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

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!

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 ;-)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141119

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?

I don't wanna be a party pooper here, but you will be lucky if the input satisfies one of those conditions. Getting input with both those attributes on HN is like finding life on Mars.

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

- You seem to have a rather high opinion of your own writing :-)

- Why the mix of tense (use/used)?

- Oxford commas are a monstrosity

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.

I use semicolons a lot. If this is the nouveau tell du jour for LLMs then I'm in trouble.

Perhaps always be sure to say something especially timely, original or insightful that an LLM can't have come up with.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Pretty sure this comment is AI

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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)

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.

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.

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

https://github.com/mitchellh/vouch

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.

Btw, 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 more 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, YC founders who want to launch on HN, and so on. The goal is to enhance human relatedness, not diminish it.

But yes, there is some irony there.

A nice side effect is that it will double as a confirmation step, solving the FFF (fat finger flagging) problem.

> 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.)

Challenge accepted.

My reading is that the intent is to have a human voice behind the text.

Monitor and see how it goes I guess!

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).

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"?

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.

Also low quality wine[0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plonk_(wine)

Man this is a great head-to-head. The folks who claim to use LLMs to "clean up" their writing? Yeah, no. I guess the grammar is probably right, but the writing is wrong. The whole point is about the passage of time, both in the metaphor of the "the age of steel," and in the literal sense. And then it starts talking about "miles back"? It feels bad to read, and in a non-obvious way that requires extra cycles just to figure out why it's off.

Whereas, a human in a comment section writing something like "We passed the no return sign miles ago" - it reads so much better. If the grammar or idiom is slightly off, that actually makes it read better because this is a comment section, people don't actually communicate via formally correct language in almost any context whatsoever.

Would you to explore some more examples of human to human conversation throughout history?

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>?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

(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)

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

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

I can understand why you think this is true, but it is false.

By the looks of it, I don't even think I'm replying to a human.

> Your arguments will come of as stronger to the reader.

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

Typed without a spellchecker :).

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.'.

(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.)

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

This is another reason why it's good to email us (hn@ycombinator.com) rather than commenting when you see generated comments.

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...

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.

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

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.

(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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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)

stump along, cut your own path, or fuck right off

real life will eat you otherwise

I mean holly shit, you actualy want to hide behind an automated echoing device so that you wont get, well, what is happening to my post as sooooon as I press↓

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

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.

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.

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.

That's the spirit!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27esprit_de_l%27escalier

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

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.

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.

This might be roughly what you're looking for?

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").

No one is confusing Cleetus McFarland with an AI bot.

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).

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.

> 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.

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.

Though I note it didn't say "read comments by other humans", only "read comments by humans", so confirmed AI.

I think the guidelines here work quite well, and expect a good-faith interpretation, which they mostly receive.

I think you're asking for some sort of empirical verification of "this is / is not LLM text" (which seems impossible), but there's no real reason to expect the existence of LLMs to change that this website is, generally, interacted with in a good-faith way. People are really good at calling others out on here -- I doubt that will change.

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

> 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.