>Beyond folks for whom English is a second language

I am one of those folks, and I’m strongly against AI writing for that use case as well.

The only reason I can communicate in English with some fluency is that I used it awkwardly on the internet for years. Don’t rob yourself of that learning process out of shyness, the AI crutch will make you progressively less capable.

Traditional translation tools still work, and they're pretty darn good still.

As someone who learned English as a second language, I would encourage people to use LLMs and any other resources to practice, and then use what they've learned to communicate with others.

Telling an LLM to "refine" your writing is just lazy and it doesn't help you learn to express yourself better. Asking it for various ways of conveying something, and picking one that suits you when writing a comment is OK in my book.

The way I see it, people will repeat the same grammar and pronunciation mistakes, and use restricted vocabulary their whole lives, just because learning requires effort, and they can't be bothered.

I can accept that nobody is perfect, as long as they have the will to improve.

Why exempt people who use English as a second language? Anyone with a level of proficiency sufficient for reading the comments here can manage writing English at a passable level. If that takes effort and requires looking up idioms or words, then good! That is how you learn a language — outsource that and you don't. It won't stick even if you see what is being output.

I don't care if they use an LLM to ask questions about grammar or whatever, as long as they write their own text after figuring out whatever it was they were struggling with.

> We just want to communicate with you

Then you should have no issue with people using LLMs to communicate more clearly.

Also, there is nothing wrong with looking like an idiot. Thats only in your mind. As long as you have put thought into your reply, even if it not structured correctly, or verbose, or does not have perfect English, humans can still decipher it and understand it.

One heartbreaking loss from LLMs are the funny little disfluencies from ESL speakers. They're idiosyncratic and technically wrong, but they indicate a clear authorial voice.

AI polished writing shaves away all those weird and charming edges until it's just boring.

English is my 3rd language. I still disagree with using an LLM to write on one's behalf. I either get to read your thoughts in your voice or the comment is getting a downvote/flag.

> I don't understand why people are immediately trying to find some loophole in this with spelling, grammar, etc checks.

First, what "loophole" is the comment above referring to? Spell-checking and grammar checking? They seem both common and reasonable to me.

Second, I'm concerned the comment above is uncharitable. (The word 'loophole' is itself a strong tell of that.)

In my view, humanity is at its best when we leverage tools and technology to think better. Let's be careful what policies we put in place. If we insist comments have no "traces of LLM" we might inadvertently lower the quality of discussion.

The "I asked <LLM>" disclosures vary between a) implying the LLM is an expert resource, which is bad, and b) disclosure that an LLM was referenced with the disclosure being transparent about it, which is typically good but more context dependent.

Unfortunately (a) is more common, and the backlash against has been removing the communinity incentive to provide (b).

I find the consistent anthropomorphization to be grating as well

These are the worst. I'm fine with you dumping your own half formed thoughts into an LLM, getting something reasonably structured out, and then rewriting that in your own voice, elaborating, etc.

But the "This is what ChatGPT said..." stuff feels almost like "Well I put it into a calculator and it said X." We can all trivially do that, so it really doesn't add anything to the conversation. And we never see the prompting, so any mistakes made in the prompting approach are hidden.

The only thing worse is "I asked my AI and he said"

You don't possess an AI, you are using someone's AI

This is usually an "auto-skip" for me as well.

Still preferable to just pasting it without revealing the source. LLMs have become a brain prosthesis for some people which is incredibly sad.

I work for a political party (not Ameican) and the President is addicted to using chatgpt for facebook posts.

> "I asked <LLM> and he said..."

An alternative I tried was sharing links my LLM prompts/responses. That failed badly.

I like the parallel with linking to a Google/DuckDuckGo search term which is useful when done judiciously.

Creating a good prompt takes intelligence, just as crafting good search keywords does (+operators).

I felt that the resulting downvotes reflected an antipathy towards LLMs and the lack of taste of using an LLM.

The problem was that the messengers got shot (me and the LLM), even though the message of obscure facts was useful and interesting.

I've now noticed that the links to the published LLM results have rotted. It isn't a permanent record of the prompt or the response. Disclaimer: I avoid using AI, except for smarter search.

My take is orthogonal. Overall, I've become less tolerant of token-generators of all kinds (including people) of bad quality (including tropes, bad reasoning, clunky writing, whatever). But I digress.

If we want human "on the other end" we gotta get to ground truth. We're fighting a losing battle thinking that text-based forums can survive without some additional identity components.

It's not about the rules. It is about intent. The rules are just there to alert newcomers and repeat offenders to the fact that they are in fact not operating according to the rules. That way there is something to point to. Then they can go 'oh, I didn't know that, sorry', and then it is all fine or they can do an 'orf'[1] and persist and then you throw them right out.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47321736

I feel like you are being a bit contradictory: the suggestion is to dissuade AI content - isn't that "design[ing] a site to deter group(s) of people that they don't want"? I personally don't want to vibe check every HN comment if I can avoid it, I don't even think you can quantify that in any meaningful way. We can engender a site like that at least in spirit. It may be equally as difficult but it's still worth fighting for.

> 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.

To answer your question: LLMs don't have free speech, because they aren't companies/businesses, they are a tool (that is used by companies/businesses).

Whether a company/business uses an LLM or a real human to write a particular piece of text, that piece of text is entitled to free speech protections on the basis of the company signing off on it. Not on the basis of how that piece of writing was produced.

When you put the question that way, the answer is naturally no. However, there are other factors. I wrote about this here if you want to take a look: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47342616.

I think we can be a little more nuanced than calling this sentiment outright stupid. A top HN article is about Scientific publications being overwhelmed with LLM trash. LLMs do pose a very real challenge to modern discourse. 10 years ago we could know that if we read something that sounded intelligible that at least some minimum effort had been put forth by a huma to be coherent. That bar is now completely gone. Now all internet users have to become adept AI-sniffers to know if some random bot isn't wandering themnoff a mental cliff with perfect formatting and eloquent prose. Having visceral reactions to that aren't unfounded in my opinion. We've lost real signal and having a forum like this be polluted will be a big casualty if we aren't careful and deliberate about our reaction to AI.

You's correct :)