AI-edited comments are not welcome here. If you’re not able to see and make those changes in your HN writing without AI editing, then you’ll either have to post on HN without those changes, or you’ll have to strive to apply them yourself.

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bsimpson 5 hours ago | parent [-]

This sounds like you're chastising me for something totally distinct from what I was supporting the request for clarity on.

I'm not asking or advocating for using AI as a copy editor.

The post I replied to asked about using Gemini as if it's Wikipedia - that is, saying "according to Gemini" when citing a fact where one might have once wrote "according to Wikipedia" or even "according to Google."

This is a forum people hang out in part-time. It's nobody's job to go spend an hour researching primary sources to post a comment. Shallow searches and citations are common and often helpful in pointing someone in the right direction. As AI becomes commonplace, a lot of that is being done with AI.

"Can I have AI write a reply for me?"

is a very different question than

"Can I cite an AI search result?"

This rule change is clear about the former. There's room to clarify the latter.

	▲	duskdozer an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I don't see how an AI response would have any value. If you aren't familiar enough with the material to make a statement yourself, you aren't familiar enough to validate the response. If you use it as a pointer to verifiable sources, you should instead post the sources themselves and why you think they're relevant.
	▲	altairprime 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> This sounds like you're chastising me Nope. (For an example of that, see any comment I posted to this discussion that starts with “Please don’t”.) > "Can I cite an AI search result?" Ah. An AI response is neither a primary source nor a reference source, and HN tends to strongly prefer those. Linking to a Google /search?q= isn’t any more welcome here than linking to an AI /search?q=; neither are stable over time and may vary wildly based on algorithmic changes. Wikipedia, as a curated reference source, is not classifiable as equivalent to either a search engine or an AI response at this time, and evidences much stronger stability, striving towards that of a classical print encyclopedia (but never reaching it). Perhaps someday Britannica will release an AI that only provides fully factual replies that are derived in whole from the Britannica encyclopedia, but as of today, AI has not demonstrated the general veracity and reliability that even Wikipedia, the very worst of possible reference sources, has met over the years. (Note that an Ask-A-Librarian response would be more credible than a Wikipedia page and much more credible than today’s AI attempts to replace that function; but linking such a response would still be quite problematic, not the least of which because the primary value of that response is either directly quotable and/or is citations that should be incorporated into the post itself. But if that veracity differential changes someday once the AI hallucination problem is solved at the underlying level rather than in post-filters, I’m happy to revise my position.)