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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#241

Post by pants2 »

tayo42 wrote: post #90
SoKamil wrote: post #58

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.

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.

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.

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

#242

Post by getnormality »

chrisweekly wrote: post #175

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…

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.

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

#244

Post by jmuguy »

bondarchuk wrote: post #167

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 n…

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.

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

#245

Post by armchairhacker »

foxfired wrote: post #123

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.

This was discussed before. People will age accounts and buy/hack inactive ones. Meanwhile, often a link gets posted, the project owner (or someone affiliated) finds out, and they make a new account to comment; it would be a shame to lose these people.

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

#246

Post by gleenn »

resters wrote: post #194
bondarchuk wrote: post #167

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 n…

[flagged]

I think we can be a little more nuanced than calling this sentiment outright stupid. A top HN article is about Scientific publications being overwhelmed with LLM trash. LLMs do pose a very real challenge to modern discourse. 10 years ago we could know that if we read something that sounded intelligible that at least some minimum effort had been put forth by a huma to be coherent. That bar is now completely gone. Now all internet users have to become adept AI-sniffers to know if some random bot isn't wandering themnoff a mental cliff with perfect formatting and eloquent prose. Having visceral reactions to that aren't unfounded in my opinion. We've lost real signal and having a forum like this be polluted will be a big casualty if we aren't careful and deliberate about our reaction to AI.

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

#247

Post by bob1029 »

tromp wrote: post #9

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

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.

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

#248

Post by altairprime »

nkzd wrote: post #114

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.

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.)

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

#249

Post by minimaxir »

fouronnes3 wrote: post #197
bondarchuk wrote: post #167

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 n…

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

The "I asked " 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).

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

#250

Post by xpe »

fouronnes3 wrote: post #197
bondarchuk wrote: post #167

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 n…

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

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.

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