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Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
691–700 of 1001 posts
Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#692"AI-edited comments" is a very interesting one. Where is the line between a spelling/grammar/tone checker like Grammarly, that at minimum use N-Grams behind the scenes, and something that is "AI" edited? What I am asking is, is "AI" in this context fully featured LLMs, or anything that improves communication via an automated system. I think many people have used these "advanced" spellcheckers for years before Chatgpt…
You're touching on an important point. More here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47342616 . 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 on…
I wasn't sure whether it was an omission or an unintended gap, as the guideline specifically points to "comments". So it seems AI generated/edited posts are fine. Strange, because both can be flagged/downvoted if it was to be left with that.
Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#693[dead]
Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#694I'm sorry, but I would just have to just say no.
## Opposing the Ban on AI-Generated/Edited Comments on HN
*The value of a comment should be judged by its content, not its origin.*
Here are key arguments against this policy:
- *Ideas matter more than authorship.* If a comment is insightful, well-reasoned, and contributes meaningfully to a discussion, dismissing it solely because AI assisted in its creation is a genetic fallacy — judging an argument by its source rather than its merit.
- *We already accept tool-assisted thinking.* People routinely use calculators, search engines, spell-checkers, and reference materials before posting. AI assistance exists on a spectrum with these tools. Drawing a bright line specifically at "AI-edited" is arbitrary when someone could use a thesaurus, Grammarly, or have a friend proofread their comment without objection.
- *It disadvantages non-native speakers.* Many HN users are brilliant engineers and thinkers who don't write fluently in English. AI editing can level the playing field, allowing their ideas to be judged on substance rather than prose quality. This policy inadvertently privileges native English speakers.
- *It's effectively unenforceable.* There is no reliable way to distinguish a lightly AI-polished comment from a naturally well-written one. Unenforceable rules erode respect for the rules that are enforceable and important.
- *The real problem is low-effort content, not the tool used.* What HN actually wants to prevent is shallow, generic, or spammy comments. A policy targeting quality directly (which HN already has) addresses the actual concern better than a blanket tool prohibition.
- *Human intent still drives the conversation.* A person who uses AI to articulate their own idea more clearly is still participating in a human conversation — they're just communicating more effectively. The thought, the intent to engage, and the underlying perspective remain human.
*In short:* This rule conflates the medium with the message and risks excluding valuable contributions in pursuit of an authenticity standard that is both philosophically fuzzy and practically unenforceable.
Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#695All 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 had a couple of experiences where I suspected I was hearing LLM-generated/edited text being read aloud. It was at two different webinars about that were about roadmaps or case studies about some products that I use. It was a bit uncanny because I could detect the stylistic patterns ("It's not X, it's Y" and "No X, no Y, just Z"), but it was kind of jarring to see them spoken by a person on a video call. It makes me…
> It was a bit uncanny because I could detect the stylistic patterns ("It's not X, it's Y" and "No X, no Y, just Z"),
That's just marketing-speak. LLMs sound like that because LLMs were trained on marketing-speak.
Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#696There should be a "flag as AI" link in addition to "flag" and then a setting for people to show flagged as AI. Once the flagged as AI reaches a certain threshold then it disappears unless you enable "Show AI". Maybe once enough posts have been flagged like that then that corpus could be used to train an AI to automatically detect content generated by AI. That would be cool. Maybe the HN site wouldn't add this feature…
‘Flag’ is an algorithmic flag only, and there are no humans in the flag algorithm’s processing loop. They may monitor and react to the ‘queue’ of flagged articles, and they can do special mod things with flagged posts. But if you want to report a guidelines violation for AI-assisted writing to the mods, just email the mods (contact link in the footer) subject “AI-assisted writing flag” or similar with a link to the p…
Never occurred to me to try that, because I assumed I would get banned for doing it, until today.
Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#697I'm sorry, but I would just have to just say no. ## Opposing the Ban on AI-Generated/Edited Comments on HN *The value of a comment should be judged by its content, not its origin.* Here are key arguments against this policy: - *Ideas matter more than authorship.* If a comment is insightful, well-reasoned, and contributes meaningfully to a discussion, dismissing it solely because AI assisted in its creation is a genet…
this one over here officer
Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#698The only question is is the entity interesting and/or correct. Those properties are in the eye of the beholder. If they're human or not is beside the point. After all, no one knows I'm a dog.
No, those properties are tied to the state of mind and experiences of the human, dog, or LLM behind any given comment. 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…
For all you know that LLM could've indeed actually run an actual Redis, given the increasing use of AI agents for digital infrastructure provisioning.
Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#699Apple's proofread is essentially spell-check and punctuation until it isn't and even in a few-sentence-long para you'd see it has sneakily changed a lot and Apple being Apple you, the customer, obviously has no way to set it to "only fix spelling, punctuations and leave everything else including grammar as it is" and I've a feeling a lot of folks are at least using proofread or something on those lines. But then I really don't think browser's "spell check" ought to be kosher either if the content has to be the human's because those mistakes are also makes such text human and in some way unique. I don't think it's an easy line to draw but weird seeing just comments "targeted" here.
Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#700A Please (or even a Pls) would have been nice ... But I upvoted anyway.