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

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.

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

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?

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.

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.