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!
Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
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Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#582It's far from proven or obvious whether involving an LLM in your thought process degrades your thought process.
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.
Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#583Is 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.
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.
Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#584I'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…
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.
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.
Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#585I don’t think there is a good algorithm (or guts) for differentiating between well-written comments and AI-generated comments.
Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#586How 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 recol…
This is how I would use/expect AI to be used in HN. I would also like this clarified.
Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#587Honest 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?
Reputation farming -> upvote rings -> black market promotion
Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#588How 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 recol…
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...
Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#589People 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]:…
> 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.
Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#590I don't understand the need to use AI for this kind of convo.
+1 to this.