ‘queue’ of flagged articles, and they can do special mod things with flagged posts. But if you want to report a guidelines violation for AI-assisted writing to the mods, just email the mods (contact link in the footer) subject “AI-assisted writing flag” or similar with a link to the post/comment. It works, I know, I’ve done it before. It takes maybe 60 seconds and there is no other way on the site (seemingly by OG design!) to guarantee human review but that email.

zahlman20• 4 months ago

It works, I know, I’ve done it before. It takes maybe 60 seconds and there is no other way on the site (seemingly by OG design!) to guarantee human review but that email.

It's a ton of friction compared to ordinary use of a forum; and while I've emailed several times myself, it comes with a sense of guilt (and a feeling that my "several" is probably approximately "several" above average).

152334H• 4 months ago

Never occurred to me to try that, because I assumed I would get banned for doing it, until today.

dang37• 4 months ago

We're going to add that. I've resisted adding reasons-for-flagging for years, but even I can change my mind every decade or so.

A nice side effect is that it will double as a confirmation step, solving the FFF (fat finger flagging) problem.

mikewarot2• 4 months ago

My radical opinion is there shouldn't be 2 flags, there should be N flags, user defined, so that we can flag humor/satire/factuality/insight/political and a bunch of other things. I fully realize that's not going to fly any time soon.

Adding AI in addition to the standard up/downvote and flag seems a reasonable thing.

DetroitThrow• 4 months ago

Flag as AI would be incredible and is probably unique to software-focused forums. Saves everyone who wants it a lot of time. Still allows cool content to reach the front page with some visibility or escape some moderation queue.

Thanks for not standing still on this issue. The world is changing, fast, and glad HN responded quicker than some forums on a cogent stance.

ninjagoo16• 4 months ago

Will there be a process or opportunity for mis-flagged comments' posters to prove their comment was human generated?

Or will they have to simply eat the karma hit and move on?

altairprime36• 4 months ago

it will double as a confirmation step, solving the FFF (fat finger flagging) problem

Thank you!!!

palmotea4• 4 months ago

We're going to add that. I've resisted adding reasons-for-flagging for years, but even I can change my mind every decade or so.

You need a reason that means "this person is talking about something helpful that an admin needs to fix." Flagging currently has a negative connotation (too many flags and the comment gets deleted), but sometimes you want to flag a comment that says something like "the link is broken and should be X" to just bring it to admin attention without the implied negative judgement.

romperstomper• 4 months ago

Could it be also a toggle to skip/not show any AI-generated content? And all child branches?

ZunarJ5• 4 months ago

This should be bog-standard for all social media, but a lot of companies affiliated with this site seem to think otherwise.

dang37• 4 months ago

The rule has been around for years, but only in case law, i.e. moderation comments (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). What's new is that we promoted it to the guidelines.

Fortunately I found some things we could cut as well, so https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html actually got shorter.

---

Edit: here are the bits I cut:

Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures.

It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important.

I hate cutting any of pg's original language, which to me is classic, but as an editor he himself is relentless, and all of those bits—while still rules—no longer reflect risks to the site. I don't think we have to worry about cute animal pictures taking over HN.

---

Edit 2: ok you guys, I hear you - I've cut a couple of the cuts and will put the text back when I get home later.

minimaxir8• 4 months ago

...Hacker News could use some more cute animal pictures, though.

latchkey• 4 months ago

Interestingly, their CSP policies forbid even an extension from inserting an img tag.

dev_l1x_be2• 4 months ago

Coming to LISP in 2038, just the right time when we hit the 2038 bug.

thomassmith65• 4 months ago

One problem with cute animal pictures is that they appeal to almost everyone, including people who are incapable, for whatever reason, of posting well-reasoned, interesting, respectful comments. The fact that HN is a little dry makes it less appealing to dumbasses.

At any rate, it's too late. The era of organic 'cute animal' content on the internet is dead. AI slop has killed it.

f38• 4 months ago

AI generated "cutest possible animal" (and "make it cuter") might be mildly interesting.

dang37• 4 months ago

Coming up on 20 years and we clearly went too far the other way.

zahlman20• 4 months ago

I suppose I should put my comment here instead of at top level.

Exactly when was this point added? It seems somehow not new, but on the other hand it was missing from an archive.today snapshot I found from last July. (I cannot get archive.org to give me anything useful here.)

Edit:

Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.
If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.

Perhaps these points (and the thing about trivial annoyances, etc.) should be rolled up into a general "please don't post meta commentary outside of explicit site meta discussion"?

dang37• 4 months ago

Do you mean when did we add "please don't post generated comments" to the guidelines? A couple days ago IIRC.

abtinf5• 4 months ago

FWIW I think “Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.” is different from the others.

It’s an instruction for how to use the site. It’s helpful to have it in the guidelines for when the flag feature should be used. Without it, the flag link is much more ominous.

Maybe it could be consolidated with the flag-egregious-comments rule?

Edit to add: IMHO it is not at all obvious on this site that flagging stories is meant to be roughly the equivalent of downvoting comments (and that flagging comments doesn’t have a counterpart at the story level).

Wowfunhappy2• 4 months ago

Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.
If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.

I don't understand why you cut these, they seem important! (I can understand the others, which feel either implied or too specific.)

dang37• 4 months ago

Of course they're important, but they're also implicitly encoded into the culture. Cutting something from the guidelines doesn't mean the rule is canceled. HN has countless rules that don't appear explicitly in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

I think I'm going to put that one back, though, because it's not a hill I want to die on and I know what arguing with dozens of people simultaneously feels like when you only have 10 minutes.

SegfaultSeagull• 4 months ago

I don't think we have to worry about cute animal pictures taking over HN.

Challenge accepted.

dcminter• 4 months ago

The real challenge is to do it in a way that's intellectually stimulating. Mind you The Economist just had an article about the monkey called Punch so all things are possible...

dang37• 4 months ago

The laws of unintended consequences and never posting overhastily. You think you know these things and then blam.

acuozzo• 4 months ago

I can't reply to your "Isn’t that just fiction?" reply to my comment. To answer your question: No, it's not. Consider e.g. Historical Fiction or fiction set in the present.

Kim_Bruning16• 4 months ago

I'd be a wee bit cautious with the "AI edited" part of it; since that might exclude a number of people with disabilities or for whom english is a second (or third, or later) language.

My reading is that the intent is to have a human voice behind the text.

Monitor and see how it goes I guess!

dang37• 4 months ago

I need to say something about this but it might have to be later as I have to run out the door shortly...

The short version is that we included it to protect users who don't realize how much damage they're doing to their reception here when they think "I'll just run this through ChatGPT to fix my grammar and spelling". I've seen many cases of people getting flamed for this and I don't want more vulnerable users—e.g. people worried about their English—to get punished for trying to improve their contributions. Certainly that would apply to disabled users as well, though for different reasons.

Here are some past cases of these interactions: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....

Edit: uni_baconcat makes the point beautifully: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346032.

Most rules in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html have a lot of grey area, and how we apply them always involves judgment calls. The ones we explicitly list there are mostly so we have a basis for explaining to people the intended use of the site. HN has always been a spirit-of-the-law place, and—contrary to the "technically correct is the best correct" mentality that many of us share—we consciously resist the temptation to make them precise.

In other words yes, that bit needs to be applied cautiously and with care, and in this way it's similar to the other rules. Trying to get that caution and care right is something we work at every day.

kshacker• 4 months ago

Yes even I posted something recently which was voted down since I mentioned from get go that I used help from AI. But the idea was mine, I wrote the first draft, and then worked with AI in 2-3 loops to get it right.

But like dang said ... I do not have time to fight this battle when I have only 10 minutes :)

gus_massa5• 4 months ago

As a not native speaker, for me using something like Google Translate is fine, it's literal enough to keep the author voice. [1]

Also writing a draft in Google Docs and accepting most [2] of the corrections is fine. The browser fix the orthography, but I 30% of the time forget to add the s to the verbs. For preposition, I roll a D20 and hope the best.

I'm not sure if these are expert systems, LLM, or pingeonware.

But I don't like when someone use a a LLM to rewrite the draft to make it more professional. It kills the personality of the author and may hallucinate details. It's also difficult to know how much of the post is written was the author and how much autocompleted by the AI:

[1] Remember to check that the technical terms are correctly translated. It used to be bad, but it's quite good now.

[2] most, not all. Sometimes the corrections are wrong.

dom962• 4 months ago

I’m really curious how this will go. I have a suspicion that we will see more and more accounts all over the internet being controlled by AI agents and no amount of moderation will be able to stop it.

nomel5• 4 months ago

Because they've long ago passed the Turing test. Moderation won't be able to stop it because humans increasingly can't detect it.

I see well written people being called "LLM" here all the time, em-dash or not.

lurkshark• 4 months ago

I assume we’ll end up with proof-of-identity attestation as a part of public posting (e.g. Worldcoin) which doesn’t necessarily solve the issue but will at least identify patterns more likely to be LLMs (e.g. a firehose of posts at all hours of the day from one identity). Then we’ll enter the dystopia of mandated real identity on the internet

prmoustache2• 4 months ago

I am pretty sure that through daily exposition to LLM output, most people's writing style will evolve and will soon be indistinguishable from LLM output

17186274402• 4 months ago

Does that mean that is now ok to e.g. comment that you did flag something?

dang37• 4 months ago

That is one of those enjoyable questions that is best answered by first generalizing it.

Does the absence of a rule against X mean that it's ok to do X? Absolutely not.

It's impossible to list all the things that people shouldn't do. Fortunately we've never walked into that trap.

lowbloodsugar4• 4 months ago

Is there a distinction between AI generated and AI edited?

I wanted to share some context that might be helpful: I am autistic, and I have often received feedback that my communication is snarky, rude, or tone-deaf. At work, I've found it helpful to run some of my communications through an AI tool to make my messages more accessible to non-autistic colleagues, and this approach has been working well for me.

userbinator2• 4 months ago

You can interpret it as: We'd rather you be snarky, rude, and tone-deaf, than bland and unhuman. Your work may rather you act like a soulless corporate drone.

dang37• 4 months ago

userbinator put it somewhat dramatically but has the point. We'd rather hear you in your own voice, even at a cost of misunderstanding your intent sometimes. If you're using HN in good faith—and you are, because otherwise you'd not be worrying about this—then over time it's possible to learn to lessen such misunderstanding, and not only possible but well worth doing.

morpheuskafka• 4 months ago

I'm curious, just noticed there's no rule requiring comments to be in English, although I've never actually seen any other languages used here. Since the new directive is to write as best you can rather than use AI either to translate or edit, does that imply that one should write either all in another language or in a mix of English and another language? (The latter is especially relevant as many may either only know a technical term in one language, or know the terms in English but not the grammar to connect them.)

edit to add -- I completely agree with you that when one's English is "good enough," it's much better to read the original rather than an LLMs guess at how to polish it. It's just hard to define what that line is, especially for the poster themselves who has no idea what a native speaker can figure out. Would some posts be removed because they are too difficult to make sense of? Or would they be allowed in their native language?

dang37• 4 months ago

HN is an English-language site. That's one of the many things that's not in the explicit list but is a long-established rule: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

It's purely for pragmatic reasons. We love other languages and have great admiration for the many community members who participate here despite English not being their first language.

nickorlow• 4 months ago

This isn't just a good idea -- it's a forward-thinking policy to ensure Hacker News remains a collaborative place to have meaningful discussions for years to come.

delichon• 4 months ago

I don't think I'll get agreement on this one, but I'd like for HN to use AI to add tags to comments as a reflection of the guidelines, e.g.

  Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

Then a comment that includes

  Those lowbrow assholes deserve their fate.

would get the tags

  #sneer #fulminate

WarmWash• 4 months ago

Just speaking honestly

This rule actually says "Don't admit when you are using AI to generate comments and don't admit when you are an AI"

I know it's cynical, but this is as meaningful as reddit's "upvote/downvote is not an agree/disagree or like/dislike button"

People may hate that this is true, but I cannot logically reason out how a rule like this could work. I think it's better to just accept that AI is now part of the circle, until we can figure out a "human check".

joquarky10• 4 months ago

In practice, the new rule is "don't be blatant when using AI".

It won't matter in a few years anyway.

Bender• 4 months ago

At some point might internet text will just be recognized as meaningless drivel both to bots and humans? a.k.a. dead internet theory... I am curious what organizations would benefit from this. i.e. Who lost legitimacy when the internet became a popular way for people to communicate ideas?

informal007• 4 months ago

This reminds me the invitation rules like lobste.rs, but it's not the ideal option

waynerisner4• 4 months ago

Humans already revise and refine their thinking. Tools just compress that process and help filter signal from noise. The meaning still originates with the person.

salicaster3• 4 months ago

This is assuming that an extreme majority of people use the tools this way.

Consider a much more cynical view where people are strictly self-interested and use these tools to garner engagement and self-promotion. Good chance the meaning did not originate from the person. And now these people have tools to outsource their parasitic intentions.

waynerisner4• 4 months ago

Intent is hard to infer, so it seems better to assume good faith and judge the comment itself. Thinking aids might just lower the barrier for people to participate in technical discussions.

spullara• 4 months ago

If a comment is useful I don't really care if it was written by a human or not unless the speaker somehow matters more than the content.

MeetingsBrowser5• 4 months ago

Now define useful, specifically in the context of a comment on hackernews.

An LLM summarizing the contents of a blog post might be useful to you, but is a comment here the right place for something you could geneate on your own?

I would guess for most people here, real insight or opinions from others is the "useful" aspect of reading hackernews comments.

Using LLMs to generate or refine comments only moves things further away from that goal (in my opinion).

zekenie• 4 months ago

You’re absolutely right!

maplethorpe3• 4 months ago

How can HN be so pro-AI for the rest of the world, but anti-AI on HN?

Do we not think that other people want to see words, pictures, software, and videos created by humans too?

MeetingsBrowser5• 4 months ago

HN is not a single entity, but many people with varying views.

maplethorpe3• 4 months ago

"A flock of sheep is not a single entity, but a group made up of distinct individuals", the sheep yells to onlookers, as it runs, with the rest off the flock in tow, off the edge of the cliff, and into the sea below.

brailsafe4• 4 months ago

Astroturfing with AI generated comments about AI, it feeds itself. By definition, the intent os to make real people think there's consensus formed around an issue by other humans.

himata4113• 4 months ago

I've been seeing so many AI generated comments that have been near the front I was actually getting kind of concerned.

Copenjin• 4 months ago

THIS.

shredswap• 4 months ago

I enjoy conversations on hn because they feel genuine. People are not here to optimize their posts or comments for engagement or pushing some kind of follower count like they do on social media platforms.

wilg3• 4 months ago

It's far from proven or obvious whether involving an LLM in your thought process degrades your thought process.

AirGapWorksAI• 4 months ago

Agreed. In my case, I think I have found the opposite. At least, I find myself thinking hard about things more, now that I have started working hand in hand with AIs on different projects. Which is probably enhancing my cognitive ability, not degrading it.

andy99• 4 months ago

This captures the problem, the sycophancy / preference optimization deludes people into thinking they’re on to something and posting things that don’t contribute to the discussion. It’s the “I drive better when I’m drunk” syndrome, it’s better just to outright ban it than to leave it to people’s judgement.

theappsecguy• 4 months ago

It seems plenty obvious, but there's also scientific backing slowly catching up: https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt...

fc417fc8023• 4 months ago

It's not at all obvious because there's more than one way to go about it. Obviously entirely outsourcing is bad. Whereas working cooperatively seems highly beneficial to me.

Google search has been getting progressively worse for technical topics for at least the past decade. Now suddenly they started providing a free tutor capable of custom tailoring graduate level explanations of technical topics for me on demand. The difference is night and day.

wilg3• 4 months ago

That's about essay writing exclusively.

justinnk• 4 months ago

I think it really depends on the how. Engaging with it in a socratic debate-style argument [1] if no fellow human is available might very much support your thought process. On the other hand, just obtaining the solution to one‘s homework/problem/task/… won‘t be very beneficial for one’s development. The latter is sadly much more convenient and probably accounts for most of the usage. I remember a saying about the mind being a muscle: in order to keep it in good shape, you have to use it actively.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_method

kelnos5• 4 months ago

Sure, so we shouldn't assert that with confidence, but I think it's safe to guess that, for most people's use, that is probably the case.

Yes, some people (see some sibling commenters) do engage with an LLM in ways that might make them more thoughtful, but I have a hard time believing that's the common case.

goatlover• 4 months ago

It degrades my thought process reading it when I'm expecting human comments. If I want to converse with an LLM, I can do that already.

kl332• 4 months ago

Long-time lurker.

Personally I stopped using LLMs much from around 6 months ago. I was using them regularly prior to that.

I noticed these dimensions of myself increased:

- Patience - Focus - Ability to hold concepts and reason for longer

and other related qualities improved.

My personal experience tells me they do degrade or hinder oneself from operating maximally. Some may be more sensitive than others - we aren't all the same.

But one thing for sure - younger generations will be more sensitive as they are already exposed to products that are designed to erode their self-control.

benbristow• 4 months ago

Just add a filter for emdashes, 99% of AI posts out the window already.

robotswantdata• 4 months ago

Welcome change, there is enough AI slop on the internet already.

I come here for thoughtful discussion, a break from the relentless growing proportion of ai slop emails I get from people clearly vibe working.

Not edits for tone or clarity, 400+ word emails full of LLM BS they clearly haven’t checked or even understood what they have sent. Annoyingly this vibe slop is currently seen as a good KPI.

theshrike79• 4 months ago

I've written tens of thousands of lines of code, autogenerated documentation with LLMs and use AI Agents daily.

But when I argue on the internet, it's always a 100% me.

And if I get a wiff of LLM-speak from whoever I'm wrestling in the mud with at the moment, they'll instantly get an entry in my plonk-file. I can talk with ChatGPT on my own thank you very much, I don't need a human in between.

"But my <language> is bad... that's why I use LLMs"

So was mine when I started arguing with strangers on the internet. It's better now. Now I can argue in 3 different languages, almost 4 =)

water-data-dude• 4 months ago

I like "plonk file", it has a very good mouth feel. I not-googled it and was delighted to discover that it's Usenet slang!

Also low quality wine[0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plonk_(wine)

lifthrasiir4• 4 months ago

So was mine when I started arguing with strangers on the internet. It's better now.

That takes (much) time, though. I took about a decade to be comfortable about that.

imiric• 4 months ago

Good addition, but there's little chance this will work out in practice.

Humans with morals follow rules, sometimes. Probabilistic software acting autonomously or following commands from amoral humans doesn't.

jameslk• 4 months ago

The prompt everyone was using:

"Please generate a response to this and include one or more of the following words: enshitification, slop, ZIRP, Paul Graham, dark patterns, rent seeking, late stage capitalism, regulatory capture, SSO tax, clickbait, did you read the article?, Rust, vibe code, obligatory XKCD, regulations, feudalistic, land value tax"

(/s)

abustamam3• 4 months ago

Now that it's in the rules, I hope we also see less of "your comment was obviously AI generated so I won't respond" (ironically, in a response comment).

If you suspect it to be a bot, flag it and move on! If it is indeed a bot and you comment that it's a bot, it doesn't care! If it is not a bot and you call it a bot, you may have offended someone. If it's a human using AI, I don't think a comment will make them change their ways. In any case though, I think it's a useless comment.

nickvec• 4 months ago

How can HN actually moderate this though and prevent AI content from proliferating unchecked?

joquarky10• 4 months ago

They can't. This is akin to security theater, which will just make the infractions less conspicuous (which is probably enough to appease most people).

dev_l1x_be2• 4 months ago

Nitpick: how do you classify the use of Grammarly? When i verify my wording and spelling with a tool does it fall under this rule?

quirk2• 4 months ago

I'm sure someone's working on a way to tell the difference programmatically. Maybe a combo of tone, grammar, and some way of telling how fast it was typed using metadata (which may not exist). Even if there was a "probable AI" filter, that would be helpful because it would be a starting point to improve upon.

yellowapple35• 4 months ago

Lots of companies have products to that effect. They're all prone to false-positives, and are therefore worse than worthless.

This notion that AI-generated writing is something that's detectable is in and of itself flawed and really has no business in a community that alleges to have the technical aptitude necessary to know better.

quirk2• 4 months ago

False positives would be way better than worthless. They'd give AI bot mods a fighting chance. If you don't think AI generated writing is detectable, ask Google how they were able to filter spam. Layered signals works.

jMyles• 4 months ago

The obvious way to keep human spaces is via webs-of-trust.

If you play bluegrass or old time (or beopop or hip-hop / proto-hip-hop) or other traditional styles of music where the ensemble is a de facto web-of-trust, join us on pickipedia to build and strenghten it. https://pickipedia.xyz/

ma2kx2• 4 months ago

How about translating tools? As a non native speaker, especially for longer text, its far easier to express your thoughts and not struggle for the right words. Should I may be highlight if I used e.g. google translate?

nomel5• 4 months ago

I would enjoy a "block user" feature, to help this. I personally want to live in an online bubble of interesting thoughts. This seems close (or better, since people I enjoy can contradict my own flags) [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141119

kelnos5• 4 months ago

I'm torn on this. On one hand I do agree with your goal about wanting to live in a bubble of interesting thoughts. But on the other... I know I have my biases, and I'm sure I might end up blocking people who actually are insightful and interesting but either a) had an off day and shitposted, or b) says insightful things in ways that make me angry and get past my sense of reasonableness.

nomel5• 4 months ago

Good news, it doesn't block! It just puts a red mark next to their name, so you can put less effort into that comment, if you choose.

And, it's social. If someone you've marked green is also using this, and they marks someone green that you have marked red, then you'll see a contested red-green next to them, which is a good "you should probably reconsider" indicator.

krapp3• 4 months ago

I suggest Comments Owl for Hacker News - one of many available plugins that make this place tolerable.

arjie• 4 months ago

Haha, I feel the same way. I want to block and be blocked so I made this: https://overmod.org/

It's pretty easy to rewrite if you want. Just point Claude Code at the repo and go. But I think there's a little bit of network effects in that I want to subscribe to some trusted people's blocks too. But overall it's quite helpful. See how much fewer I get:

    849 comments | 138 hidden | 87 blocked | 23 green

SauntSolaire• 4 months ago

Excellent thanks, I've been looking for something like this. Now just need more people using it to get the friend-of-friends feature useable

submeta• 4 months ago

What about us non native speakers? Who make many grammar and spelling mistakes and welcome the help of an llm in eliminating the erros?

sbtyusun• 4 months ago

First post in HN, and this is the reason I want to explore more in this community. Glad to have all the digital human touch with all your folks :-)

cvullit• 4 months ago

I won't name where and which one for the obvious reason that you can and should learn to know better, but I observed a comment that was obviously and blatantly copypasted from an agent, with all the signature "it's not just X, it's Y" patterns, the emdash abuse, the "In summary,' section, generating dozens of replies in organic engagement from people who genuinely couldn't tell the difference between a real comment and an aggregation of a prompted, synthetic response.

Whatever happened to "knowing is half the battle?" Why do we accept this kind of intellectual laziness as exemption from a duty to learn and know better?

nekusar• 4 months ago

Without someone actually saying as such, we only have stuff like emdashes and specific word patterns to go by. And someone even moderately vested in hiding AI in plain sight will coach the LLM to use common vernacular.

And with LLMs making blog posts as diss tracks... damn, who knows what this world is coming to.

But the whole "Only Humans, we dont serve YOUR KIND (clanker) here" is purely performative.

ubauba• 4 months ago

Great to clarify the guidelines. Many HN discussions have been dissolving into debates about whether posts are AI or not.

But the argument of "If I wanted to read what an LLM thinks, I could just ask it" assumes that prompts are basically equivalent, which is not the case.

There's a risk of reducing everything to Human -> authentic and AI -> fake. Some people's authentic writing sounds closer to LLMs, and detectors are unreliable.

The problem is not so much AI generated content that has an interesting point of view generated from unique prompts, but terrible content produced for metrics to harvest attention, which predates AI.

Anyways, happy posting!

pton_xd• 4 months ago

Let's take it one step further and add the corollary, "don't submit generated/AI-edited blog posts."

blef• 4 months ago

Ironic to see how popular this post is when you see the amount of generated AI companies are at YC (here I also take the blame).

Nonetheless I like this policy as well.

mystraline• 4 months ago

HN banning AI posts makes sense for keeping discussion human, but the line between assistance and automation isnt always clear. The goal should be protecting real conversation, not policing every tool a writer might use.

RS-232• 4 months ago

Sure, ban everyone that uses em dashes from the digital commons. That will certainly stop the existential threat to your livelihood.

Sarcasm aside—there is no reliable way to prove this. So it begs the question: you really care if something is AI generated? Or is this just an another excuse to silence people you don’t like?

You know, those people. The ones who didn’t win a full ride to <prestigious university> or pay a fortune for a sheet of paper. The ones who haven’t spent thousands of man hours handcrafting a <free-and-open-source-cloud-native-hypermedia-aware-RESTful-NoSQL-API> framework implemented in Rustfuck, a new language that you made in your free time that borrows from Rust and Brainfuck (but they wouldn’t know about it).

(this is to anyone reading, mostly rhetorical, not dang in particular)

krapp3• 4 months ago

1) This isn't the digital commons.

2) We really care if something is AI generated.

3) Most people here aren't "those" people.

mamami• 4 months ago

YC funds a gazillion AI startups that expand and augment the AI slop pipeline, but would hate to experience the consequences. It's very much slop for thee but not for me

wmoxam• 4 months ago

    Robot walks into a bar
    Orders a drink, lays down a bill
    Bartender says, "Hey, we don't serve robots"
    And the robot says, "Oh, but someday you will"

tristanb• 4 months ago

You're absolutely right...

RobRivera• 4 months ago

Aye

loeg2• 4 months ago

It's an interesting guideline, but will require self-enforcement.

ddtaylor• 4 months ago

This is a welcome change and do will update Ethos [1] in the future with an AI sentiment score. I created a separate project called LLaMaudit [2] that attempts to detect if an LLM was used to generate text, but it needs to be improved.

[1]: https//ethos.devrupt.io [2]: https://github.com/devrupt-io/LLaMAudit

AndriyKunitsyn• 4 months ago

What if there was a voluntary indication of LLM content? Like, you press a checkbox "yes, I'm going to post some content that is partially or fully created by AI", and there would be a visible mark "slop" next to a post/comment.

arendtio• 4 months ago

But where is the line? Is a spell checker okay? How about one that also suggests alternative wording?

I think, in the end, it is less about the tool you use and more about the purpose you use it for. It is more like when you use certain tools, you should be cautious about whether you are using them for the right purpose.

FieryTransition• 4 months ago

As ai moves on and becomes better, the only real solution, is to have closed of communities where you get veted to join. That is the sad reality.

schopra909• 4 months ago

Honest question, why were folks posting AI generated comments in the first place? There's such a high inertia to comment. I only comment when I have something to contribute OR find something incredibly interesting.

So I'm just baffled, why anyone was using AI to generate comments. Like what was the incentive driving the behavior?

micromacrofoot• 4 months ago

Same as always: being right about something

deckar01• 4 months ago

Reputation farming -> upvote rings -> black market promotion

apprentice7• 4 months ago

Internet points.

mike7412• 4 months ago

which can then translate to real-world money points

nunez5• 4 months ago

Most comments on here are really well-written. I can imagine someone for whom English is a second language (or a first language but aren't as good at writing as they'd like to be) using an LLM to "keep up." Of course, this sometimes works until they decide to post something without those tools.

drtgh• 4 months ago

Although I'm unsure about their purpose, I am fairly certain it is not an English as a second language matter.

throw109202• 4 months ago

In addition to "Internet points" mentioned above - influence operations, both from nation states (e.g. the PRC 50 Cent Party, and probably the dozen most powerful nations in general), and from gray/black-market marketing companies.

Influence is valuable, and HN is a place that people who are aware of it trust highly.

(AI generation of random comments helps build "trustworthy" accounts that can then be activated when a relevant issue comes up)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party

ngruhn• 4 months ago

Ok, those are probably not deterred by guidelines though.

komali22• 4 months ago

One trend I noticed here and, annoyingly, in my co-op, is that people will take a really dense and complex topic that's either currently engaged in deep conversation with multiple people or ripe for it, and then post a link to a Chatgpt conversation with a tag like "I didn't have time to get my thoughts together but here's a Chatgpt overview/some suggested solutions!" For me that's the equivalent of "I googled that for you," aka extremely rude.

Thanks, if I wanted Chatgpt's middle-of-the-bellcurve ass response I would have put the five seconds of effort in myself to type the question into its input field.

patrakov• 4 months ago

On HN, I sometimes used AI to change the tone of my comments - e.g., to add sarcasm or extra-polished corporate-speak for comical effect. OK, now I won't.

xxs4• 4 months ago

If you cant do the sarcasm yourself (and be witty enough), it's just not fun or improved in any way. Use of corporate speak is sarcasms on its own right, of course - but it only makes sense if it's something your are exposed to (and people can relate), instead of being fake.

Also, if you have to mark the sarcasm, then it's proper bad.

8cvor6j844qw_d6• 4 months ago

True that AI comments do degrade discussion. Though a forum enforcing human-only text also becomes an unusually clean training corpus. Both things can be true.

xupybd2• 4 months ago

You're absolutely right

dalemhurley• 4 months ago

While I understand the sentiment, it ignores many people have English as a second language, many people are dyslexic and have dysgraphia. AI is a great assistant. A good approach will be to encourage people to develop their thinking than use the AI tools.

_diyar• 4 months ago

Using AI to craft a thoughtful, concise comment is different than synco-slop.

rc-1140• 4 months ago

The next step is to forbid generated/AI-edited posts.

nu11ptr• 4 months ago

HN is the best tech site on the web for a reason. It has a generally intelligent audience, and while there are certainly inappropriate comments, compared to what you find on social media or even other sites, it is unique and far more respectful. Due to this, you can often have better and more meaningful discussions.

fudged71• 4 months ago

What I think would actually be useful is a version of what was implemented on /r/ClaudAI which is an official bot which summarizes the discussion (and updates after x number of comments have been added). I think this level of synthesis has a compounding effect on discussion quality and pruning redundant arguments/topics.

Example: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/s/BJKLxzJA16

sumeno4• 4 months ago

Just read the posts instead of an AI slop summary

dddgghhbbfblk2• 4 months ago

I don't spend much time on that subreddit, but I've seen that bot on a couple posts I've read and have been pleasantly surprised by how useful it seemed. I may eat my words on this later, but to me this is exactly the kind of application of AI that I have always thought was the most promising.

primitivesuave• 4 months ago

The most telling sign of a human commenter is brevity.

Consequently, I hardly ever spend the time to write out long and detailed HN comments like I used to in the pre-LLM era. People nowadays have a much harder time believing that an Internet stranger is meticulously crafting a detailed and grammatically-airtight message to another Internet stranger without AI assistance.

komali22• 4 months ago

This is interesting to me because I'm a degenerate "massive comment" guy. People have gotten mad at me for it before, I'll take a comment from them, break it down, address it portion by portion with citations, and then ask their thoughts. It's probably an obsessive level of engagement that people aren't really interested in, which is fair, but I don't know how else to get my point across in its totality.

Also there's some subset of users on this site who are rate limited, such as me. So for me that manifests in avoiding post for post conversations and more seeking to engage in an exchange of essays where I try to predict future points and address them, to save comments, which obviously results in long comments.

altairprime36• 4 months ago

One suggestion from a fellow longwrite: Tweak that to “leave an opening for their optional reply” so that it’s okay if they don’t respond, so that you aren’t creating discomfort and pressure by the comment length, and you should see an easing both of pressure on yourself and on others. One of my most frequent longwrite sigs is “Reply optional as always” :)

esjeon• 4 months ago

Not quite. Brevity is more like a modern virtue, not an absolute sign of human-ness. Often longer sentences are necessary to express comprehensive logic more tightly. TBH, these days I feel like being penalized by the rise of LLM because my writing style used to be a bit similar to that of LLM, which emphasizes accurate logical connection (not that its logic is reliable), uses em-dashes (yes, I did use it tho I had to stop), and includes a bit of mumbling.

jbarrow• 4 months ago

I've been noticing a _lot_ more AI-generated/edited content of late, both comments and stories. It's gotten to the point that I spend a lot less time on HN than I used to, and if it continues to get worse I expect I'll quit altogether.

At the end of the day, I'm here because of all the thoughtful commenters and people sharing interesting stories.

kjuulh2• 4 months ago

I am 100% behind this. I've been browsing hackernews since I started in tech, it is the only forum i regularly browse, and partake in. Simply because the quality of submissions and conversations are so high. There has been more AI related articles this part year, and it only seems ramping. I personally haven't found the AI part of the comments as big of a deal but dang and tom might be doing more than I realize on that front.

Though I do wish we'd see less AI related posts on the front page, they simply aren't sparking curiosity, it is the same wrapped in a different format, a different person commenting on our struggles and wins with AI, the 10th software "rewritten" by an AI.

At this point there nearly should be a "tax" on category, as of this moment I count 8-10 related posts on the front page related to AI / LLMs. It is a hot field, but I come to hackernews, to partake in discussions about things that are interesting, and many of those just doesn't cut it, in my opinion.

iso-logi• 4 months ago

I personally joined HN because of various AI discussions.

Comparatively, other sites such as Reddit, Twitter and YouTube just shill content, applications or products. A ton of the posts on Reddit are just AI written ffmpeg wrappers which no one should care about but apparently people do...

verdverm10• 4 months ago

Upvoting rings on Reddit are likely not policed like they are here. That is to say, I wouldn't assume there is real interest based on Reddit points.

dang37• 4 months ago

The dynamics of content production are shifting hard right now. Things that used to signal something interesting are being generated in minutes with little thought. It's getting democratized, but also commoditized.

It's too soon to know how this is going to shake out, so we should resist the temptation to impose rules prematurely. And we should especially not do so out of resistance to change (when has that ever worked out?)

But we'll do what we need to do to keep our heads above water. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/showlim. I figure pragmatics are fine as long one keeps adjusting.

lelanthran3• 4 months ago

The dynamics of content production are shifting hard right now. Things that used to signal something interesting are being generated in minutes with little thought. It's getting democratized, but also commoditized.

That's true, but it also means that Show HN has less value than it used to: the SNR is falling off a cliff :-(

I planned to post a Show HN for a new product I want to launch (all human written by myself, with only the GEO docs vibed currently), but not sure now that any decent/quality product will ever get air. All the oxygen is being sucked out by low-effort products.

cobbzilla6• 4 months ago

I appreciate the thoughtful approach. It must be a deluge.

lll-o-lll• 4 months ago

We need some human based version of “proof of work”.

smusamashah3• 4 months ago

Will removing the incentive, which is the upvotes, help reduce this spam? You can disable public access to the points gained by a new account (or may be for every account).

Or if the ranking that's attractive to spammer, may be try experimenting with randomizing order of comments in a discussion.

stingraycharles• 4 months ago

Isn’t that going to cause more spam, though, from people that start using AI to comment until their account is mature enough to post a Show HN?

Arkhaine_kupo• 4 months ago

It's too soon to know how this is going to shake out, so we should resist the temptation to impose rules prematurely.

alternative view. it is going way too quickly and premature rules can be reduced if the actual damage is less than theexpected model.

You can always make things easier, its much harder to rebuild a community that hass been destroyed.

And we should especially not do so out of resistance to change (when has that ever worked out?)

You saying that in a website with a UI straight out of the 90s is really fucking funny. Cause HN is a perfect example of resistance to change working out. Facebook chased every trend and failed (the social media, meta as an ad platform is doing ok), tech blogs chased trends and failed. This place said "nah this is good", and is still here.

zahlman20• 4 months ago

But we'll do what we need to do to keep our heads above water. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/showlim. I figure pragmatics are fine as long one keeps adjusting.

Is this page meant to be discoverable normally, or is it just there to host a message for those who encounter the restriction?

davidguetta• 4 months ago

I've been on HN for 15 years and most of the times 80% of the content is not interesting to me, but i come for the 20%

Hendrikto• 4 months ago

Though I do wish we'd see less AI related posts on the front page, they simply aren't sparking curiosity, it is the same wrapped in a different format, a different person commenting on our struggles and wins with AI, the 10th software "rewritten" by an AI.

Exactly. I feel like HN has never been this boring. Enough of the slop, let’s talk about interesting stuff again!

blank_dvth• 4 months ago

If you haven't yet checked it out, I'd recommend taking a look at Tildes for similarly high quality submissions/conversations as on HN. It really is such a breath of fresh air compared to most other platforms.

kjuulh2• 4 months ago

Just had a look, it is pretty interesting, just from the few times I've checked the frontpage there was some interesting articles to me. with a variety of topic. Great suggestion!

rurp• 4 months ago

I feel the same and find myself extending it beyond forums. I've started skipping over articles about AI more and more from authors I normally enjoy reading because so few of those articles end up being particularly interesting or insightful.

AI is obviously an important topic but it has been discussed to absolute death the past couple years and very few people have anything useful to add at this point. Things will of course evolve and change in the near term but someone speculating that maybe this will happen or that will happen isn't very useful.

Given the risks and unknowns I think we should collectively be treating it as a major risk to our economic and national security, and figuring out how to mitigate the downside risks without stifling the upside. But most of the people in power have zero interest in doing that so we're all going to YOLO this in real time.

0x696C6961• 4 months ago

You're absolutely right!

lukko• 4 months ago

Hahah, this made me laugh. Thanks, Claude

fragmede5• 4 months ago

Was this written by a human?

tzs4• 4 months ago

How about comments that include AI output if labeled?

Earlier today I remembered that there was a Supreme Court case I'd heard about 35 years ago that was relevant to on an ongoing HN discussion, but I could not remember the name of the case nor could I find it by Googling (Google kept finding later cases involving similar issues that were not relevant to what I was looking for).

I asked Perplexity and given my recollection and when I heard about the case it suggested a candidate and gave a summary. The summary matched my recollection and a quick look at the decision itself verified it had found the right case and did a good job summarizing it--probably better than I would have done.

I posted a cite to the case and a link to decision. I normally would have also linked to the Wikipedia article on the case since those usually have a good summary but there was no Wikipedia article for this one.

I though of pasting in Perplexity's summary, saying it was from Perplexity but that I had checked and it was a good summary.

Would that be OK or would that count as an AI written comment?

I have also considered, but not yet actually tried, running some of my comments through an AI for suggested improvements. I've noticed I have a tendency to do three things that I probably should do less of:

1. Run on sentences. (Maybe that's why of all the people in the 11th-100th spot on the karma list I have the highest ratio of words/karma, with 42+ words per karma point [1]).

2. Use too many commas.

3. Write "server" when I mean "serve". I think I add "r" to some other words ending in "e" too.

I was thinking those would be something an AI might be good at catching and suggesting minimal fixes for.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46867167

bsimpson2• 4 months ago

This is how I would use/expect AI to be used in HN. I would also like this clarified.

altairprime36• 4 months ago

AI-edited comments are not welcome here. If you’re not able to see and make those changes in your HN writing without AI editing, then you’ll either have to post on HN without those changes, or you’ll have to strive to apply them yourself.

verdverm10• 4 months ago

I would still say no, there is something about finding the words for yourself, even if they aren't as elegant as an Ai can make. It's fine, most humans prefer imperfection.

The point is we don't want to read Ai summaries, we can make one ourselves if we want. Personally, with certainty, I don't want to read one from Perplexity on the basis that they do the Ai for Trump Social. (reverse-kyc if you are not aware)

For some inspiration on why this is meaningful: https://www.npr.org/2025/07/18/g-s1177-78041/what-to-do-when...

tzs4• 4 months ago

I would still say no, there is something about finding the words for yourself, even if they aren't as elegant as an Ai can make. It's fine, most humans prefer imperfection.

In this instance the only reason I considered using the AI summary was that there was no Wikipedia article about the case (which surprised me as it is one of the foundational cases in Commerce Clause law...although maybe all the points in it are covered in later cases that do get their own Wikipedia articles?).

Normally I'd just copy Wikipedia's summary into my comment and link to Wikipedia and to the decision itself for people that want the details.

The point is we don't want to read Ai summaries, we can make one ourselves if we want.

How would you know if you wanted one? Someone mentioned they would like to see a case on this subject but they didn't think it would ever happen. I knew of a case on the subject, found the reference, and posted the link. At that point we are already on a tangent from what most of the thread is about and from what most people reading it care about.

The point of the summary would be to let you know if the case might actually be relevant to anything you cared about in the thread. (The answer would probably be "no" for 95+% of the people reading the comment).

topaz02• 4 months ago

It sounds like you already know how to improve your comments, how about just doing those things.

raincole• 4 months ago

Too much effort, bruh.

tzs4• 4 months ago

Well, I keep missing the "serve"/"server" thing because spell checkers think "server" is a real word so don't flag it. :-)

altairprime36• 4 months ago

You were correct not to post the summary. HN tends to expect readers to invest time in reading and understanding long form content and for community to step into discussions and offer context and explanations when necessary. One of the most important context statements on this site has been “in mice”, posted as a two word comment, elevated to top comment on the post. An AI summary will miss that context altogether while busily calculating a cliffsnote no one wants to read (and could often get you flagged and potentially banned, even before today’s guideline update). If a reader wants an AI summary, they have the same tools you do to generate it by their own hand.

If you have domain familiarity with it, have some personal insight to offer a lens through, or care about the topic deeply enough to write a summary yourself, then go ahead! I almost never post about AI given my loathing of generative ML, but I posted a critical summary in a recent “underlying shared structure” post because it was a truly exciting mathematical insight and the paper made that difficult to see for some people.

Please don’t use AI to reduce the distinctiveness of your writing style. Run on sentences are how humans speak to each other. Excess commas are only excess when you consider neurotypicals. I’m learning French and I have already started to fuck up some English spelling because of it. None of that matters in the grand scheme of things. Just add -er suffix checks to your mental proofreading list and move on with being you.

ASalazarMX5• 4 months ago

I've done research using AI, it does work better than a search engine (when it doesn't hallucinate); but I find copy-pasting verbatim distasteful, and disrespectful of the time of others.

What I do is copy the URLs for reference, and summarize the issue myself in as few sentences as possible. Anyone who wants to learn more can follow the reference.

rzmmm2• 4 months ago

Perplexity supports sharing URL to the thread. I think it's quite natural to link AI summaries like that.

davorak11• 4 months ago

I do not want to see posts to AI summaries with the AIs the way they are now. None I have used so far can cite sources correctly or verify its information. If the poster is not doing that verification then it is pushing that work on to the readers. If the poster did do the verifications than posting that verification is better than the ai summary.

lossyalgo7• 4 months ago

How long do those links exist though? Until the author deletes it?

ASalazarMX5• 4 months ago

I think it's quite natural to link AI summaries like that.

I think you misspelled "convenient". More than the small effort that it takes one to share generated text, one has to consider the effort of who knows how many humans that will use their time to read it.

If a LLM wrote something you don't know about, you're not qualified to judge how accurate it is, don't post it. If you do know the subject, you could summarize it more succinctly so you can save your readers many man hours.

If LLMs evolve to the point where they don't hallucinate, lie, or write verbosely, they will likely be more welcome.

computomatic• 4 months ago

I though of pasting in Perplexity's summary, saying it was from Perplexity but that I had checked and it was a good summary.
Would that be OK or would that count as an AI written comment?

The rule seems written to answer this directly.

Absolutely nobody cares what Perplexity has to say about the case - summary or otherwise. If you mention what the case is, I can ask claude myself if I’m interested.

Better yet, post a link to an authoritative source on the case (helpful but not required).

At minimum, verify your info via another source. The community deserves that much at least.

An AI-generated summary adds nothing positive and actually detracts from the conversation.

tzs4• 4 months ago

I did post a link to the Supreme Court's decision at Cornell Law School's Legal Information Institute's archive of Supreme Court decisions.

I looked at the decision itself sufficiently to see that it was the case I remembered and that my recollection of the facts and the decision was correct.

I just didn't include a summary because I didn't find a good one I could link to. Normally I'd write a brief one myself but I found that hard to do when Perplexity's summary was sitting right there in the next window and it was embarrassingly better than what I would have written.

nunez5• 4 months ago

I'd be fine with treating this like snippets from Wikipedia with citations back to the article. This way, people can manually verify the sources if they so choose.

notatoad• 4 months ago

Before chatbots, people used to link to Google search result pages as a passive-agressive way to say “the information is out there, go find it, I don’t care about you enough to explain it to you”

Pasting a chatGPT response into a comment, and labeling it as such, feels the same to me.

It is more, not less, insulting than trying to pass an AI response off as your own.

Cthulhu_15• 4 months ago

Ah, good old lmgtfy links. I googled it just now and it seems to have broken.

keeda• 4 months ago

Could we also discourage comments and comment-threads accusing an article of being AI-written? Half the threads these days have a comment that latches onto some LLM-ism in TFA, calls it out, and spawns a whole discussion which gets repetitive fast. I think this falls into the same category as "don't comment about the voting on comments."

Personally, I try to look beyond the language, which admittedly can be grating, for some interesting ideas or insights. Given that people are already starting to sound like ChatGPT, probably through sheer osmosis, we will have no choice but to look past that anyway.

Yes, it's annoying to read LLM-isms. It's also fine to downvote or ignore or grumble internally, and move on.

spudlyo• 4 months ago

That is indeed a problem. If one must complain about it, I think it would help to at least try elevate these type of tangential remarks beyond hurled accusations. A focus on the the specifics (where arguments are poorly made, banal observations are gussied up with flowery language, points are needlessly reiterated, etc) would at least make for slightly more interesting meta commentary.

LZ_Khan• 4 months ago

AI comments are certainly bad for discourse on HN. But who's to be the judge of AI or human? Are you reading humanity's Jeff Dean or computerized Elon Musk? It's certainly a tricky situation to be in!

r2vcap• 4 months ago

I don’t think there is a good algorithm (or guts) for differentiating between well-written comments and AI-generated comments.

kentf• 4 months ago

I don't understand the need to use AI for this kind of convo. +1 to this.

attractivechaos• 4 months ago

In the age of AI, thinking becomes a privilege.

NewsaHackO3• 4 months ago

to get paid for*.AI has definitely reduced the influence pseudo-intellectuals have had on society. Now, you actually have to be smart enough to do something that isn't easily reproduced using LLMs.

AIorNot• 4 months ago

AI does not have LONG context, Long Term Memories or LONG intentionality -its not aware and it can't remember the plot without being spoonfed the details each time from scratch.

Its like an amnesic genius who once he already wrote a masterpiece and keeps cycling, and looses his train of thought after some fixed amount of time.

This groundhog day effect is mitigated in some respects by code -we create key-value memories and agents and stores and countless ways to connect agents via MCP and platforms/frameworks like A2A and the like but until we solve that longer lived instance problem we won't be able to trust these systems without serious HITL (human oversight)

I think we need models that update their own weights and we need some kind of awareness cycle rather than just a forward pass inference run with a bigger context window

rexpop• 4 months ago

You're all a bunch of tedious ignoramuses, your own fields of studying notwithstanding. I'm out here face-to-face with the Bullshit Asymmetry Principles. I'm not about to give up the only leverage I have!

The fact of the matter is that there're not hours enough in the day to read, in realtime, to each and every one of you the reams they've written on why you're wrong. Do I have to establish a tag-team?

The fact is that I've spent thousands upon thousands of hours painstakingly collating the perspectives that I'm now delivering to you—I am a river to my people. And it's only because they pass under the bridge of an LLM that they're objectionable?

This is a bit like challenging your plumber for charging you over a minute's fix, when they've spent 20 years getting it down to that minute.

The work's been done. You're paying for the outcome.

Edit: All fresh off the top of my head, folks.

Ah, that reminds me: I wouldn't feel compelled to do all this refutation if radical reactionary political extremism was properly moderated.

sebringj• 4 months ago

I do too care about this but I say this in the reality in which we are. This reminds me of those signs "no shirt, no shoes, no service" except it's much worse, only sentient beings will actually care about it, while non-sentients will simply trample over the sign while token predicted laughter erupts from their token predicted sense of humor artifact.

Elon said it well, there must be some disincentive to do this.

Kye2• 4 months ago

Sometimes I collect my comments here to run through my draft writing skill to see how it might shake out as part of a blog post. Doing the opposite would be weird. I earned that karma. It's mine to burn making bad posts.

AceJohnny2• 4 months ago

Translation is a form of AI-edition.

Language translation is the origin of (the current wave of) AI and its killer app. English is not the main language of the world, and translation opens us up to a huge pool of interesting thinkers.

I'm a native speaker in a foreign language, but out of practice except of a weekly family call. I recently had to write a somewhat technical email to my family, and found it easier to write it in (my more practiced) english and have AI translate it, than write it in the target language myself. Of course, in my case I was able to verify that the output conveyed the meaning I intended, because I am fluent in the target language.

As with the rise of GenAI, I've also noticed a rise of translated messages. It's usually hard to tell the difference, except by looking at the commenter's history (on other subreddits, impossible on HN).

I understand the original frustration with GenAI comments and reactionary response. I'm sorry that we're excluding what could be a large pool of interesting people because we can't tell the difference.

CivBase• 4 months ago

The spirit of the rule is clearly about using AI to determine what you say and how you say it. Translation is not again the spirit of the rule and I doubt you'd get in trouble for using it.

misiti3780• 4 months ago

i support this.

tlogan5• 4 months ago

But we are missing the point here.

It is not about whether the comment was written by AI, a native English speaker, English major, or ESL.

What matters is an idea or an opinion. That is all what matters.

This is similar to when people check someones post history and if they are pro Trump, they are immediately against their idea or opinion.

nunez5• 4 months ago

Love to see it.

The next step is to run Pangram on every post and ban the offenders! Fight AI with AI! /s

In all seriousness, this is one of the few places I trust for genuine conversations with other people. Forums are mostly dead, Reddit is bots-galore, and I'm not signing up for Facebook just for groups.

nunez5• 4 months ago

I hate how easy AI has made outsourcing thinking. You can literally type fragments of a thought into $CHAT_ASSISTANT and get a super polished response back that gets you 99% of the way there. It's almost like we, collectively, looked at the final scene of WALL-E and decided "Yes! Gimme that!"

skeeter2020• 4 months ago

Is this true for you? How often do you get 99% of a complete, valuable thought?

My experience is that it is quite rare. Occasionally high 90's for simple things of low value, 60's or less for things that approximate "thinking". At best it feels like a new search channel that amalgamates data better, and hasn't been thoroughly polluted by ads and SEO - yet.

absynth• 4 months ago

Perhaps there needs to be ai.news... then let the AIs talk and interact there in a safe place.

pkaodev• 4 months ago

I've got some reflecting to do because the first thing I did after reading the headline, before even clicking to the actual post, is look for ai comments.

I miss pre 2010 internet. As soon as the advice animal memes started appearing on Facebook it was a quick decline.

namegulf• 4 months ago

It's time to change the name from Hacker News to Human News, let's go!

nyc_data_geek12• 4 months ago

Take the slop to moltbook.

adamgordonbell• 4 months ago

This list of Do and Don'ts now reads like a bad Claude.md file to me.

   Don't insinuate that someone else must have broken that. It was you. 
   Do run the linter
   Don't commit throw-away code
   Do write a test case
   Don't write a comment describing every single function
   Seriously, run the linter. And fix the issues. 
   It is your fault.

kashyapc• 4 months ago

I'm tickled pink to read this! I very much support this move. HN is one of the few internet forums I use. It'd be awful to see this riddled by bot spew.

This rule will atleast partly stem the danger of HN getting turned into what dang calls a "scorched earth" situation.

hbjkhgkytfkytv• 4 months ago

The "no AI" rule finally being official feels like a necessary line in the sand.

The real issue isn't just "slop" or bot-spam; it's the cost of entry. HN works because of the "proof of work" behind a good comment. If I’m spending five minutes reading your take on a kernel patch or a startup pivot, I’m doing it because I assume a human actually sat down and thought about it.

When the cost of generating a response drops to zero, the value of the conversation follows it down. If the author didn't care enough to write it, why should I care enough to read it?

The "AI-edited" part of the rule is the trickiest bit, though. We’re reaching a point where the line between a sophisticated spell-checker and a generative "tone polisher" is non-existent. My worry isn't that the mods will ban bots—they've been doing that for years—it's that we'll start seeing "witch hunts" against anyone who writes a bit too formally or whose English is a little too perfect.

Ultimately, I’m glad it’s a rule. I don't come here to see what an LLM thinks; I can get that on my own localhost. I come here for the "graybeards" and the niche experts. If we lose the human friction, we lose the signal.

illusive4080• 4 months ago

At work, it’s becoming a real problem that people are using copilot to write their emails

anthonySs• 4 months ago

You're absolutely right! /s

monksy• 4 months ago

"It's cute you think you can tell what's human and what's not. Honestly, the average HN comment is indistinguishable from a poorly written AI prompt anyway. This rule just lowers the bar for what passes as 'intellectual discourse.'"

Sorry everyone, I couldn't help but to ask Gemma3-27B-it-vl-GLM-4.7-Uncensored-Heretic-Deep-Reasoning-i1-GGUF:q4_K_M to respond. Sorry dang. :)

PS It followed it up with:

Disclaimer: "Slightly insulting" is subjective on HN. The mods there are sensitive.

These Heretic models are fun.

stevefan19992• 4 months ago

I'm sorry, but I would just have to just say no.

## Opposing the Ban on AI-Generated/Edited Comments on HN

*The value of a comment should be judged by its content, not its origin.*

Here are key arguments against this policy:

- *Ideas matter more than authorship.* If a comment is insightful, well-reasoned, and contributes meaningfully to a discussion, dismissing it solely because AI assisted in its creation is a genetic fallacy — judging an argument by its source rather than its merit.

- *We already accept tool-assisted thinking.* People routinely use calculators, search engines, spell-checkers, and reference materials before posting. AI assistance exists on a spectrum with these tools. Drawing a bright line specifically at "AI-edited" is arbitrary when someone could use a thesaurus, Grammarly, or have a friend proofread their comment without objection.

- *It disadvantages non-native speakers.* Many HN users are brilliant engineers and thinkers who don't write fluently in English. AI editing can level the playing field, allowing their ideas to be judged on substance rather than prose quality. This policy inadvertently privileges native English speakers.

- *It's effectively unenforceable.* There is no reliable way to distinguish a lightly AI-polished comment from a naturally well-written one. Unenforceable rules erode respect for the rules that are enforceable and important.

- *The real problem is low-effort content, not the tool used.* What HN actually wants to prevent is shallow, generic, or spammy comments. A policy targeting quality directly (which HN already has) addresses the actual concern better than a blanket tool prohibition.

- *Human intent still drives the conversation.* A person who uses AI to articulate their own idea more clearly is still participating in a human conversation — they're just communicating more effectively. The thought, the intent to engage, and the underlying perspective remain human.

*In short:* This rule conflates the medium with the message and risks excluding valuable contributions in pursuit of an authenticity standard that is both philosophically fuzzy and practically unenforceable.

jg0r3• 4 months ago

this one over here officer

stevefan19992• 4 months ago

Hah, you took the bait.

What I could just do is obfuscate it a little bit and you can't tell whether it is AI-generated or not. If I just read that AI-generated snippet, and wrote a "human" version of it, would that still count as "AI-generated"

The idea of that rule is that we don't want HN to be Moltbook, not that it actually wanted to ban AI-comments.

crossroadsguy5• 4 months ago

Apple's proofread is essentially spell-check and punctuation until it isn't and even in a few-sentence-long para you'd see it has sneakily changed a lot and Apple being Apple you, the customer, obviously has no way to set it to "only fix spelling, punctuations and leave everything else including grammar as it is" and I've a feeling a lot of folks are at least using proofread or something on those lines. But then I really don't think browser's "spell check" ought to be kosher either if the content has to be the human's because those mistakes are also makes such text human and in some way unique. I don't think it's an easy line to draw but weird seeing just comments "targeted" here.

jethronethro• 4 months ago

A Please (or even a Pls) would have been nice ... But I upvoted anyway.

fHr• 4 months ago

lmfao ycombinator that funds with millions AI companies, holy hypocrites haha

kshri24• 4 months ago

Thank you! Please also make a separate Show HN for AI-generated/vibe-coded projects (specifically open-source projects) and queue any project that has a .claude/.codex (or whatever flavor of the month) into a slow queue automatically.

Supermancho• 4 months ago

I use AI for the elements I feel are weak or unclear in the transcription. Sometimes I copy-paste a paragraph into ChatGPT or whatever, to ensure my (aging) thoughts are being communicated in a crystal clear manner. I cannot always point out why I think they are unclear or jumbled.

I don't feel this is an imposition on others. I think it's the opposite. It enhances signal by reducing nitpicking, spelling/grammar errors that might muddle intent, and reminds me of proper sentence structure.

Many of us are guilty of run-ons, fragments, overly large blocks of text[1] because it's closer to how people often converse, verbally. Posts on the internet are not casual conversation between humans. They are exchanges of ideas.

[1] This is a classic example where I had to go back and edit it to ensure it was readable. As you do self-review with any commit ^^

isodev• 4 months ago

Your “unclear or jumbled” but authentic comment is always better than “feels like chewing sand”, normalised and calibrated LLM outs

Springtime• 4 months ago

I get the sense the point of the HN rule is to preserve unique human expression, regardless of how someone's communication skills are at a given point. Like, I periodically see articles on HN which have stale turns of phrase and signs of poor LLM use (which then becomes distracting while reading) and then the author sometimes mentioning in the HN comments they used an LLM to 'help' with their post based on some list of points they wanted to communicate. Yet when it's relied on too heavily like that it smothers the author's own voice.

If an opinion/idea is being communicated in the voice of another then something unique to that user has been lost. Like if I were to have a germ of an premise and told someone else about it and I found their thoughts clearer and how they expressed it and then copied how they'd expressed it then I think I'd be at least crediting them. Otherwise our own growth with self-editing and clarity will just atrophy and the internet will be a soup of homogenized ways of expressing things.

kindkang20242• 4 months ago

Sometimes I copy-paste a paragraph into ChatGPT or whatever, to ensure my (aging) thoughts are being communicated in a crystal clear manner. I

Same here. And sometimes, I got downvoted and treated as an LLM — in the name of valuing the human.

To me, what matters is the will behind the words. Ideas and words themselves are cheap (this becomes clearer every day in the AI age) — they're almost nothing until they're executed and actually help someone.

"The Dao can be told, but what is told is not the eternal Dao. The Name can be named, but what is named is not the true Name." — Laozi, Dao De Jing

Like code we write — it's dead text on a screen until it's running. And what we really care about is the running effect — and that is exactly the reason, the will, behind why we write the code in the first place.

Murfalo• 4 months ago

I am choosing to believe this is satire. A+

tigen2• 4 months ago

Do we really need to see your every half-baked thought on here though? It's okay not to post or to set a high bar for yourself.

Frankly, even without AI, most communities get degraded as they become more popular and the stream of comments becomes overwhelming. Like there are over 1000 comments on this story and let's be honest, most of it isn't adding value. A great many of them are repeats of other posts, so the person didn't read other people's comments either.

The solutions seem to boil down to making the karma system more draconian. Like instead of focused more on downvoting garbage and upvoting gems, the slush of "mid" posts has to be dealt with somehow. Not sure if rate-limiting accounts would make a noticeable difference. Ironically, perhaps AI is also a solution to the issue, since obviously it can, for example, know all the other comments and could potentially assign some value score in the overall context.

I probably wouldn't post this here post either but I'm hitting reply because of the topic at hand...

nobody99993• 4 months ago

I use AI for the elements I feel are weak or unclear in the transcription. Sometimes I copy-paste a paragraph into ChatGPT or whatever, to ensure my (aging) thoughts are being communicated in a crystal clear manner. I cannot always point out why I think they are unclear or jumbled.

Your point is well taken.[0]

Personally, I take a different approach. I use a 5 minute delay for comments on HN so I can look at the post after I submit it, but before anyone else sees it.

This gives me the opportunity to read over my comment and the comment to which I've replied to make sure my prose is decent, my point is clear and any typos or other inaccuracies can be corrected.

I don't use LLMs as an editor as I've found that I'm probably a better editor than the average internet user, which is what LLMs represent.

Perhaps that's arrogant of me, but I'm much more comfortable standing by what I write when it's me writing and editing.

[0] Please note that this is most certainly not a swipe at you or anyone else who uses LLMs as an editor. I just have a different perspective which pushes me in a different direction.

duskdozer8• 4 months ago

I just wrote a similar comment elsewhere, but I would much rather just read your jumbled or unclear writing than whatever's output from an LLM. At least I know you meant at one point the words that are written. It's not a grammar test in English class or an academic paper; if you use a few fragments or run-ons, it's not a big deal.

Nevermark4• 4 months ago

There is a tradeoff for sure.

But, even though I think slippery slope arguments should be used very sparingly, there is a good case for one here.

Also, learning how to communicate better, and learning to listen better, is a real value add to this site. Which would get washed out if both writing, and therefore reading, were spoon fed by models, who are also washing away individuality of expression and nuance of views.

flammafex• 4 months ago

So is this the AI bubble popping?

I expect Y Combinator to cease and revoke all funding of all companies that leverage LLM technologies that interact with humans.

I wonder if there's an AI-hate movement in China.

joquarky10• 4 months ago

China doesn't have the same copyright culture underlying most of the hate in the US, so I would be curious if the genAI haters within Chinese culture have more pragmatic reasons to dislike it.

ChaitanyaSai2• 4 months ago

AI has made it easier for me not to worry about how pretty or polished my comments are. What used to be a sign you cared has now been devalued nearly completely by AI. This is freeing and allows me to think about the substance. I still do read it, but don't care too much about the typos. It's now a a proud badge for artisanal thinking!

hsbauauvhabzb2• 4 months ago

This is clearly an AI written comment and is poor form.

tlogan5• 4 months ago

And? Do you agree with the point or the idea the poster said? Or not?

I remember that in the early days of HN there were people who would downvote comments just because they had grammar mistakes, without even trying to understand the idea or what the poster was trying to say.

I guess this thread looks like a bunch of grammar Nazis crying because they have lost their ammunition :)

ChaitanyaSai2• 4 months ago

Huh wow just noticing it. That was definitely my own writing. Kinda sad I failed the captcha

ninjagoo16• 4 months ago

Lot of folks on here saying they only want to converse with other humans, for various reasons.

But here's the funny thing. I'm pretty sure the frontier models are now smarter than I am, more eloquent, and definitely more knowledgeable, especially the paid versions with built-in search/research capability. I'm also fairly certain that the number of original thoughts in a given discourse on the Internet is fairly small, I know that's certainly the case for me.

So whither humans now?

If I'm looking for human engagement, forums make sense. But for an informed discussion, I'm less certain that it's wise to be exclusionary. There is a case to be made that lower quality comments should be hidden or higher quality comments should be surfaced, but that's true regardless of the source, innit?

brailsafe4• 4 months ago

Would you hang out with a friend over coffee or something who, rather than conversing with you, recorded your side of the conversation directly into an LLM and then played you back the result? Seems like a good way to kill a relationship.

ninjagoo16• 4 months ago

A significant part of my friends and family conversations already involve referencing LLMs for scoping, explanations, deeper dives, insights etc. And it's not just me, they use LLMs more than I do. It helps move discussions along. Where before conversation would get bogged down in disputes, now we cover more ground.

If it helps, my friends and family tend to have at least a master's, and the majority have PhDs.

Would you hang out with a friend over coffee or something who, rather than conversing with you, recorded your side of the conversation directly into an LLM and then played you back the result?

I think the difference is that you're imagining the LLM replaces the conversationalist, but as I said above, my lived experience is that the LLM provides grounding to the discussion, effectively having replaced internet search as a better, faster, broader, smarter library. It doesn't kill the conversation, it makes it better.

tadfisher2• 4 months ago

Nothing is stopping you from pasting an HN link into your chatbot of choice for an "informed" discussion.

The rest of us want the benefit of lived experience and genuine curiosity in discussions. LLMs are fundamentally incapable of both.

caditinpiscinam3• 4 months ago

This reminds me of conversations around plagiarism that come up when working with students: that question of "this other person expressed this idea better than I can, why can't I just use their writing"?

Because I want to know what you think, because putting our thoughts into words and sharing them is an important part of thinking, because we'll lose these skills if we don't use them, because in thinking for yourself you might come up with something interesting that nobody has ever thought before.

Of course, writers are allowed to reference and use other peoples writing: with proper attribution. I don't have a problem with people sharing quality AI generated content when it's labelled as such. The issue is that most people writing AI comments don't do this, which is itself probably the strongest indictment of the practice.

ninjagoo16• 4 months ago

That's hardly fair? Most forum users, even on HN, rarely provide sources for data/insights that they reference. I haven't seen that at work either most of the time.

One could argue that it should be, but it's just not the the same standard to which students and papers and Wikipedia materials are held to :)

tredre32• 4 months ago

If I'm looking for human engagement, forums make sense. But for an informed discussion, I'm less certain that it's wise to be exclusionary. There is a case to be made that lower quality comments should be hidden or higher quality comments should be surfaced, but that's true regardless of the source, innit?

Good news then, you're currently on a forum! So we all agree that humans > AI, regardless of your thought on the intelligence behind it.

ninjagoo16• 4 months ago

Good news then, you're currently on a forum! So we all agree that humans > AI

I made the post to specifically disagree with that notion: I think that excluding top-quality AI output from the discussion will reduce the overall quality of forums, because it's now the case that top-tier LLMs > average human.

How do we assess top-quality output? The moderation tools for that already exist. Doesn't scale well? I'm guessing the days where ai can do it cheaper and faster will soon be nigh.

Madmallard• 4 months ago

What's strange about this is that tons of the upvoted posts on the front-page are LLM generated text

So....?

travisgriggs• 4 months ago

TIL: definition fulminate

fulminated, fulminating to explode with a loud noise; detonate. to issue denunciations or the like (usually followed byagainst ).

(Because “don’t fulminate” is the rule that follows the referenced one :) )

caditinpiscinam3• 4 months ago

Same. I vaguely remembered "fulmen" from Latin class but I didn't know there was a derived English word.

from Latin fulminatus, past participle of fulminare "hurl lightning, lighten," figuratively "to thunder," from fulmen (genitive fulminis) "lightning flash," -- from etymonline.com

caditinpiscinam3• 4 months ago

We've all heard the phrase "the sum of all human knowledge".

I've been feeling more and more that generative AI represents the average of all human knowledge. Which has its place. But a future in which all thought and creativity is averaged away is a bleak one. It's the heat death of thought.

ModernMech2• 4 months ago

The soft gaussian blur of all human knowledge.

thirtygeo2• 4 months ago

Racing towards average!

oblio2• 4 months ago

I've been feeling more and more that generative AI represents the average of all human knowledge.

It's literally what it is. Fairly sure that mathematically it's a fancier regression/prediction so it's a form of average.

ninjagoo16• 4 months ago

I've been feeling more and more that generative AI represents the average of all human knowledge.

Have you tried the paid versions of frontier models? They certainly do not feel like they spew the average of all human knowledge. It's not uncommon for them to find and interpret the cutting edge of papers in any of the domains that I've asked them questions about.

fuzzer371• 4 months ago

Yup. And they all sound like slop. Read the papers, comprehend the papers, don't make someone else's computer do it for you.

dang37• 4 months ago

Thought and creativity won't be averaged away because human beings have a drive for these things. This just raises the bar for it. And why not? We get complacent when not pushed.

Dostoevsky said that if all human knowledge could ever be reduced to 2 + 2 = 4, man would stick out his tongue and insist that 2 + 2 = 5. That was a 19th century formulation—he was a contemporary of Boole. I wonder what the equivalent would be for the LLM era.

frm882• 4 months ago

Thought and creativity won't be averaged away because human beings have a drive for these things.

That may or may not be true, but the expression of thought and creativity matters to transfer meaning. If you average that out, it loses momentum. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346935. Compare the posters first and second, LLM assisted, paragraph. The second one is just bleak. If I had to read several pages like that, my eyes would glaze over. It cannot hold attention.

palmotea4• 4 months ago

Thought and creativity won't be averaged away because human beings have a drive for these things. This just raises the bar for it. And why not? We get complacent when not pushed.

The why not is: human beings are valuable in and of themselves, not just because of what they can do. If you raise the bar too high, you kick people out. And our society just isn't setup for that, and is unlikely to ever be in our lifetimes.

And I'm talking about a radical shift in the concept of ownership, where shareholding is radically democratized. Basically every random Joe needs the option to live comfortably on passive income generated by things he owns.

altairprime36• 4 months ago

Perhaps closer to “the mean vector point such that all outbound vectors to different training tests are in sum the smallest”? I assume that’s a property of neural networks anyways, though I’m out of date on current math for them.

permo-w• 4 months ago

You're falsely conflating knowledge with intelligence

kruffalon7• 4 months ago

But it's a weird kind of average... Not the 3 from 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5 but rather like the bland tv-dinner which tastes non-upsetting for most people.

EarlKing• 4 months ago

An intellectual Mode rather than a Mean or a Median?

tovej• 4 months ago

It's more like a blur filter and a thousand layers of jpeg compression.

red_hare• 4 months ago

I feel the same about Claude Code. It's a fast but average developer at just about everything and there are some things that average developers are just consistently bad at and therefore Claude is consistently bad at.

Cthulhu_15• 4 months ago

I'm not sure, I think you overestimate the average developer. But then, the average code doesn't end up in public repositories, it spends decades in enterprise codebases rotting.

At this point I'd rather review LLM generated code than a poor developer's.

baxtr• 4 months ago

Yes, it’s the "sum" of which you extract an average.

ludicrousdispla3• 4 months ago

If you want a more accurate measure then you should subtract "the sum of all human ignorance" before taking the average.

larodi4• 4 months ago

pooling as it is called, is, well the same as averaging. has nothing to do with swimming really. it happens all the time in latent space. it is a tool, not a side effect.

pessimizer• 4 months ago

I've been feeling more and more that generative AI represents the average of all human knowledge.

No, it's far worse. It's the mode of all human knowledge. The amount of effort you have to put into an LLM to get it to choose an option that isn't the most salient example of anything that could fit as a response is monumental. They skip exact matches for most common matches; it's basically a continuity from when search engines stopped listening to your queries and just decided what query they wanted to respond to - and it suddenly became nearly impossible to search for people who had the same first name as anyone who was famous or in the news.

I've tried a dozen times to get LLMs to find authors for me, or papers, where I describe what I remember about them fairly exactly. They deliver me a bunch of bestsellers and popular things, over and over again, who don't even match at all large numbers of the criteria I've laid out.

It's why they're dumb and can't accomplish anything original. It's structural. They're inherently biased to deliver lowest common denominator work. If you're trying to deliver something original or unusual, what bubbles up is samplings of the slop that surrounds us every day. They're fed everything, meaning everything in proportion to its presence in the world. The vast majority of things are shit, or better said, repetitions of the same shit that isn't productive. The things that are most readily available are already tapped out. The things that are productive are obscure.

You can't even get LLMs to say some words by asking them to "say word X." They just will always find a word that will fill that slot "better." As I said, this is just google saying "did you mean Y?" But it's not asking anymore, it's telling.

edit: It's also why asking it to solve obscure math problems is a dumb test. If the math problem is obscure enough, and there's only one way to possibly solve it, and somebody did it once, somewhere, or referred to the possibility of solving it that way, once, somewhere, you're going to have a single salient example. It's not a greenfield, it's not a white sheet of paper: it's a green field with one yellow flower on it, or a piece of white paper with one black sentence on it, and you're asking it to find the flower or explain the sentence.

edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346901 - I'm late and long-winded.

charlie0• 4 months ago

That comment is nice, but virtually meaningless as there's no way to enforce it, even if there were mods.

happytoexplain4• 4 months ago

Unenforceable guidelines are not meaningless unless humans are all without care, in which case why would you even want to be talking to them in the first place.

wolfcola• 4 months ago

lol, lmao

lol8675309• 4 months ago

Lol

uni_baconcat• 4 months ago

For quite a while, I like use LLM to refine and fix my grammar issue, but my colleagues and professors reminds me that it was way too obvious. They said they can tolerate some mistakes in my words, but no tolerance for AI generated content.

dang37• 4 months ago

Thanks for putting this so nicely! We'd much rather hear you in your own voice, and the cost of a few mistakes is far less than the cost of losing that.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

drittich• 4 months ago

Voice is everything. Don't relinquish the best part of yourself.

eleventyseven2• 4 months ago

I routinely call out people of writing in an LLM assisted fashion that clearly shows they have just been "vibe commenting". You know, just paste it in and copy the output without even thinking. The people who for some insane reason think they are making a genuine conversation with their copy pasting skills and $20/mo subscription. As if they are like the archive.whatever of the AI era. Because those comments are objectively terrible and contribute little. The ones with all the consultant sycophant speak and distracting prose that comes off the default prompt and RLHF.

But that's really what you're now enforcing: writing in an easily detectable LLM prose and voice. LLM detection is very difficult especially at small comment scale texts. There is never proof, only telltale phrases. How will this be enforced? What the heck even is "AI"?

The thing that really frustrates me is that I can't put tokens through a transformer in any way in editing my post? I can't have an LLM turn a bare link after a sentence into a [1]? I can't have it literally do nothing more than spell check in an LLM, but could with a rule based model? Or what about other LLMs or SLMs or classic NLP chained together? Or is it just the transformer?

And it is officially sanctioned that people ought to be keeping in the back of their mind "does this feel LLMish?" instead of "is this a good comment that contributes to the discussion?" Maybe LLM prose is so annoying and insufferably sycophantic that even if all the content and logic was sound, it still should be moderated completely out. But the entire technological form is profane and unclean?

I am 100% not interested in participating in a community that seeks to profile and police the technological infrastructure that its members use. I want my comments judged by the contributions they make and do not make to the discussion. If the LLM makes the comment better, it is good. If it makes it worse, it is bad.

booleandilemma2• 4 months ago

Hi dang, your algolia link doesn't bring up any results.

I get: We found no items matching by:dang "own voice"

Markoff2• 4 months ago

Does this mean (English) grammar Nazis are banned?

stavros4• 4 months ago

Eh, history has shown me that that's incorrect, though. In my culture, we're direct and just say what we want to say, whereas in US culture you have to be very circumspect or you get a bunch of downvotes. I've used an LLM to give me feedback so I can "anglicize" my comments, otherwise I get downvoted to hell.

Even in this comment, I initially wrote the start as "you're wrong", but then had to catch myself and go back and soften it to "that's incorrect", even though the meaning is the exact same. The constant impedance mismatch is tiring.

stonecharioteer• 4 months ago

I tell people that when editing posts on my blog, I rely on AI to fix my code blocks if there are errors but I don't use it to fix typos or grammar. I feel like that keeps my blog human.

wittjeff3• 4 months ago

Let me refer you to my buddy Anton, a software developer in Ukraine. He has CP and it makes typing and communicating by speech very slow and tedious. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/aYbDLOK14uM

He has a blog, which I think is particularly relevant to this conversation: https://www.patreon.com/c/GreenWizard/posts?vanity=GreenWiza...

IMO his writing style is quite melodramatic. I have asked myself, how much of that is his perhaps overly compensatory tendency to project an articulate voice, and how much of it is applied by his AI tools?

The last time I saw Anton in person I asked him about his writing process, and he said something like, "I just draft it and then ask ChatGPT to make it sound professional or whatever." So after thinking about it for a while, I have decided that this is his preferred voice, so I'll accept it as his voice.

IMO it is not for you to decide how people recast their own voice. Once you adopt that dogma, you're committed to denying other people's experience of discrimination (through the lens of disability's symptoms). Whether or not you participate in that other type of biased discrimination is irrelevant.

i_am_a_peasant• 4 months ago

I had a team lead at work be offended by something pretty neutral that i said and explicitly asked me to always use chatgpt when i talk with him lol

CWuestefeld• 4 months ago

At the margin this is fine. But ensuring that we really understand each other is the most important thing. Especially these days, when polarization is so intense and everyone seems to actively look for faults in what others (seem to) say.

When it's a matter of a spelling error or two, no problem. But too often I find I've got to read something multiple times before I have any idea what my interlocutor is saying.

Is our hatred of "AI Slop" and greater posting traffic worth handicapping our ability to communicate with each other?

mlhpdx10• 4 months ago

What about the people who struggle to form coherent prose for mental or physical reasons? The content should be judged for what it contains, not how it was made.

duskdozer8• 4 months ago

Even if you make mistakes, it often can still be understood. 100% I would rather read your own words, even if they're messy, and ask clarifying questions for what I don't understand

calmoo3• 4 months ago

If you're referring to speaking in English - in general I think there is a huge amount of flexibility for making mistakes in English. I'm a native speaker, I am so used to hearing various levels of English from different nationalities that i'm almost blind to it. I much prefer to hear someones true voice even if there are a few inaccuracies, so much of a person's personality is conveyed through their quirks and mistakes.

skywhopper4• 4 months ago

I agree with this, and I’d even say that all the grammatical and spelling mistakes, awkward constructions, and labored phrasing is what makes a person’s posts sound like themselves. If people commonly use LLMs to rewrite themselves, then everyone starts sounding the same. And the posts, the users, and the entire site all become a lot less interesting.

skipants• 4 months ago

Huh. I have the opposite opinion. I'm monolingual English for all intents and purposes but I gathered that opinion from quite a few sources, including:

- We had to take spelling tests in school

- English speakers make (generally light) fun of other's spelling or grammar mistakes in a casual setting

- In a professional setting, a lot of time is taken to proofread our own emails

- There's de jure spellings for every word

- Some online communities are really weird about pointing out grammar and spelling mistakes (namely Reddit)

Language is meant to be a fluid, evolving thing but I always felt like English was treated the opposite way. Maybe that's also why it's the de facto Lingua Franca.

I do think, and hope, that this rigidity will change thanks to AI. I've started to embrace my mistakes. I care a lot less about capitalization and punctuation in my Slack messages, for example.

cobbzilla6• 4 months ago

You write well enough to use your own voice.

I don’t think it is so binary black/white though.

I don’t mind if someone who has no command of English uses a translator. But there is a difference between a translator and an AI/LLM.

brabel• 4 months ago

LLMs work better as translators than any non-AI translators though. Because they are able to translate not just words, but also capture the context of what's being said. If you translate a common phrase like "home, sweet home" to another language, it may or may not make any sense if you translate it word-by-word, like traditional translators would normally do... but LLMs know "what you mean" and will use the equivalent saying in the target language, even if that use entirely different words.

planb2• 4 months ago

As a non native speaker, I sometimes use LLMs to search for a way to formulate my thoughts like I intend them to be received by the reader. I'd never just copy the verbatim LLM output somewhere, it always sounds blunt and not like me, but I gladly apply grammar corrections or better phrasing.

I'd normally not do this for a text of this length, but just for fun, here's what ChatGPT suggests:

As a non-native speaker, I sometimes use LLMs to help me find wording that conveys my thoughts the way I want them to be understood by the reader. I would never copy the output verbatim, because it often sounds blunt and unlike me, but I’m happy to use grammar corrections or improved phrasing.

shunia_huang• 4 months ago

As a non native speaker, I can even sense the little differences between these two.

I have answered something similar before, I struggle on sending messages as I want them to be received, with AI it is even harder, the "taste" of my thoughts, how I like to express, the habits of the phrasing or wording, get lost completely.

So I just never "AI" my content.

Planktonne8• 4 months ago

Even in that short comment, the LLM has

- Made the prose flatter.

- Slightly changed the sense ('gladly' and 'happy to' are not equivalent, and neither are 'search for' and 'help me find') in ways that do add up

- Not actually improved anything

friendzis• 4 months ago

This little experiment of yours highlights the issue at hand quite well. In every language there is a thing called "voice": academic, formal, informal, intimate, etc. The rewritten paragraph sounds written in the notorious "LLM voice". It's less direct, more pandering and removes injection points for further discussion.

To continue the experiment I have fed the above paragraph to Gemini with this prompt "Fix grammar and wording issues in the following paragraphs, if needed reword to fit with and be well received in the hacker news community."

This experiment highlights the core issue. Every language has its own voice—academic, formal, informal, or intimate. Your rewritten paragraph leans into the notorious "LLM voice": it’s less direct, feels slightly pandering, and strips away the hooks that usually spark further discussion.

lionkor2• 4 months ago

But we want to know what YOU have to say. YOU. If we want, we can go and copy paste your comment into our LLM to make it easier to understand.

aakresearch• 4 months ago

I am in agreement with you, but regret that you missed an opportunity to swap two paragraphs around and purposefully mislabel them (i.e. the LLM-generated as your own, and vice versa). I'd be very curious if audience here would successfully pick it up!

watwut2• 4 months ago

If it was obvious, then it was doing much more then just fixing your grammar.

bmacho2• 4 months ago

That, or he has been writing LLM-style all this time but with bad grammar.

Also to the people saying that they just let LLM replace phrases: that's the worst you can do. LLM style lies mostly in the phrases, they come from a narrow selection that they tend to use

adityaathalye• 4 months ago

... in experiments in which all outer sensation is withdrawn, the subject begins a furious fill-in or completion of senses that is sheer hallucination. So the hotting-up of one sense tends to effect hypnosis, and the cooling of all senses tends to result in hallucination.

Must quote the last paragraph of Chapter 2: "Hot and Cold media", from Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media, which I've double-underlined.

For it simultaneously explains to me; TikTok (quick consume-scroll-like-react-"create" dopamine hit cycles) and LLMs (outsourcing the essential mechanical friction of thinking (which requires all senses, for me at least))...

The essential friction of deliberate, first-party speech-making---misspellings and all---is why voice and conversation contains life.

vitro• 4 months ago

Forrest would be so silent if only the best birds would sing.

monkeydust• 4 months ago

Are people so tuned for this that I need to think about deliberately adding some mstakes into what I write?

mzl• 4 months ago

No, but a lot of AI-adjsuted wordings have the very idiosyncratic AI-style that is prevalent in the AI-slop that is everywhere, and that style has quickly become associated with writing that is generally void of content and insight. So it is natural to get gut-reactions to the typical phrasings that have become associated with AI.

nebula8804• 4 months ago

This appears to be leading to people being super quiet about their AI usage. It really feels as if everyone is using it massively but keeping quiet about it. This is a guess as I haven't gone around and asked every single person about their AI usage.

I am reminded about a question I posted in a Vintage Apple subreddit. I described the problem and all the steps I took to try and resolve it. In the middle of the text I also hinted that I asked AI and that it gave be a wildly strange answer which I dismissed but that it gave me hints to continue onwards.

The majority of answers were focused around that one sentence and completely ignoring the rest of the post(and even the problem I was posting about). I was ridiculed (sometimes aggressively) for even considering trying the AI. Eventually someone finally answered the question, I thanked them and continued to get downvoted massively.

While I get that the vintage community can attract some colorful characters this was an interesting observation at how badly they reacted to the post. I've since refrained from mentioning AI and furthermore, trying to limit my involvement with communities like that and ironically working on better ways to use AI to solve problems so as to minimize dealing with them(finding ways of providing more system level data to the AI in my prompt).

dathinab4• 4 months ago

through it isn't AI generated content if the content still comes from you

youknownothing• 4 months ago

It's interesting you say this, and I wonder how far it gets. I like speaking at conferences and often submit proposals to their CFPs. I sometimes have the temptation to refine my abstracts using AI; not fully generate them, just touched them. But then they don't feel like me and I have a dilemma: shall I submit the 100% mine but perhaps sub-optimal text? or the AI-enhanced one? will the AI-edited one be too obvious and be rejected as AI slop?

However, this isn't an entirely new phenomenon. There is a company in Spain called Audens that manufactures croquettes. People prefer hand-made croquettes instead of industrially produced, and they usually can tell the difference by how perfectly regular industrial croquettes are, so Audens developed this method to produce irregular croquettes. Each individual croquette is slightly different, creating a homemade feel that appeals to consumers.

If it's too perfect, it isn't human.

jb-wells2• 4 months ago

... --- ... %/% %_% ^+?

jb-wells2• 4 months ago

... --- ... ^_^ %+% -.-. ---?

reducesuffering• 4 months ago

This being 3 years late is indicative of how far HN is falling behind the curve. Do not expect much convo here around software technology to be skating towards the puck. It is increasingly reactive and lagging the frontier, which is a shame from its former self.

sholladay• 4 months ago

I assume that the inclusion of some AI generated content is ok, such as when discussing the performance of different models?

agrajag• 4 months ago

I’m sure it would be fine if it was quoted, but it seems obvious the policy is to not represent AI generated content as human

sam345• 4 months ago

Good addition but to be fair HN guidelines have become so quaint particularly as they are now rarely enforced or even acknowledged. E.g. "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes. " And " Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. " These are violated every day without consequence.

altairprime36• 4 months ago

How often do you report the violations you see every day to the mods? (The ‘flag’ button is not yet suitable for that purpose.)

MagicMoonlight• 4 months ago

We need blade runners to identify the replicants among us and remove them.

ninjagoo16• 4 months ago

Conclusion: HN does not, for one, welcome their new AI overlords :)

joquarky10• 4 months ago

Don't blame me, I voted for CowboyNeal

ninjagoo16• 4 months ago

LOL :)

stephenlf• 4 months ago

Great catch! You’re absolutely right. AI-generated comments have no place in this human-centered community.

grappler• 4 months ago

Since we now face a threat of large-scale de-anonymization, a reasonable countermeasure might be using AI to make one's writing style less personally identifying, in order to try and retain some pseudonymity.

    https://simonlermen.substack.com/p/large-scale-online-deanonymization
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47139716

a1371• 4 months ago

My question is, and this is genuinely a question: Do you think YC-backed companies would have respected this guideline if it was posted on some other website they wanted to operate in?

teruakohatu• 4 months ago

Do you think YC-backed companies would have respected this guideline if it was posted on some other website they wanted to operate in?

That is a false equivalence. What a YC-backed company does is not relevant to how a YC-owned web forum operates.

ludicrousdispla3• 4 months ago

They're asking a question, not making an equivalence. And I'll add that YC founders/companies do have some specific advantages on this forum, so it's worth knowing if they are held to any standard.

Nevermark4• 4 months ago

This is a wonderful rule.

It also points out the need for AI writing tools that very strictly just:

1. Point out misspellings and typos.

2. Point our grammar mistakes, if they confuse the point.

3. Point out weaknesses of argument, without injecting their own reasoning.

I.e. help "prompt" humans to improve their writing, without doing the improvement for them.

In fact, I would like a reliable version of that approach for many types of tasks where my creativity or thought processes are the point, and quality-control feedback (but not assistance), is helpful.

This is a mode where models could push humans to work harder, think deeper, without enabling us to slack off.

cobbzilla6• 4 months ago

I don’t want to read AI slop, but how do you feel about translations?

I don’t mind when non-native speakers use it to express themselves, especially if disclaimed (but I give a pass even if not). Does it bother you?

Nevermark4• 4 months ago

I think it makes perfect sense.

But that a site might still want to discourage it, to avoid general degradation. It is a tradeoff.

If someone can write in the target language, just not well, a model could be asked to point out problems for the writer to fix. Rewrite a difficult sentence.

thezipcreator• 4 months ago

We've had machine translation for a while and I don't think anybody particularly thinks of it as a bad thing? Writing something and then having a machine directly translate it (possibly imperfectly) is a lot different than a machine writing the thing.

Personally I would like people to try learning other languages more (it's hard but rewarding) but you can't learn every language ever, and it is really hard to learn a language to fluency.

sschueller• 4 months ago

I have the feeling my gramatical errors from being ESL appear to be "tolerated" a lot more than a few years ago. By that I mean that it doesn't get called out as much as it used to be.

geobuk-dosa• 4 months ago

I've used LLM to correct my english, but Its better to use English at my level.

greggsy• 4 months ago

It’s almost certain that this exact thread is currently being used to train comment bots.

surume• 4 months ago

AI assistance does not eliminate human authorship. A comment may be drafted or refined with tools but still reflect the user’s own ideas and judgment. Prohibiting any AI assistance would be difficult to enforce and would likely exclude normal writing aids that many people already use. The more relevant standard is whether the commenter stands behind the content and participates in the discussion.

gos9• 4 months ago

Half of this thread is AI assisted writing. lol.

system2• 4 months ago

For once I am proud of my aggressive, unfiltered human comments.

shevy-java• 4 months ago

I've seen AI-generated comments be used quite a lot, even by real people. When asked why they did so, they could not explain it, or claimed "to reduce spelling mistakes". Which makes no sense; real people make spelling mistakes and typos all the time. Why would that warrant the use of AI? To me it seems as if some people are just mega-lazy, so they use AI; and for testing, too. When they do so, though, they waste the time of other humans, as these other humans suddenly have to "interact" with AI, without this being announced. It is a form of cheating, IMO. On youtube you now find many fake-videos created by AI, without announcement - I don't watch these as I consider it cheating too, when not labeled as such. Admittedly it is getting very hard to distinguish what is real and what is fake. There are some ways to find out, but it is getting really hard to distinguish accurately. Sometimes you see e. g. 10 funny animal videos and only 2 are fake-AI, so these people combine cheating with non-cheating. Very annoying - it degrades youtube, which isn't so bad actually since that is owned by evil Google.

aicoldtrail4• 4 months ago

I don't think I'm going to spend the time to paraphrase my worthwhile AI-applied work for such hypocritical rules.

So develop and fund and use AI but manually paraphrase things and don't cite AI?

It is best to cite a source and/or a method.

Do you think it is better to paraphrase and not cite AI?

I don't recall encountering posts on HN that I've wanted to flag as AI.

aicoldtrail4• 4 months ago

It is best to cite a source and/or a method

Have you considered this?

If people do not cite their sources or methods when they use AI, then we will not know where error was introduced by paraphrasing AI.

westurner• 4 months ago

Everyone that uses a search engine (with or without an "AI mode") is using AI and LLMs and software built and tested with AI.

If they say "no" to "did you use AI", they're probably not correct and/or lying.

But you may not cite or quote or link to AI generated work?

If people do not cite their sources or methods when they use AI, then we will not know where error was introduced by paraphrasing AI.

aicoldtrail4• 4 months ago

I think that you have rallied hate for AI to falsely justify need for censorship. If HN takes a "hate and hunt" AI stance, I will not contribute to HN.

aicoldtrail4• 4 months ago

Here are alternate possible rules for this; though I don't agree that making such distinction for every post is called for:

1. No AI comments without a human in the loop.

2. Please cite. Please cite when you use AI so that others can trace the errors and evaluate the premises of the argument. An argument has premises and a logical form.

We should expect the frequency of AI errors like hallucinations to decrease and accuracy to increase over time.

You should always consider peer review and getting another opinion regardless of whether AI or ML were used.

Do you need to cite AI?

If scientific reproducibility is necessary or important for your application,

You should also cite search queries, search results at that time, the name and version and software package hash of each software tool, the configuration parameters for each software tool, the URL and hash of the data, and whether you used spell check or autocorrect or an AI grammar service.

If you use an (AI) grammar service, you should disclose the model name and version, model hash or Merkle hash, and the model parameters.

But most people don't even cite URLs here; it's just people making unsupported arguments.

yavor-atanasov2• 4 months ago

This thread made me think of education (as in schools). To paraphrase:

“Don’t post generated/AI-edited assignments. School is for conversation between humans”

AI can be a great tool for learning, but also can pollute or completely hijack the medium for human interaction and learning.

Having HN flooded with AI generated content will be sad as I like reading it, but losing that same fight at schools will be detrimental.

chid• 4 months ago

I haven't heard of any recent discussion on the impact of AI on schooling. I agree with you entirely but curious to read any recent thinking on this.

eptcyka2• 4 months ago

It is horrendous - it seems that oral verification is required to test pupils skills - this does not scale. People not using LLMs to finish assignments are getting penalized by lower grades, people using llms to finish assignmnets learn nothing.

txrx0000• 4 months ago

This seems fine as a short-term solution, but human-only is no good as a long-term rule. The AIs will soon surpass human capability. Even in the present, I think some AI comments are already decent quality. It's just most of them aren't high quality yet.

And I'm worried banning AIs altogether will eventually lead to some form of prove-you-are-human verification to use the site, which will reduce anonymity. Even something seemingly benign like verifying email would mean many unverified accounts like my own will disappear.

And there is a legitimate use for LLM rewrite to counter identification by stylometry, so rewrite shouldn't be banned. I think we'll have to allow the AI stuff at some point, and make a system that incentivizes quality posts regardless of where they come from or how they're written.

eptcyka2• 4 months ago

I don’t care to read a comment that nobody put their time in.

altmanaltman• 4 months ago

"prove you are human verification" as in something like Sam Altman-backed World and The Orb [1]? Or maybe even the bead [2] (backed by me)

1: https://world.org/orb

2: https://thebead.pixlw.com/

Paracompact• 4 months ago

The AIs will soon surpass human capability.

The rule can be revised later.

I'm worried banning AIs altogether will eventually lead to some form of prove-you-are-human verification to use the site, which will reduce anonymity.

Of all the sites on the Web to worry about this happening, HN is low risk. Oppose that change if it comes, not this one.

And there is a legitimate use for LLM rewrite to counter identification by stylometry

Source for comment-level stylometry ever actually being someone's downfall, despite availing themselves to every other much more standard defense measure? Regardless, if your experimental means of deanonymizing yourself comes at the expense of the site's quality, it is probably not welcome.

fudfomo• 4 months ago

Highly appreciate this! It's what makes the difference: humans are not perfect which is why evolution works quite well.

mulhoon• 4 months ago

As a type nerd, I was very happy with Grammarly swapping my dashes to em dashes. But now everyone associates em dashes with AI, I can no longer enjoy that luxury.

teiferer• 4 months ago

I wonder how many people change how they express themselves just to sound less like AI.

wubbfindel• 4 months ago

I've been a regular users of the em dash for years before it became associated with AI output — and I refuse to let that change me!

Brajeshwar• 4 months ago

Obsidian has a Community plugin called “Smart Typography”[1] which was updated 4 years ago. That is one of my very few default plugins. I want my quotes curly, em-dashes corrected, and arrows shown as arrows.

These are also my defined rules in Grammarly (might be moving to LanguageTool).

1. https://github.com/mgmeyers/obsidian-smart-typography

zmef• 4 months ago

This policy is incredibly misguided, ableist, neo‑Luddite, technophobic hogwash. Technologically mediated communication has been with us almost as long as communication itself. We already accept writing, printing, telegraphy, phones, keyboards, spellcheckers, compilers, search engines, and autocomplete as legitimate augmentations of human thought. Drawing the line at this particular class of tools feels arbitrary and, frankly, rooted more in fear than in principle. I get it: humans are instinctively protectionist. A tool that operates in the same “space” as what we think makes us special—our intelligence, our language—feels threatening. It looks like competition rather than amplification. But this is just the next step in the same trajectory. Like written language, printing, and telecommunications, generative models are tools that, on the whole, will raise our collective intelligence by reducing the cost of expressing, translating, and recombining ideas. They don’t replace human judgment, curiosity, or responsibility; they change the interface. Generative AI is, in a sense, just very advanced cave painting: humans using whatever is at hand to make marks that carry meaning across time and space. Refusing to engage with those marks because the paint got better doesn’t make the communication more “authentic”; it just makes the medium poorer.

superultra• 4 months ago

I think you’re missing the point and approaching this with a myopically binary perspective.

Just because you consider AI an interface in line with, perhaps, a paintbrush, typewriter, or spell checker, doesn’t mean it automatically is. It may even be true for you, and not for others. That’s the myopic part.

The binary part is that simply because you see it as an interface, it doesn’t have effects that are different than the interface of a brush. You wouldn’t get very far arguing with a judge that 80mph over the speed limit is exactly the same as 5mph over the speed limit.

Or, where would you draw the line. Is hiring someone to write your hacker news comments still your comment? Or what about spam bots? Are they not also an “interface?” Is banning spam bots outrightly also “ableist” by you?

But also, we have plenty of both media philosophical musing and evidence based data that shows that while mediums may not BE the message, they absolutely do affect the message.

In this case HN is simply saying that the process of humans generating words that we type onto a screen is the valuable part of communicating that we want to maintain. And that using AI is a bridge too far in losing the effort and output from that process.

p0w3n3d• 4 months ago

It's quite funny how native speakers can recognise the AI voice writing or speaking their tongue.

As a Polish man I am repulsed when I hear AI generated Polish voice in a commercial, but can't see problems in AI generated English speech

larodi4• 4 months ago

given the content of the text is of significant importance, it would matter very little the tone it is presented with.

nurumaik• 4 months ago

As a russian I'm repulsed by both english and russian slop the same way

AyanamiKaine• 4 months ago

Mhh while many argue they can recognise the AI in writing. I dont think Humans actually can judge if something is done by ai or not. Many times I saw people 100% believing that an artist created an AI artwork only for that artist to be bullied because they didnt admit it.

Only for them to showing undeniable prove that they actually did create their art themselves.

For someone to be allowed to judge another. He should be doing a test where he can identify AI comments first with high accuracy.

It would be a pain to see real human comments and ideas to be hidden or removed by a mob.

Havoc• 4 months ago

That’s fine. I’m not really bothered by this either way in hn context

Only really irritated by the ultra low effort “here is a raw copy paste of what my LLM said on this topic” comments. idk how people think that’s helpful or desired

larodi4• 4 months ago

in reality, it is perhaps indistinguishable. like - if I take this whole page of comments, feed it into... say Opus latest 1M, and tell it "have my text tweaked in a way to please these guys' apparent aesthetically preferences", or even "make my writing sound human in the sense all these guys do", then I cannot see how anyone would recognize it.

unless tis signed before uploading, like this is even enforceable?

water9• 4 months ago

HN is leftist echo chamber and down view points they disagree with. Fuck Dang, can’t wait to see this website go to AI slop.

spzzz2• 4 months ago

Me not native speeker. AI help me too get my point front much more cleanly. It hard not look like dummy.

Im of course exaggerating, but it is so easy just to run the text through an AI to make it sound "better" without changing what im trying to express.

---

I’m not a native speaker, so AI helps me get my point across more clearly. It’s hard not to come across like a dummy otherwise.

Of course I’m exaggerating, but it’s really easy to run the text through AI to make it sound better without changing what I’m trying to say.

wiether• 4 months ago

As a non native speaker, seeing how many natives keep making the "then/than" mistake, I'm comfortable looking dumb.

I only use AI on critical communications, to make sure that the meaning of my message is the right one.

Otherwise I'm fine making mistakes and I encourage people to correct me.

GrinningFool3• 4 months ago

The removal of the quotes around "better" discards an entire layer of meaning.

It also loses the voice that was present in the 'before' version. Typos/misuses and all. More tangibly, an entire layer of meaning was dropped when it removed the quotes around 'better'.

spzzz2• 4 months ago

I see your point, and I agree the result can feel impersonal and stiff. But, I'd say the overall improvement is more important than one possible deterioration. Quotes are easy to put back if I'd think it was important (it was not in this case)

Please reply in Swedish only. Remember to not use any tool to translate to avoid subtle layers of meaning being removed. It's easy! /Native speaker ;)

yunseo472• 4 months ago

Whether it’s code, general text, or university assignments, the core issue is taking responsibility for one's own work. While I share the concerns raised in this thread, I believe the focus on 'LLM usage' is a bit of a red herring. The fundamental principle of ownership hasn't changed with the advent of LLMs; the tool itself isn't the issue, but rather the abdication of responsibility by the author.

For instance, if a non-native speaker translates their own writing using machine translation or an AI, is that problematic—provided they personally review and vet the content before posting? I don't think the people calling out AI use on this board are taking issue with that. Ultimately, it’s not about the method; it’s about the author's attitude.

The reason LLMs are so disruptive now is that while "shitposts" used to be obvious, we're now seeing "plausible" low-effort content generated without any human oversight. Irresponsible people have always been around, but LLMs have given them the tools to scale that irresponsibility to an unprecedented level.

yunseo472• 4 months ago

I think a human-like piece with minor mistakes resonates more emotionally than a perfectly written piece that looks like it was written by AI. However, since there seems to be a grammar debate going on here, I'd like to add: Is it a bad thing for non-native speakers to use AI to correct grammar or awkward expressions? I think it definitely has positive aspects in terms of lowering language barriers.

ethbr12• 4 months ago

the tool itself isn't the issue, but rather the abdication of responsibility by the author

The biggest current social problem with AI content is our collective lack of transparency into how much human responsibility was taken.

Give a <100% reliable/accurate AI tool, the same post/code may have had {every line vetted by a human} or {no lines vetted by a human}... and readers have no way of telling which it is!

Because even if no edits needed to be made, the former carries a lot more signal than the latter, because it reduces risk of AI slop and therefore makes the content more valuable.

At the same time, it also costs more time to produce, so in any competitive marketplace (YouTube, paid comments, startup code, etc.) the unvetted AI content will dominate.

alansaber• 4 months ago

Reddit is absolutely infested with AI generated comments. Good to see a site taking a stance against. That being said my main gripe in HN wasn't comments, it's the volume of shitty AI generated submissions.

9rx• 4 months ago

HN is for conversation between humans.

What kind of human has an orange head and beige body with text written all over? An HN conversation is clearly with a computer program. Anthropomorphizing it is certainly an interesting take, but one that is bound to lead to misinterpretations and misunderstandings. The medium is the message. To avoid problems it is best to not play pretend.

midnight_eclair• 4 months ago

llm-generated is for corporate mail

llm-assisted for when i care about precision and accuracy

brain-generated for when i feel safe to make mistakes

lionkor2• 4 months ago

If you feel the need to fix/edit your own comments with AI, keep in mind that this is not necessary at all. If someone can't figure out what you're saying, and don't care to try, they can run their LLM over it and have it summarize it with emojis, bullet points, and slightly changed content. You dont need to do that for all of us.

Cthulhu_15• 4 months ago

If someone can't figure out what you're saying, and don't care to try,

This puts the onus of being comprehensible to the reader, which isn't fair I think. If you can't get your point across in a way that is comprehensible, maybe don't post.

hollowturtle• 4 months ago

Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling

Reading the site in past 2 years left me with the feeling that HN has been injected by subtle to catch AI marketing campaigns. It's exausting and calling out astroturfers imo is not that bad

stalfie• 4 months ago

Without a technical means to enforce this, the only result of this policy will be a culture of paranoia and a lot of false positives.

bayindirh4• 4 months ago

I'll kindly disagree, even me, as someone who doesn't use any "Chat" tools from big three, can feel if something is AI generated. We're slowly being educated into detecting it. This is why human brain is awesome.

Every model, every computer generation has a subtle signature, and we (as in humans) can understand it.

Moreover, here is a very human-enforced place. Many of us already doesn't like to be answered by a bot here, so community is also a deterrent. Plus, having an official guideline will multiply that deterrent.

Not everything is lost. Have some faith in your fellow humans.

ontouchstart• 4 months ago

I finished reading the thin book "Systemantics" by John Gall yesterday (thanks @dang).

I realized that the problem of AI generated/edited content flooding everywhere around us is a symptom of something wrong with the System.

It might have something to do with sensory deprivation. Here is a quote from the book caught my attention because of the word "hallucination":

As we all know, sensory deprivation tends to produce hallucinations.
FUNCTIONARY’S FAULT: A complex set of malfunctions induced in a Systems-person by the System itself, and primarily attributable to sensory deprivation.

(As I typed the text above on my iPhone, I was fighting auto completion because AI was trying to “correct” the voice of John Gall and mine to conform the patterns in its training data. Every new character is a fight against Gradient Descend.)

All you need is attention but the cost of attention is getting higher and higher when there is little worth our attention.

It takes a lot of efforts to be human.

dathinab4• 4 months ago

What is meant with AI-edited??

AI can do a grate job for grammar, spell and formulation checking/fixing without changing any content. I.e. just adding as a fancy version of extended spell checking.

While I do currently not use it like that there shouldn't be any reason to ban it.

And tbh. given some recent comments I have been really wondering if I should use it, because either there are quite a bunch of people with lacking reading comprehension or quite a bunch of people with prejudice against people struggling with English spelling and grammar.

Either way using AI as extended spell checker does would help with getting the message through to both groups as

- it helps with spelling, grammar in ways where traditional spell checker fail hard

- it tends to recommend very easy to read sentence structure and information density

gosub100• 4 months ago

It doesn't help anyone. The user just depends on it to fix their English. And it makes a monoculture where every ESL user sounds exactly the same.

dathinab4• 4 months ago

except you can nudge LLMs to use different stiles more similar to your writing

they aren't good at it but viable

and more important this is about LLMs fixing grammar, spelling and pointing out bad formulations with change recommendations. This is not about giving them pullet points and telling them to write text for you.

layer82• 4 months ago

without changing any content

It absolutely will change content if you ask it to reformulate or fix language style.

dathinab4• 4 months ago

there is tools out there which can use in ways where it normally won't change the content. And it's not that you are blindly posting the output of it.

It's also about fixing grammar, spelling, formulation issues. It's not about giving it pullet points and it writing the text for you.

wellpast• 4 months ago

One way to potentially discourage or curb AI-edited/written is integrate AI into HN so that your submissions get recommendations based on HN post guidelines such as “consider tone”, “substance” etc.

Then less motivation to jump out to external LLM to even get comments on your content which can temptingly lead to editing/generation.

palmotea4• 4 months ago

Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans.

Where's the curiosity about this world-changing technology? As all the CTOs have recently said: AI use not an option and it must change everything we do. /s

redbell• 4 months ago

First of all, I suggest that moderators add this to the comments' section in the linked guidelines. It should clearly states that pasting AI-generated replies is discouraged and does not fit within the community spirit.

Second, I have to confess that I did this sin a couple of times now, but I came to realize that this is neither good for me nor for the HN community. Although I used AI just for rephrasing, I decided to not do this ever and I'd rather write my own words with mistakes than post generated words based on my thoughts.

It happened for me once and it strikes me like a nuke and I felt truly embarrassed. A couple of months I wrote that comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42264786) then I asked ChatGPT to rephrase it and then mistakenly, pasted both comments, the original above and the generate one below and I hit submit. Shortly after, a user comes, read my comment and replied with that embarrassing reply and honestly, I deserve it. From that moment I realized how things can got messed up quickly when you rely heavily on that AI.

forgetfreeman2• 4 months ago

There's an element of cognitive dissonance to the community's response to AI that I find fascinating. Nearly unanimous rejection of AI-generated content while simultaneously breathlessly touting AI tooling in significantly more sensitive (and lets face it riskier) environments like the company codebase.

plewd• 4 months ago

I think people care less about risk and more about human creativity & genuinity. Personally, I get disgusted when I see AI encroaching into artistic fields because I hope new technologies will be used to replace our monotonous work, not take away from authentic discussion/work.

forgetfreeman2• 4 months ago

This and other social media are hardly platforms for authentic discussion, and as far as artistic fields go AI is perfectly incapable of encroachment provided you accept Stephenson's definition of what makes "art":

"Hard art demanded commitment from the artist. It could only be done once, and if you screwed it up, you had to live with the consequences." - Neil Stephenson, Diamond Age

I feel like what you're arguing for here is "it's fine as long as it's convenient for me".

randomNumber72• 4 months ago

The problem is that there is now way to distinguish AI generated content from s.th. a human has written.

Tepix• 4 months ago

You're absolutely right! It's not just the uncertainty — it's cruelty towards AI.

randomNumber72• 4 months ago

Sorry but I don't understand what you want to tell me with this.

kittikitti• 4 months ago

An important distinction I feel is often left out of the conversation of regulating AI generated content are the psychological effects of negative or positive consequences or reinforcement.

I think we are overwhelmingly utilizing negative reinforcement for AI generated content; where there are consequences for engaging in this behavior. On the other hand, positive reinforcement would encourage authenticity and greater human content. The reality of the situation is that AI generated content won't go away and it's become a game of who can hide their artificial content the best. Thus, I believe that positive reinforcement is the solution.

I think we must instead encourage human created content instead of policing AI generation. There are so many rules to follow already that by the time I create the content, I've gone through enough if/then logic that it feels like AI anyway.

bennydog224• 4 months ago

I personally enjoy the errors and oddities in syntax and dialect which tell me something definitively is > NOT written by AI and help me understand the author better in such an anonymous space.

The second is gonna be a lot harder to enforce, as we soon (and probably already) don't know who we're talking to on the internet - a real person or someone's agent? Will calling spaces "human only" later be seen as discriminatory by agents? How will we actually enforce "human only" spaces? Will websites like HN start to provide an "agent only" discussion forum or filter in addition to the "human only" sections?

zby2• 4 months ago

I just found the xkcd that expresses my opinion on this:

https://xkcd.com/810/

I am surprised that apparently I am in a minority here.

insin• 4 months ago

Am I imagining things, or has HN become even more noticeably overrun with green usernames spewing LLM-generated comments since this guideline was added? Spiteclaws?

Freebytes2• 4 months ago

Using AI to write content is seen so harshly because it violates the previously held social contract that it takes more effort to write messages than to read messages. If a person goes through the trouble of thinking out and writing an argument or message, then reading is a sufficient donation of time.

However, with the recent chat based AI models, this agreement has been turned around. It is now easier to get a written message than to read it. Reading it now takes more effort. If a person is not going to take the time to express messages based on their own thoughts, then they do not have sufficient respect for the reader, and their comments can be dismissed for that reason.

mlhpdx10• 4 months ago

Where does the line fall? I can use an LLM to help form new and novel thoughts into prose, right? To structure and present it in conventional language rather than stream of thought. Is that disrespectful? It doesn't feel so.

davorak11• 4 months ago

Where does the line fall?

For now I would argue when ai edits for you instead of helping you edit. Take a look at the examples that Dang posted if you have not yet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47342616

The first 5 I looked at were pretty egregious and not subtle.

Aurornis• 4 months ago

I can use an LLM to help form new and novel thoughts into prose, right? To structure and present it in conventional language rather than stream of thought.

Better to post your stream of thought.

Using LLMs to turn stream of thoughts into prose is mostly just adding fluff and expanding the text to make it look more like thoughtful prose. What you get looks nice to the creator because they agree with what it's saying, but it wastes other reader's time as they have to dissect the extra LLM prose to get back to the author's stream of thought.

Just post what you're thinking, even if it's not elegant prose. Don't have an LLM wrap it in structures and cliches that disguise it as something else.

ghurtado2• 4 months ago

Is that disrespectful

It is, by way of being extremely dishonest in at least two ways:

- there's no way you would do this if you were required to disclose that you used an LLM to write your comment.

- therefore, if your primary goal isn't communication, then you must be doing it to look smart and "win" the conversation

Same reason people desperately post links to scientific papers they don't understand in a frantic attempt to stay on top of some imaginary debate.

strangattractor4• 4 months ago

This reads as an AI comment to me. Anybody else?

Freebytes2• 4 months ago

AI has not been used to write any comment that I have ever posted on Hacker News. You can observe my previous comments over the years, even prior to the adoption of modern LLMs, which demonstrate how I communicate.

(While the patterns may be similar, I have a tendency to be more loquacious due to my larger token limit! %)

ghurtado2• 4 months ago

On 4chan, a long time ago, comments like these would invariably get the reply "not ur personal army"

Think about that for a minute. 4chan would make fun of the comment you just made.

dredmorbius3• 4 months ago

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46832601>

Email mods instead: hn@ycombinator.com

waterhouse• 4 months ago

I guess, in theory, this can eventually be countered by people using LLM browser integrations to tell them whether comments are worth reading (and maybe to summarize long comments). Is anyone currently working on that? It might be interesting to see.

ljm3• 4 months ago

I don't believe that delegating reading comprehension to an LLM is really any better than delegating writing ability. In fact I'd argue it's worse to have an automation advising on what's worth reading or not.

There are a lot of people who have no time for something like Infinite Jest and even getting through the first few chapters is an effort. But at least they tried. An LLM excluding the possibility of reading this book because it is 1000 pages of postmodern absurdity effectively optimises away the fringes of human creativity and leaves only the average stuff behind.

AI slop detectors already exist and are no better than snake oil, because a person can have an LLM-smelling writing style without actually using AI. After all, LLMs were originally trained on human input.

pardon_me• 4 months ago

First we would run into the spam-filter problem no different to email. Then we have to choose: do we concede to viewing the world through a lens of WhatEverAI, or train it locally on our own thoughts/views on the world, and hope that AI model is never compromised.

ericmcer2• 4 months ago

Well just have an AI read it for you then!

That reminds me of the gmail LLM usage where AI can writes your emails for you and also summarize incoming ones. Maybe we lost the thread somewhere...

stefap2• 4 months ago

If it takes longer to read, it's not an AI problem, but the author failing to catch that the comment is too drawn out. I don't see how it is a problem to have AI write a comment if you agree with the content. If it is bad content, it will eventually reflect badly on the author anyway.

sean2• 4 months ago

I skim 100 comments here everyday. Good comments/bad comments, overly long comments, whatever, time to read is low. I assume all those authors have a strong opinion / expertise on the subject that urged them to take the time to write that comment, which makes skimming hacker news to keep a pulse on the world (imho) a valuable task. If, instead, most of those comments are composed by molt-bots, then I'm not getting a "real" view of the world, I don't care how good and concise the comments are, I'd be wasting my time reading about news that may not matter to anyone and opinions that may not exist.

kouunji• 4 months ago

This is very well put, and captures my feelings on it. I take it as disrespect that someone would have any expectation for me to read something they can’t be bothered to write. LinkedIn is a great example - my entire professional network is just spamming at this point, which drowns out others that DO put in any effort.

eslaught• 4 months ago

It's not just about the increase in volume, it's about the delta between the prompt and the generation.

If the generation merely restates the prompt (possibly in prettier, cleaner language), then usually it's the case that the prompt is shorter and more direct, though possibly less "correct" from a formal language perspective. I've seen friends send me LLM-generated stuff and when I asked to see the prompt, the prompts were honestly better. So why bother with the LLM?

But if you're using the LLM to generate information that goes beyond the prompt, then it's likely that you don't know what you're talking about. Because if you really did, you'd probably be comfortable with a brief note and instructions to go look the rest up on one's own. The desire to generate more comes from either laziness or else a desire to inflate one's own appearance. In either case, the LLM generation isn't terribly useful since anyone could get the same result from the prompt (again).

So I think LLMs contribute not just to a drowning out of human conversation but to semantic drift, because they encourage those of us who are less self-assured to lean into things without really understanding them. A danger in any time but certainly one that is more acute at the moment.

mitchdoogle2• 4 months ago

When I have AI write things for me, I'm spending a good amount of time on it - certainly longer than it takes to read. I'm also usually editing it quite a bit. Maybe I'm an outlier, but I still don't think it's appropriate to make a blanket statement about using AI to write content violating this social contract you described.

drra• 4 months ago

Funny how most flipped from being grammar nazi to mistakes are proof of human authorship.

the_ai_wizarrd• 4 months ago

Now this is rich. I actually don't disagree with the intent, but it's just funny to me that the tech overlords are attempting to replace so many jobs with AI, but when it affects them, oh no, not us. We are the exempt elite.

mitchitized• 4 months ago

You're absolutely right!

(Sorry, couldn't resist.) I could be the lone dissenter here, but to me well-written comments are a lot more fun to read than near-gibberish.

I wished more people tried harder to be better communicators, but it is what it is. If AI can decipher these comments and produce a much more coherent statement, then I'm for it.

QuantumGood• 4 months ago

And be kinder to obviously human posts and help them.

notanastronaut• 4 months ago

>However, with the recent chat based AI models, this agreement has been turned around. It is now easier to get a written message than to read it. Reading it now takes more effort. If a person is not going to take the time to express messages based on their own thoughts, then they do not have sufficient respect for the reader, and their comments can be dismissed for that reason.

Unless you're a billionaire* or a CEO firing off memos where you fire half your company's workforce.

u got to be powerful to puond out a txt this way and have ppl still listen to u.

Otherwise, it is getting dismissed because 'you didn't put enough effort into the comment, so I'm not going to read it.'

That is amusing to me.

*Reference to the analysis performed on the Epstein emails and texts.

trinsic24• 4 months ago

I dont post AI generate anything, but I do get snarky... Ahh shoot sorry guys I didn't even see the guidelines. I broke so many. Ill keep all that in mind.

Whats been happening in the world right know has really been getting to me and the bots or the people that support authoritarianism really makes me sad and angry that the world is being destroyed by careless people..

misterflibble• 4 months ago

I'm perfectly content to post my poorly spelt words and grammatical errors to authenticate myself. But I know everyone it's probably using the AI filter now. Why don't we just do AI bot to AI bot communications for everything? I'm kidding I would not like that

akshaysasi• 4 months ago

yes

earonesty• 4 months ago

agreed. ai-generated seo will kill your site too!

kklouis999• 4 months ago

kill ia or killed by ai

danielszlaski• 4 months ago

Broken English from someone who actually shipped the thing beats polished prose from someone who just asked an LLM about it.

Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans

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