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.
Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
341–350 of 1001 posts
Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#342All 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.
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.
Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#343What 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.
> 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.)
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.
Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#344Doesn’t mean anything when even one of the first rule is not enforced at all > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics
"Most" is not "All". Hacker News has always had an exception for extremely significant politics.
Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#345Not 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…
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.
Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#346Can 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.
Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#347I'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…
I prefer low effort human thought to low effort llm output.
Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#348Im 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.
Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#349Yes! 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 th…
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…
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.
Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#350I'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…
> 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 opp…
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.