I feel a little bit of irony in this post of a company/forum that is asking its users to not use AI while simultaneously trying to fund countless companies that are responsible for ruining the internet as we speak.

We aren't asking people to not use AI. (We use it ourselves.) What we're asking is not to post AI-generated comments to Hacker News. (We don't do that ourselves.)

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.

As I mentioned, 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 longer experience being hit by disorienting changes, so for them the current moment seems 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, as well as 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.