> Cutting something from the guidelines doesn't mean the rule is canceled.

Understood, but I feel like I see people breaking these ones frequently, so removing the explicit guideline feels to me like a bad idea.

I seem to recall a rule about "don't downvote something because you disagree with it", but I can't find anything like that.

Not sure if that's really solvable with rules, though.

My experience with downvotes is that people mostly use it as a "I don't like this" button, which is proxy for "I couldn't think of a counterargument so I don't want to look at it."

(I noted recently that downvotes and counterarguments appear to be mutually exclusive, which I found somewhat amusing.)

Whereas I will often upvote things I personally disagree with, if they are interesting or well reasoned. (This seems objectively better to me, of course, but maybe it's personality thing.)

That makes this more ok, IMO. I'm otherwise against "AI-edited" being part of the rules — it's very hard to draw the line (does asking an AI for synonyms of a word count?). AI-editing is especially a valuable tool for non-native-English speakers or similar.

I was close to one such case, and I really appreciate the care and caution you and Tom applied.

Anything I post here is always in my own voice - even when I use an LLM. 95% of the times grammar/spelling is fixed, it's because my brain lapsed while typing, not because I don't know the grammar well and am using LLM to shape my voice.

I would wager that this use case is much more prevalent than ones where the LLM changed the comment significantly enough to change one's voice.

I never copy/paste from an LLM into HN. Everything is typed by myself (and I never "manually" copy LLM content). I don't have any automatic tools for inserting LLM content here.[1]

Always, always, always keep in mind that you don't notice these positive use cases, because they are not noticeable by design. So the problematic "clearly LLM" comments you see may well be a small minority of LLM-assisted comments. Don't punish the (majority) "good" folks to limit the few "bad" ones.

Lastly, I often wish we had a rule for not calling out others' comments as "AI slop" or the like.[2] It just leads to pointless debates on whether an LLM was used and distracts far more than the comment under question. I'm sure plenty of 100% human written comments have been labeled as LLM generated.

[1] The dictation one is a slight exception, and I use it only occasionally when health issues arise.

[2] Probably OK for submissions, but not comments.

I've thought about fine-tuning a model on the corpus of your HN posts and then offering a service that would allow the user to paste their message into a text box and the Dangified version of their comment would pop out in another box next to it.

I was thinking of calling this service "Dang It."

You say you want hear posts in other people's voices but I'm pretty sure that if I did this that the people who used it would find greater acceptance of their comments than if they just posted them as they originally wrote them.

>For preposition, I roll a D20 and hope the best.

This makes me think of something: are nonnative English speakers tempted to use LLMs to correct grammar because mistakes like this actually make the writing unintelligible in their native language? For example, if I swap out the "For" in this sentence for any (?) other preposition, it's still comprehensible. (At|Of|In|By|To|On|With) example, ...

I agree. I think that ultimately it will be governments providing services to attest humanity.

They already do to a certain extent via passports. I built a little human verifier using those at https://onlyhumanhub.com

Even prior to LLMs, a single comment was rarely enough to identify a bot. Even if nonsensical, there's too little information to separate machine from confused human (plenty of people posting drunk on their phones).

On reddit people sometimes go through the comment history and see that it seems to be a bot, but that's fairly high effort.

The key is to accuse everyone of being an LLM. Those who don't react are bots. Those that fight the charge no matter how much its levied are also bots, but with better programming. Those that complain at first but give up when too much effort is required are the real humans. Any bot able to feel frustration is cool.

(I was replying to a now deleted response)

> Slop has an upside?

Not exactly. Rather its is that places where one does want to find pictures of people's cute cats and dogs is now having additional moderation / administration burdens to try to keep the AI generated content out of those places.

It's not a "cute pictures of cats overrunning some place" but rather "even in the places where it was appropriate to post pictures of one's pets in #mypets or /r/cuteCatPics because such pictures are appropriate there (so they don't overrun other places), now people are starting fights over AI generated content."

An example that I recently encountered was someone who did an AI replacement of a cat that was "loafing" of a loaf of bread that looked like a cat. The cat picture would have been fine (with a dozen "aww" and "cute" comments in reply)... the AI cat loaf picture required moderation actions and some comment defusing over the use of AI.

Strong opinions strongly held.

...except that "snarky, rude, and tone-deaf" generally gets the downvoting (flagging?) mob to come in and "phoosh".