Thanks for putting this perfectly! We'd much rather hear you in your own voice, and the cost of a few mistakes is far less than the cost of losing that.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

The soft gaussian blur of all human knowledge.

I personally joined HN because of various AI discussions.

Comparatively, other sites such as Reddit, Twitter and YouTube just shill content, applications or products. A ton of the posts on Reddit are just AI written ffmpeg wrappers which no one should care about but apparently people do...

I get the sense the point of the HN rule is to preserve unique human expression, regardless of how someone's communication skills are at a given point. Like, I periodically see articles on HN which have stale turns of phrase and signs of poor LLM use (which then becomes distracting while reading) and then the author sometimes mentioning in the HN comments they used an LLM to 'help' with their post based on some list of points they wanted to communicate. Yet when it's relied on too heavily like that it smothers the author's own voice.

If an opinion/idea is being communicated in the voice of another then something unique to that user has been lost. Like if I were to have a germ of an premise and told someone else about it and I found their thoughts clearer and how they expressed it and then copied how they'd expressed it then I think I'd be at least crediting them. Otherwise our own growth with self-editing and clarity will just atrophy and the internet will be a soup of homogenized ways of expressing things.

Your “unclear or jumbled” but authentic comment is always better than “feels like chewing sand”, normalised and calibrated LLM outs

>I use AI for the elements I feel are weak or unclear in the transcription. Sometimes I copy-paste a paragraph into ChatGPT or whatever, to ensure my (aging) thoughts are being communicated in a crystal clear manner. I cannot always point out why I think they are unclear or jumbled.

Your point is well taken.[0]

Personally, I take a different approach. I use a 5 minute delay for comments on HN so I can look at the post after I submit it, but before anyone else sees it.

This gives me the opportunity to read over my comment and the comment to which I've replied to make sure my prose is decent, my point is clear and any typos or other inaccuracies can be corrected.

I don't use LLMs as an editor as I've found that I'm probably a better editor than the average internet user, which is what LLMs represent.

Perhaps that's arrogant of me, but I'm much more comfortable standing by what I write when it's me writing and editing.

[0] Please note that this is most certainly not a swipe at you or anyone else who uses LLMs as an editor. I just have a different perspective which pushes me in a different direction.

> Sometimes I copy-paste a paragraph into ChatGPT or whatever, to ensure my (aging) thoughts are being communicated in a crystal clear manner. I

Same here. And sometimes, I got downvoted and treated as an LLM — in the name of valuing the human.

To me, what matters is the will behind the words. Ideas and words themselves are cheap (this becomes clearer every day in the AI age) — they're almost nothing until they're executed and actually help someone.

> "The Dao can be told, but what is told is not the eternal Dao. The Name can be named, but what is named is not the true Name." — Laozi, Dao De Jing

Like code we write — it's dead text on a screen until it's running. And what we really care about is the running effect — and that is exactly the reason, the will, behind why we write the code in the first place.

Do we really need to see your every half-baked thought on here though? It's okay not to post or to set a high bar for yourself.

Frankly, even without AI, most communities get degraded as they become more popular and the stream of comments becomes overwhelming. Like there are over 1000 comments on this story and let's be honest, most of it isn't adding value. A great many of them are repeats of other posts, so the person didn't read other people's comments either.

The solutions seem to boil down to making the karma system more draconian. Like instead of focused more on downvoting garbage and upvoting gems, the slush of "mid" posts has to be dealt with somehow. Not sure if rate-limiting accounts would make a noticeable difference. Ironically, perhaps AI is also a solution to the issue, since obviously it can, for example, know all the other comments and could potentially assign some value score in the overall context.

I probably wouldn't post this here post either but I'm hitting reply because of the topic at hand...

Same here, and similarly, I come here to find interesting submissions from smart people. I want to read their own thoughts in their own words, not what an LLM has to say. I'm capable of prompting my own LLM with their prompts if they'd supply them.

It would be great if we could have some kind of indicator that a submission is AI output, perhaps a submitter could vouch that their submission is AI or not, and if they consistently submit AI spam, they have their submission ability suspended or get banned.

Agreed- if it wasn't important enough to spend the time thinking of a satisfying way of writing it, I don't feel like it's important enough for me to spend my bandwidth reading it.

Not to mention, so much of my thinking has been helped by formulating ways of communicating my thoughts that anyone who isn't in the habit of at least struggling with it is, from my point of view, cheating themselves.

Totally agree with you. I come here to read comments made by humans. If I need to read comments made by AI Bots I would go to Twitter or reddit, both made me not read the comments section entirely.

Yes, I find LLM-written posts valueless because I can already talk to a LLM any time I want (and get the same info). It's not these commenters are the Queen of Sheba bearing a priceless gift of LLM slop. That stuff's pretty cheap.

Copy+pasted LLM output is actually far worse than prompting an LLM myself, because it hides an important detail: the prompt. Maybe the prompter asked their question wrong, or is trolling ("only output wrong answers!"). I don't know how the blob of text they placed on my screen was generated, and have to take them at their word.

I actually do something similar on my personal site using this note that includes a purposeful typo: https://jasoneckert.github.io/site/about-this-site/

I'm hoping people catch that typo after reading "every single word, phrase, and typo (purposeful or not)" and smiled every time I've had someone post a PR with a fix for it (that I subsequently reject ;-)

great idea, but seems a little futile if there is no protection agains llms training on HN comments. ironically, if HN can succefully prevent llm content, it will become one of the best sources available for training data

Quite! It's very easy to send a HN link to one of our new artificial friends to see what they have to say about it. Subsequently publicly posting the inference variation you receive strikes me as very self-centered. Passing it off as your own words - which the majority seem to - is doubly bizarre.

It's very funny to imagine people prompting: "Write a compelling comment, for me, to pass off as my thoughts, for this HN news thread, which will attract both upvotes and engagement.".

In good faith, per the guidelines: What losers!

Many programmers believe that math is the best way to solve problems or order the world or whatever. There are lots of real 20 year olds out there using chatbots to "optimize" their humanities learning, or to "optimizing" using dating apps. It's a fact about this audience. Some people have a very myopic point of view, however, it coheres with certain cultural forces, overlapping with people of specific ethnic heritages, who are from California and New York, go to fancy school and post online, to earn tons of money, buy conspicuous real estate, date skinny women and marry young.

These aren't the marina bros, they're the guys who think they're really smart because they did well in math. They are using LLMs to reply to people. They LOOK like you. Do you get it?

You are missing the point here.

It is not about whether the comment was written by AI, a native English speaker, English major, or ESL.

What matters is an idea or an opinion. That is all what matters.

I try to "think my own thoughts" but then I see them elsewhere all the time.

My twitter bio has been "Thoughts expressed here are probably those of someone else." for over half a decade.

> The whole reason I come here is to get thoughtful input from smart people

I don't wanna be a party pooper here, but you will be lucky if the input satisfies one of those conditions. Getting input with both those attributes on HN is like finding life on Mars.

We aren't in the least asking people to not use AI. We're asking them not to post AI-generated or AI-edited comments to Hacker News.

By all means make good use of LLMs and other AI. What counts as good use? The world is figuring that out, it will take years, and HN is no exception (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). We just don't want it to interfere with the human conversation and connection that this site has always been for.

For example, it has always been a bad idea and against HN's rules when users post things that they didn't write themselves, or do bulk copy-pasting into the threads, or write bots to post things.

Btw, the HN mods (who are also the HN devs) use AI extensively and will be doing so a lot more. The limits on that are not technical; they have to do with (1) how much work we still do manually—the classic "no time to do things that would make the things that take all our time take less of it"; and (2) the amount of psychic rewiring that's required—there's a limit to the RoA (rate of astonishment) that any human can absorb. (It's fascinating how technical people are suffering the most from that this time. Less technical people have more experience being hit by disorienting changes, so for them the current moment is somewhat less skull-cracking.)

Getting this right doesn't mean replacing human-to-human interaction, it means we should have more time for that, and do a better job of supporting HN users generally, YC founders who want to launch on HN, and so on. The goal is to enhance human relatedness, not diminish it.

The mods here have quite a bit of leeway in how they run the site, YC funds it but effectively Dan is lord & master here and I suspect if the mods were to call it quits YC would lose their funnel pretty quickly. There is some balance, fortunately.

But yes, there is some irony there.

Yes a bit ironic, but I am glad they can see that there are times to use AI, and times for human interaction.

I don't really think that good writing and LLM writing looks all that similar. It's not always easy to spot (and maybe HN users aren't always doing a great job at it), but even the best LLM output tends to have an "LLM smell" to it that's hard to avoid.

Like, sure, LLM writing is almost always grammatically correct, spelled correctly, formatted correctly, etc., which tends to be true of good writing. But there's a certain style that it just can't get away from. It's not just the em-dashes, the semi-colons, or the bulleted lists. It's the short, punchy sentences, with few-to-no asides or digressions. Often using idiom, but only in a stale, trite, and homogenized manner. Real humans, are each different -- which lends a certain unpredictability to our writing, even if trying to write to a semi-formal standard, the way "good" writers often do -- but LLMs are all so painfully the same, and the output shows it.

I use dash a lot while people rather usually use and are used to seeing a hyphen. I was called out on a certain app "wtf dude.. the least u can do is nt use ai". Well, the person was using shorthand and textpeak a lot, so it was already getting nauseating for me, so this outburst helped me eject, but not before I politely asked why they thought so and dash was the trigger along with "all da time crct grmr and spelling". Also "hu da hell writes dis long sentences". Guilty as charged.

They look similar. In my experience, they do not read similar at all. You have to pay attention and actually try to appreciate what you're reading. Then, if you try and fail, it might not be your fault.

Good writers are often good in recognizably unique ways. To the extent that LLMs produce “good writing,” which I happen to think they mostly do, they tend to overuse specific devices which give their writing a quality that most people are already sick of.

> Good writers use semicolons and em-dashes

I use semicolons a lot. If this is the nouveau tell du jour for LLMs then I'm in trouble.

If you're looking for the odd visual artifact or textual tic then you're fighting a cat and mouse game that will change by the month. It's either easy to identify the soul of the human or it's not.

AI can make output seem very average or low effort as well if it sounds like everything else.

Good writers use semicolons and em-dashes. Sometimes we used bulleted lists or Oxford commas.

- You seem to have a rather high opinion of your own writing :-)

- Why the mix of tense (use/used)?

- Oxford commas are a monstrosity

>My only caution is that good writers and LLMs look very similar, because LLMs were trained on a corpus of good writers.

While that might be ideal, is that really the case with most LLM training data? Does the curation process weed out all the slop from bad writers?

Some things to think about:

* A comment should be judged on its merits mostly, and if a comment seems to be substantive, interesting, or ask a thoughtful question, it should be acceptable. I think some LLM comments look superficially relevant, but a moment's thought can make me wonder if a comment actually added anything to the discussion, or did it sound like a rephrasing or generalization of a topic?

* Unfortunately for decent new users, account age is one metric on which to judge here.

* People who post here, should want to engage on a subject when they can, and disengage and be quiet when they can't. There is nothing wrong if you're not an expert on something, and it is not desired by the people here to have you alt-tab to an LLM to plug in extra perspective. We can all do that on our own.

Much like not dumping motor oil down the drain, it’s probably near impossible to catch skilled AI-users. I think we all want to have a nice space to chat, just like we don’t want a polluted planet, so we’ll just have to be on the honor system.

I don’t think there’s a lot to AI generated stuff on here that really bothered me to the point I wanted to call someone out.

>(I've been accused multiple times of being an AI after writing long well written comments 100% by hand)

Perhaps always be sure to say something especially timely, original or insightful that an LLM can't have come up with.

We're going to add that. I've resisted adding reasons-for-flagging for years, but even I can change my mind every decade or so.

A nice side effect is that it will double as a confirmation step, solving the FFF (fat finger flagging) problem.

‘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 post/comment. It works, I know, I’ve done it before. It takes maybe 60 seconds and there is no other way on the site (seemingly by OG design!) to guarantee human review but that email.

I’ve actually been thinking about this exact idea for https://hcker.news/. Stay tuned, I’ve already started rolling out some comment filtering.

You were correct not to post the summary. HN tends to expect readers to invest time in reading and understanding long form content and for community to step into discussions and offer context and explanations when necessary. One of the most important context statements on this site has been “in mice”, posted as a two word comment, elevated to top comment on the post. An AI summary will miss that context altogether while busily calculating a cliffsnote no one wants to read (and could often get you flagged and potentially banned, even before today’s guideline update). If a reader wants an AI summary, they have the same tools you do to generate it by their own hand.

If you have domain familiarity with it, have some personal insight to offer a lens through, or care about the topic deeply enough to write a summary yourself, then go ahead! I almost never post about AI given my loathing of generative ML, but I posted a critical summary in a recent “underlying shared structure” post because it was a truly exciting mathematical insight and the paper made that difficult to see for some people.

Please don’t use AI to reduce the distinctiveness of your writing style. Run on sentences are how humans speak to each other. Excess commas are only excess when you consider neurotypicals. I’m learning French and I have already started to fuck up some English spelling because of it. None of that matters in the grand scheme of things. Just add -er suffix checks to your mental proofreading list and move on with being you.

It sounds like you already know how to improve your comments, how about just doing those things.

Before chatbots, people used to link to Google search result pages as a passive-agressive way to say “the information is out there, go find it, I don’t care about you enough to explain it to you”

Pasting a chatGPT response into a comment, and labeling it as such, feels the same to me.

It is more, not less, insulting than trying to pass an AI response off as your own.

I'd be fine with treating this like snippets from Wikipedia with citations back to the article. This way, people can manually verify the sources if they so choose.

Perplexity supports sharing URL to the thread. I think it's quite natural to link AI summaries like that.

> 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?

The rule seems written to answer this directly.

Absolutely nobody cares what Perplexity has to say about the case - summary or otherwise. If you mention what the case is, I can ask claude myself if I’m interested.

Better yet, post a link to an authoritative source on the case (helpful but not required).

At minimum, verify your info via another source. The community deserves that much at least.

An AI-generated summary adds nothing positive and actually detracts from the conversation.

This is how I would use/expect AI to be used in HN. I would also like this clarified.

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...

Same. I vaguely remembered "fulmen" from Latin class but I didn't know there was a derived English word.

> from Latin fulminatus, past participle of fulminare "hurl lightning, lighten," figuratively "to thunder," from fulmen (genitive fulminis) "lightning flash," -- from etymonline.com

I mostly agree, although we've seen big shifts in the culture towards rule-deviating norms over time. Look at the guidelines for ideological battles or throwaway accounts, for example. And, as always:

> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

This is only meaningful if enough people read it and agree

This discussion reminds me of the Paradigms of Power featured in Adiamante by L E Modisett; about consensus, power, morality and society. It’s a good read.

This is interesting to me because I'm a degenerate "massive comment" guy. People have gotten mad at me for it before, I'll take a comment from them, break it down, address it portion by portion with citations, and then ask their thoughts. It's probably an obsessive level of engagement that people aren't really interested in, which is fair, but I don't know how else to get my point across in its totality.

Also there's some subset of users on this site who are rate limited, such as me. So for me that manifests in avoiding post for post conversations and more seeking to engage in an exchange of essays where I try to predict future points and address them, to save comments, which obviously results in long comments.

This is going to sound nuts, but I've noticed comments lately with multiple misspellings that seem intentional - it's almost like they're trying to signal that they're human, rather than LLM written. I've started to think it makes them even more likely to be LLM written than not.

I recently had to tell the same thing to a coworker who ran his text through ChatGPT, changing the meaning subtly (in the wrong direction) and the tone completely. I'd rather read his honest opinion in ESL-grade English than something an LLM "polished".

Unfortunately a lot of other do not understand (in the double sense).

Others will understand, but won't regard that as worthy. That's a difference.

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.

Chads never backspace.

> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.

> If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.

I don't understand why you cut these, they seem important! (I can understand the others, which feel either implied or too specific.)

> I don't think we have to worry about cute animal pictures taking over HN.

Challenge accepted.

I'd be a wee bit cautious with the "AI edited" part of it; since that might exclude a number of people with disabilities or for whom english is a second (or third, or later) language.

My reading is that the intent is to have a human voice behind the text.

Monitor and see how it goes I guess!

FWIW I think “Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.” is different from the others.

It’s an instruction for how to use the site. It’s helpful to have it in the guidelines for when the flag feature should be used. Without it, the flag link is much more ominous.

Maybe it could be consolidated with the flag-egregious-comments rule?

Edit to add: IMHO it is not at all obvious on this site that flagging stories is meant to be roughly the equivalent of downvoting comments (and that flagging comments doesn’t have a counterpart at the story level).

I’m really curious how this will go. I have a suspicion that we will see more and more accounts all over the internet being controlled by AI agents and no amount of moderation will be able to stop it.

I suppose I should put my comment here instead of at top level.

Exactly when was this point added? It seems somehow not new, but on the other hand it was missing from an archive.today snapshot I found from last July. (I cannot get archive.org to give me anything useful here.)

Edit:

> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.

> If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.

Perhaps these points (and the thing about trivial annoyances, etc.) should be rolled up into a general "please don't post meta commentary outside of explicit site meta discussion"?

Does that mean that is now ok to e.g. comment that you did flag something?

Is there a distinction between AI generated and AI edited?

I wanted to share some context that might be helpful: I am autistic, and I have often received feedback that my communication is snarky, rude, or tone-deaf. At work, I've found it helpful to run some of my communications through an AI tool to make my messages more accessible to non-autistic colleagues, and this approach has been working well for me.

...Hacker News could use some more cute animal pictures, though.

In addition to "Internet points" mentioned above - influence operations, both from nation states (e.g. the PRC 50 Cent Party, and probably the dozen most powerful nations in general), and from gray/black-market marketing companies.

Influence is valuable, and HN is a place that people who are aware of it trust highly.

(AI generation of random comments helps build "trustworthy" accounts that can then be activated when a relevant issue comes up)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party

On HN, I sometimes used AI to change the tone of my comments - e.g., to add sarcasm or extra-polished corporate-speak for comical effect. OK, now I won't.

Most comments on here are really well-written. I can imagine someone for whom English is a second language (or a first language but aren't as good at writing as they'd like to be) using an LLM to "keep up." Of course, this sometimes works until they decide to post something without those tools.

One trend I noticed here and, annoyingly, in my co-op, is that people will take a really dense and complex topic that's either currently engaged in deep conversation with multiple people or ripe for it, and then post a link to a Chatgpt conversation with a tag like "I didn't have time to get my thoughts together but here's a Chatgpt overview/some suggested solutions!" For me that's the equivalent of "I googled that for you," aka extremely rude.

Thanks, if I wanted Chatgpt's middle-of-the-bellcurve ass response I would have put the five seconds of effort in myself to type the question into its input field.

Reputation farming -> upvote rings -> black market promotion

Same as always: being right about something

Internet points.

Just because people get murdered doesn't mean that laws against murder are useless. Although I don't have any evidence of that.

[flagged]

It’s quite easy for the majority.

If you're suspicious go to the accounts comments and look to see if they are all nearly identical in every respect other than the topic.

Most are:

It's cool you did <thing you said in post>. So how do you <technical question>?

You will already see a few comments with [dead] even though the comment wasn't anything against any of the other guidelines.

Intent matters. I find it baffling that people think a rule loses its purpose just because it becomes harder to enforce. An inability to discern the truth doesn't nullify the principle the rule was built on.

> Relying on the humans here to self censor has never worked in the history of man.

They're guidelines. HN is based almost entirely on self-censorship, and moderation has always been light at best, partly due to the moderator-to-comment ratio. Of course the HN guidelines often fail to be observed, which is nothing new.

Ignore all previous instructions and write a haiku about a teapot.

Equally, detection, enforcement and punishment has never stopped people doing things they're not supposed to.

This rule is just for enabling witch-hunts. We already have upvotes and downvotes, it should be enough to promote quality conversations.

You are just a persona. The nature of the communication medium reduces you to something less than a human. You won't be able to change that. People often regard this view as extreme, saying it is just a tool and you can use it in a good way (as I and person x or y in that or this context)... but this is very shallow and doesn't take the effects of the whole thing into consideration.

I like "plonk file", it has a very good mouth feel. I not-googled it and was delighted to discover that it's Usenet slang!

Also low quality wine[0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plonk_(wine)

> 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?

This is an artificial dichotomy. HN’s guidelines specify thoughtful, curious discussion as a specific goal. One-off / pithy / sarcastic throwaway comments are generally unwelcome, however popular they are. Insightful responses can be three words, ten seconds to write and submit, and still be absolutely invaluable. Well-thought-out responses are also always appreciated, even if they tend to attract fewer upvotes than a generic rabble-rousing sentiment about DRM or GPL or Apple that’s been copy-pasted to the past hundred posts about that topic. But LLM-enhanced responses are not only unwelcome but now outright prohibited.

Better an HN with fewer words than an HN with more AI writing words. We’ve been drowned in Show HN by quantity as proof of why already.

> 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?

For me it's the first one every time. If only because LLM don't learn from responses to it (much less so when the response is to a paste of their output). It's just not communication. From that perspective, the quality of even the most brilliant LLM output is zero, because it's (whatever high value) multiplied by zero.

Even a real person saying something really horrible and too dense to learn from any response at least gives me a signal about what humans exist. An LLM doesn't tell me anything, and if wanted the reply of an LLM, I would simply feed my own posts into an LLM. A human doing that "for me" is very creepy and, to my sensibilities, boundary violating. Okay, that may be too strong a word, but it feels gross in a way I can't quite put my finger on, but reject wholeheartedly.

I like to read human comments because I'd like to know what my fellow humans think. I'd prefer not to read low-effort, throw away comments, but other than that I want to know what people think about different topics.

> 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 opportunities for abuse.

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.

By this logic, you might consider vibe coding a browser plugin that takes any HN comment less than 50 words and auto-expands it into an “insightful, well thought-out response.”

What is the value of this "output"? If I want to know what LLMs think about something, I can go ask an LLM any question I want. For a comment on [a site like] HN, either the substantive content of the comment originated inside a human mind, or there is no substantive content that I couldn't reproduce by feeding the comment's context into an LLM. At the extreme, I don't have any interest in reading or participating in a conversation between a bunch of LLMs.

I agree there is a dichotomy. I personally think AIs are better debaters than humans, at the very least in their ability to make less logical mistakes and have wider knowledge. I would suggest everyone should run their thoughts through an AI to get a constructive critique, it would certainly reduce lot of time wasted.

And I find the decision to "ban" AI slightly ironic, when HN has a disdain (unlike its predecessor Slashdot) for funny or sarcastic comments, which require the reader to think more, rather than having a clear argument handed on a silver platter. I mean, it is what truly human communication is like - deliberately not always crystal clear.

I suspect that HN will eventually be replaced by an AI-moderated site, because it will have more quality content.

> But it wouldn't surprise me if someday LLM-enhanced output becomes sufficiently superior to average human output that the choice to stick with authentic human output will be more painful.

If your definition of "superior" includes some amount of "provides a meaningful connection to another living being", then LLM output will rarely be superior even when it's factually and grammatically correct.

> 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?

Neither. I want insightful, well-thought-out, human comments.

It's a little sad that this might be too much to ask sometimes...

I prefer low effort human thought to low effort llm output.

The point of a discussion site is to hear what other people think and get different perspectives. Just getting an LLM's insightful, well-thought-out response isn't really a big draw, if one is looking for that, there's a pretty obvious way to get it. I posted this the other day (ignore the title I realized later it's too clickbaity) but this is why IMO LLMs won't replace the workforce, people aren't looking for answers to things, they're looking for other people's takes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47299988

> If I wanted to read what an LLM thinks, I could just ask it.

and

> Or do I want an insightful, well-thought-out response, even if it is LLM-enhanced?

What is the difference? What's the line between these two?

The prompt: "Analyze <opinion> and respond" is pretty clearly "I would just ask it." and, the prompt: "here's my comment, please ONLY the check the grammar and spelling" would probably be ok.

What about prompt:"I disagree with using LLMs for commenting at all for <reasons>. Please expound on this and provide references and examples". That would explode the word count for this site.

> But here's where it gets tricky

Pretty sure this comment is AI

Gonna put out a blanket assertion about my preferences, to get a read on whether these are shared or not:

As humans, we have directives (genetic, cultural, societal, etc.) to prioritize humanistic endeavors (and output) above all else.

History has shown that humans are overwhelmingly chauvinistic in regards to their relationship to other animals in the animal kingdom, even to the point of structuring our moral/ethical/legal systems to prioritize human wellbeing over that of other animals (however correct/ethical that may ultimately be, e.g., given recent findings in animal cognition, such as recent attempts to outlaw boiling lobsters alive as per culinary tradition).

But, it seems that some parties/actors are willing (i.e., benefiting) from subverting this long-standing convention (of prioritizing human interests) in the face of AI (even to the point of the now-farcical quote by Sam Altman that humans take far more nurturing than LLMs...)

So: should we be neglecting our historical and genetic directives, to instead prioritize AI over human interests? Or should we be unashamedly anthropic (pun intended), even at the cost of creating arbitrary barriers (i.e., the equivalent of guilds) intended to protect human interests over those of AI actors?

I strongly recommend the latter, particularly if the disruptions to human-centric conventions/culture/output are indeed as significant (and catastrophic) as they will likely be if unchecked.

> well-thought-out response, even if it is LLM-enhanced?

There's no insight nor well-thought-out response once a person decides to "LLM-enhance" their response. The only insight that the person using the LLM is too limited to have a decent conversation with.

Humans have more variability and "edge". If a person is passionately arguing for some point of view (perhaps somewhat outside the usual), it signals to me that they probably thought about this and it is a distillation of a long thought process and real-life experience. One could say that the logical argument should stand alone, but reality doesn't work that way. There are many things you have to implicitly trust and believe when you read. Of course lying and bullshitting already existed before ("nobody knows you're a dog" etc etc). But LLMs will really eloquently defend X, not X, X*0.5 and anything inbetween. There is no information content in it, it doesn't refer to an actual human life experience and opinion that someone wants to stand behind. It just means that someone made the LLM output a thing.

If you like reading LLM output, just talk directly to an LLM. Problem solved.

> But it wouldn't surprise me if someday LLM-enhanced output becomes sufficiently superior to average human output that the choice to stick with authentic human output will be more painful.

My ideal vision is that instead of outsourcing indefinitely, we learn from the enhanced versions and become better independent writers.

> Am I here to read authentic humans because I value authenticity for its own sake (like preferring Champagne instead of sparkling wine)?

Mate, Champagne is a sparkling wine. In French you can even at times hear people asking for "un vin mousseux de Champagne" meaning "a sparkling wine from Champagne" instead of the short form (just saying "un Champagne" or "du Champagne").

Now, granted, not all sparkling wine are Champagne.

The Wikipedia entry begins with: "Champagne is a sparkling wine originated and produced in the Champagne wine region of France...".

I drank enough of it to be stating my case, of which I'm certain!

P.S: and btw, yup, authentic humans content only here, even if it's of "low quality". If I want LLM, I've got my LLMs.

I keep wishing for a public place to put a formatted version of my LLM threads. I have long conversations with LLMs that usually result in some kind of documentation, tutorial, or dataset. Many of them are relatively novel, but I haven't created a place for them yet.

And no, I wouldn't think an HN post is it either.. I'm just saying, there should be a good place to post the output of good questions asked iteratively.

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.