Depends on how you use the AI. if you use it a bit like you'd ask a human to proof-read your work, AI can actually be quite helpful.

The other important thing you can do is have an AI check your claims before you post. Even with google and pubmed, a quick check against sources by hand can take 30 minutes or longer, while with AI tooling it takes 5. Guess which one is more likely to actually lead to people checking their facts before they post. (even if imperfectly!) .

I'm not talking about people who lazily ask the AI to write their post for them. Or those who don't actually go through and actually get the AI to find primary sources. Those people are not being as helpful. Though try consider educating them on more responsible tool use as well?

> Yes, and AI won't help here. People will use AI to better break the guidelines.

AI is a general purpose tool. People will use AI for multiple reasons, including yours. I'll wager, though, that your use case is much more challenging to do than mine, and that my use case will dominate in number.

> HN is more like talking than writing.

Says you. Many disagree.

> And LLMs don't help you write well, they help you sound like a clone, which is unwanted.

Patently false on both counts. Sorry, you're cherry picking and not addressing the part of my comment that discusses this.

> Imagine if your friend AI-edited their speech in real-time as they talked to you.

When a conversation is heated (as it occasionally is on HN), I actually would rather he AI-edit in real time - provided that the output reflects what he intended.

> The argument I'm making is that if you care so much about standards you can always hone them yourself instead of taking the lazy way out of having an AI write for you.

It's pretty clear that in this case the use of AI is not a matter of laziness, but rather quality/consistency assurance. I use code formatters not because I'm too lazy to indent code myself, but because it helps guarantee that it's formatted consistently. I use a stud finder when mounting things to walls not because I'm too lazy to do the “knock on the wall” trick, but because the stud finder is more precise and reliable at it.

I don't use AI to edit my comments, but if I did, it would be not because I'm too lazy to check for all the things I want to avoid putting in my comments, but as an extra layer of assurance on top of what I've already trained myself to do.

Here's a better example. Use "a few bad apples" wrong, and you'll likely get a response. A few bad apples will cause the entire barrel to spoil rapidly, so a few bad apples is a big deal. But it's often used to say the opposite, that a few bad apples isn't a big deal.

I wish I had posted a better example, but I couldn't recall anything at the moment and still can't. It's usually a more interesting complaint than the old man shaking fist at clouds of the usage of the word literally.