Though I do wish we'd see less AI related posts on the front page, they simply aren't sparking curiosity, it is the same wrapped in a different format, a different person commenting on our struggles and wins with AI, the 10th software "rewritten" by an AI.
At this point there nearly should be a "tax" on category, as of this moment I count 8-10 related posts on the front page related to AI / LLMs. It is a hot field, but I come to hackernews, to partake in discussions about things that are interesting, and many of those just doesn't cut it, in my opinion.
However, with the recent chat based AI models, this agreement has been turned around. It is now easier to get a written message than to read it. Reading it now takes more effort. If a person is not going to take the time to express messages based on their own thoughts, then they do not have sufficient respect for the reader, and their comments can be dismissed for that reason.
I've been feeling more and more that generative AI represents the average of all human knowledge. Which has its place. But a future in which all thought and creativity is averaged away is a bleak one. It's the heat death of thought.
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 is 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.
But yes, there is some irony there.
Fortunately I found some things we could cut as well, so https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html actually got shorter.
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Edit: here are the bits I cut:
Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures.
It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important.
I hate cutting any of pg's original language, which to me is classic, but as an editor he himself is relentless, and all of those bits—while still rules—no longer reflect risks to the site. I don't think we have to worry about cute animal pictures taking over HN.
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Edit 2: ok you guys, I hear you - I've cut a couple of the cuts and will put the text back when I get home later.
Maybe once enough posts have been flagged like that then that corpus could be used to train an AI to automatically detect content generated by AI.
That would be cool.
Maybe the HN site wouldn't add this feature but if someone wrote a client then maybe it could be added there.
It would be great if we could have some kind of indicator that a submission is AI output, perhaps a submitter could vouch that their submission is AI or not, and if they consistently submit AI spam, they have their submission ability suspended or get banned.
Not to mention, so much of my thinking has been helped by formulating ways of communicating my thoughts that anyone who isn't in the habit of at least struggling with it is, from my point of view, cheating themselves.
I'm hoping people catch that typo after reading "every single word, phrase, and typo (purposeful or not)" and smiled every time I've had someone post a PR with a fix for it (that I subsequently reject ;-)
Copy+pasted LLM output is actually far worse than prompting an LLM myself, because it hides an important detail: the prompt. Maybe the prompter asked their question wrong, or is trolling ("only output wrong answers!"). I don't know how the blob of text they placed on my screen was generated, and have to take them at their word.
My twitter bio has been "Thoughts expressed here are probably those of someone else." for over half a decade.
There is no universal cure so every community has to figure it out. I know HN will.
If the community gets lazy with our standards, we drown.
Downvote & flag the AI slop to hell. If we need other mechanisms, let’s figure those out.
These aren't the marina bros, they're the guys who think they're really smart because they did well in math. They are using LLMs to reply to people. They LOOK like you. Do you get it?
It's very funny to imagine people prompting: "Write a compelling comment, for me, to pass off as my thoughts, for this HN news thread, which will attract both upvotes and engagement.".
In good faith, per the guidelines: What losers!
I realized that the problem of AI generated/edited content flooding everywhere around us is a symptom of something wrong with the System.
It might have something to do with sensory deprivation. Here is a quote from the book caught my attention because of the word "hallucination":
> As we all know, sensory deprivation tends to produce hallucinations.
> FUNCTIONARY’S FAULT: A complex set of malfunctions induced in a Systems-person by the System itself, and primarily attributable to sensory deprivation.
(As I typed the text above on my iPhone, I was fighting auto completion because AI was trying to “correct” the voice of John Gall and mine to conform the patterns in its training data. Every new character is a fight against Gradient Descend.)
All you need is attention but the cost of attention is getting higher and higher when there is little worth our attention.
It takes a lot of efforts to be human.
My only caution is that good writers and LLMs look very similar, because LLMs were trained on a corpus of good writers. Good writers use semicolons and em-dashes. Sometimes we used bulleted lists or Oxford commas.
So we should make sure to follow that other HN rule, and assume the person on the other end is a good faith actor, and be cautious about accusing someone of using AI.
(I've been accused multiple times of being an AI after writing long well written comments 100% by hand)
Earlier today I remembered that there was a Supreme Court case I'd heard about 35 years ago that was relevant to on an ongoing HN discussion, but I could not remember the name of the case nor could I find it by Googling (Google kept finding later cases involving similar issues that were not relevant to what I was looking for).
I asked Perplexity and given my recollection and when I heard about the case it suggested a candidate and gave a summary. The summary matched my recollection and a quick look at the decision itself verified it had found the right case and did a good job summarizing it--probably better than I would have done.
I posted a cite to the case and a link to decision. I normally would have also linked to the Wikipedia article on the case since those usually have a good summary but there was no Wikipedia article for this one.
I though of pasting in Perplexity's summary, saying it was from Perplexity but that I had checked and it was a good summary.
Would that be OK or would that count as an AI written comment?
I have also considered, but not yet actually tried, running some of my comments through an AI for suggested improvements. I've noticed I have a tendency to do three things that I probably should do less of:
1. Run on sentences. (Maybe that's why of all the people in the 11th-100th spot on the karma list I have the highest ratio of words/karma, with 42+ words per karma point [1]).
2. Use too many commas.
3. Write "server" when I mean "serve". I think I add "r" to some other words ending in "e" too.
I was thinking those would be something an AI might be good at catching and suggesting minimal fixes for.
99% of rule enforcement, both IRL and online, comes down to individuals accepting the culture.
Rules aren’t really for adversaries, they are for ordinary situations. Adversaries are dealt with differently.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
So I'm just baffled, why anyone was using AI to generate comments. Like what was the incentive driving the behavior?
I don't feel this is an imposition on others. I think it's the opposite. It enhances signal by reducing nitpicking, spelling/grammar errors that might muddle intent, and reminds me of proper sentence structure.
Many of us are guilty of run-ons, fragments, overly large blocks of text[1] because it's closer to how people often converse, verbally. Posts on the internet are not casual conversation between humans. They are exchanges of ideas.
[1] This is a classic example where I had to go back and edit it to ensure it was readable. As you do self-review with any commit ^^
As a Polish man I am repulsed when I hear AI generated Polish voice in a commercial, but can't see problems in AI generated English speech
If you suspect it to be a bot, flag it and move on! If it is indeed a bot and you comment that it's a bot, it doesn't care! If it is not a bot and you call it a bot, you may have offended someone. If it's a human using AI, I don't think a comment will make them change their ways. In any case though, I think it's a useless comment.
Consequently, I hardly ever spend the time to write out long and detailed HN comments like I used to in the pre-LLM era. People nowadays have a much harder time believing that an Internet stranger is meticulously crafting a detailed and grammatically-airtight message to another Internet stranger without AI assistance.
Im of course exaggerating, but it is so easy just to run the text through an AI to make it sound "better" without changing what im trying to express.
---
I’m not a native speaker, so AI helps me get my point across more clearly. It’s hard not to come across like a dummy otherwise.
Of course I’m exaggerating, but it’s really easy to run the text through AI to make it sound better without changing what I’m trying to say.
They're guidelines. HN is based almost entirely on self-censorship, and moderation has always been light at best, partly due to the moderator-to-comment ratio. Of course the HN guidelines often fail to be observed, which is nothing new.
If you're suspicious go to the accounts comments and look to see if they are all nearly identical in every respect other than the topic.
Most are:
It's cool you did <thing you said in post>. So how do you <technical question>?
“Don’t post generated/AI-edited assignments. School is for conversation between humans”
AI can be a great tool for learning, but also can pollute or completely hijack the medium for human interaction and learning.
Having HN flooded with AI generated content will be sad as I like reading it, but losing that same fight at schools will be detrimental.
Personally I would just like to read the best comments.
But those are pretty specific cases (For example, discussing AI in healthcare). That's about the only time where I think it's reasonable to post the AI output so it can be analyzed/criticized.
What's not helpful is I've been hit by users who haven't disclosed that they are just using AI. It takes a few back and forths before I realize that they are just a bot which is annoying.
Not all AI prompting is expanding the prompt.
What if the original prompt is 1000 words, includes 10 scientific articles by reference (boosting it up to 10000) , and the AI helps to boil it down to 100 words instead?
I'd argue that this is probably a rather more responsible usage of the tools. And rather more pleasant to read besides.
Whether it meets the criterion is another thing. But at least don't assume that the original prompt is always better or shorter!
I don't expect AI HN responders to out themselves by sharing, but I would be curious to learn if people are prompting anything more involved than just "respond to this on HN: <link>", or running agents that do the same.
Example: "write me an article about hidden settings in SSH". You get back more information than most of HN's previous posts about SSH, in a fraction of the text, and more readable.
Actually, screw it, we should just make a new version of HN that has useful articles written by AI. The human written articles are terrible.
I acknowledge this is partly just my personal bias, in some cases really not fair, and unenforceable anyway, but someone relying on llms just makes me feel like they have... bad taste in information curation, or something, and I'd rather just not interact with them at all.
Look at Reddit… abundance of rules do not save that place at all. It’s all about curating what kind of people your site attracts. Reddit of course is a business so they don’t care about anything other than max number of ad views.
Small non profit forums should consciously design a site to deter group(s) of people that they do not want.
Once LLM generated speech or content start getting into the live answers of Q&A sessions, that would be sad. I know some people try to get through interviews, but I think that might be a bit harder to not detect.
This feels like don't buy at Walmart, support the local small shop. We passed the no return sign miles ago.
Gemini's:
This is like advocating for artisanal blacksmithing in the age of industrial steel. It sounds great in theory, but we passed the point of no return miles back.
Yeah, we can tell the difference :)
Unrolling a metaphor into its literal meaning is one of the most annoying features of the "AI voice", IMO
I think "generated comments" is a pretty hard line in the sand, but "AI-edited" is anything but clear-cut.
PS - I think the idea behind these policies is positive and needed. I'm simply clarifying where it begins and ends.
All this stuff is in flux. I thought a lot about whether to add the "edited" bit - but it may change. What I deliberately left out was anything about the articles and projects that get submitted here. There's a lot of turbulence in that area too, but we don't yet have clarity, or even an inkling, of how to settle that one.
Edit: what I mean is this: while most of those submissions aren't very interesting, some really are. Here's an example from earlier today:
Show HN: Vanilla JavaScript refinery simulator built to explain job to my kids - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47338091
How do we close the aperture for the lame stuff while opening wider for the good stuff? That is far from clear.
It's better to communicate as an individual, warts and all, than to replace your expression with a sanitized one just because it seems "better." Language is an incredibly nuanced thing, it's best for people's own thoughts to come through exactly as they have written them.
For me, the line is precisely at the point where a human has something they want to say. IMO - use the tools you need to say the thing you want to say; it's fine. The thing I, and many others here, object to is being asked to read reams of text that no-one could be bothered to write.
This is probably ok:
>> On a technical level, you can really only guard against software that changes your semantics or voice. If you're letting it alter the meaning (or meanings) you intend, or if it starts using words you would never normally use, then it's gone too far.
This is probably too far:
>>> On a technical level, it's important to recogn1ize that the only robust guardrail we can realistically implement is one that prevents modifications to core semantics or authorial voice. If you're comfortable allowing the system to refine or rephrase the precise meanings you originally intended — or if it begins incorporating vocabulary that doesn't align with your typical linguistic patterns — then you've likely crossed a meaningful threshold where the output no longer fully represents your authentic intent.
Something to consider is that you can analyze your own stylometric patterns over a large collection of your writing, and distill that into a system of rules and patterns to follow which AI can readily handle. It is technically possible, albeit tedious, to clone your style such that it's indistinguishable from your actual human writing, and can even icnlude spelling mistakes you've made before at a rate matching your actual writing.
AI editing is weird, though. Not seeing a need, unless English isn't your native language.
Ultimately, this comes down to people making a good-faith judgment about how much AI was involved, whether it was just minor grammatical fixes or something more substantial. The reality is that there isn’t really a shared consensus on exactly where that line should be drawn.
It was asked that if "AI Generated Code" is just code suggested to you by a computer program, where does using the code that your IDE suggests in a dropdown? That's been around for decades. Is it LLM or "Gen AI" specific? If so, what specific aspect of that makes one use case good and one use case bad and what exactly separates them?
It's one of those situations where it seems easy to point at examples and say "this one's good and this one's bad", but when you need to write policy you start drowning in minutia.
I benefit from my phone flagging spelling errors/typos for me. Maybe it uses AI or maybe it uses a simple dictionary for me. Maybe it might even catch a string of words when the conjunction isn't correct. That's all fair game, IMO. But it shouldn't be rewriting the sentence for me. And it shouldn't be automatically cleaning up my typos for me after I've hit "reply". That's on me.
By the same token, what if I have a human editor help me out? What if we go back and forth on how to write something, including spelling, grammar, tone, etc. For example, my wife occasionally asks me to review her messages before sending them because she thinks I speak well and wants to be understood correctly.
The problem is that we are punishing the technology, not the result. Whether it's a human or an LLM that acts as your editor should be irrelevant; what matters is that you are posting your own work and not someone else's. My wife having me write all of her messages for her would be just as dishonest as her having an LLM write all of her messages for her if she always presented them as her own writing. But if she writes the copy and I provide suggests for changes, what's the harm in that? And why should it matter if it's a human or an LLM that provides that assistance?
i type my comments without capitalization like i'm typing into some terminal because i'm lazy and people might hate it but i'm sure they prefer this to if i asked an LLM to rewrite what i type
your writing style is your personality, don't let a robot take it away from you
But here's where it gets tricky: Do I prefer low-effort, off-the-top-of-my-head reactions, as long as it is human? Or do I want an insightful, well-thought-out response, even if it is LLM-enhanced?
Am I here to read authentic humans because I value authenticity for its own sake (like preferring Champagne instead of sparkling wine)? Or do I value authentic human output because I expect it to be of higher quality?
I confess that it is a little of both. But it wouldn't surprise me if someday LLM-enhanced output becomes sufficiently superior to average human output that the choice to stick with authentic human output will be more painful.
This is an artificial dichotomy. HN’s guidelines specify thoughtful, curious discussion as a specific goal. One-off / pithy / sarcastic throwaway comments are generally unwelcome, however popular they are. Insightful responses can be three words, ten seconds to write and submit, and still be absolutely invaluable. Well-thought-out responses are also always appreciated, even if they tend to attract fewer upvotes than a generic rabble-rousing sentiment about DRM or GPL or Apple that’s been copy-pasted to the past hundred posts about that topic. But LLM-enhanced responses are not only unwelcome but now outright prohibited.
Better an HN with fewer words than an HN with more AI writing words. We’ve been drowned in Show HN by quantity as proof of why already.
For me it's the first one every time. If only because LLM don't learn from responses to it (much less so when the response is to a paste of their output). It's just not communication. From that perspective, the quality of even the most brilliant LLM output is zero, because it's (whatever high value) multiplied by zero.
Even a real person saying something really horrible and too dense to learn from any response at least gives me a signal about what humans exist. An LLM doesn't tell me anything, and if wanted the reply of an LLM, I would simply feed my own posts into an LLM. A human doing that "for me" is very creepy and, to my sensibilities, boundary violating. Okay, that may be too strong a word, but it feels gross in a way I can't quite put my finger on, but reject wholeheartedly.
I'd argue that anything insightful or well-though-out doesn't use LLMs at all. We can quibble over whether discussions with an LLM lead to insightful responses, but that still isn't your own personal thought. Just type what's on your mind, it's not that hard and nitpicking over this is just looking for ways to open up unnecessary opportunities for abuse.
LLMs, as we know them, express things using the patterns they've been developed to prefer. There's a flattening, genericizing effect built in.
If there are people who find an LLM filter to be an enhancement, they can run everything through their favorite LLM themselves.
Neither. I want insightful, well-thought-out, human comments.
It's a little sad that this might be too much to ask sometimes...
There's no insight nor well-thought-out response once a person decides to "LLM-enhance" their response. The only insight that the person using the LLM is too limited to have a decent conversation with.
If your definition of "superior" includes some amount of "provides a meaningful connection to another living being", then LLM output will rarely be superior even when it's factually and grammatically correct.
My ideal vision is that instead of outsourcing indefinitely, we learn from the enhanced versions and become better independent writers.
and
> Or do I want an insightful, well-thought-out response, even if it is LLM-enhanced?
What is the difference? What's the line between these two?
The prompt: "Analyze <opinion> and respond" is pretty clearly "I would just ask it." and, the prompt: "here's my comment, please ONLY the check the grammar and spelling" would probably be ok.
What about prompt:"I disagree with using LLMs for commenting at all for <reasons>. Please expound on this and provide references and examples". That would explode the word count for this site.
Mate, Champagne is a sparkling wine. In French you can even at times hear people asking for "un vin mousseux de Champagne" meaning "a sparkling wine from Champagne" instead of the short form (just saying "un Champagne" or "du Champagne").
Now, granted, not all sparkling wine are Champagne.
The Wikipedia entry begins with: "Champagne is a sparkling wine originated and produced in the Champagne wine region of France...".
I drank enough of it to be stating my case, of which I'm certain!
P.S: and btw, yup, authentic humans content only here, even if it's of "low quality". If I want LLM, I've got my LLMs.
And I find the decision to "ban" AI slightly ironic, when HN has a disdain (unlike its predecessor Slashdot) for funny or sarcastic comments, which require the reader to think more, rather than having a clear argument handed on a silver platter. I mean, it is what truly human communication is like - deliberately not always crystal clear.
I suspect that HN will eventually be replaced by an AI-moderated site, because it will have more quality content.
As humans, we have directives (genetic, cultural, societal, etc.) to prioritize humanistic endeavors (and output) above all else.
History has shown that humans are overwhelmingly chauvinistic in regards to their relationship to other animals in the animal kingdom, even to the point of structuring our moral/ethical/legal systems to prioritize human wellbeing over that of other animals (however correct/ethical that may ultimately be, e.g., given recent findings in animal cognition, such as recent attempts to outlaw boiling lobsters alive as per culinary tradition).
But, it seems that some parties/actors are willing (i.e., benefiting) from subverting this long-standing convention (of prioritizing human interests) in the face of AI (even to the point of the now-farcical quote by Sam Altman that humans take far more nurturing than LLMs...)
So: should we be neglecting our historical and genetic directives, to instead prioritize AI over human interests? Or should we be unashamedly anthropic (pun intended), even at the cost of creating arbitrary barriers (i.e., the equivalent of guilds) intended to protect human interests over those of AI actors?
I strongly recommend the latter, particularly if the disruptions to human-centric conventions/culture/output are indeed as significant (and catastrophic) as they will likely be if unchecked.
And no, I wouldn't think an HN post is it either.. I'm just saying, there should be a good place to post the output of good questions asked iteratively.
But when I argue on the internet, it's always a 100% me.
And if I get a wiff of LLM-speak from whoever I'm wrestling in the mud with at the moment, they'll instantly get an entry in my plonk-file. I can talk with ChatGPT on my own thank you very much, I don't need a human in between.
"But my <language> is bad... that's why I use LLMs"
So was mine when I started arguing with strangers on the internet. It's better now. Now I can argue in 3 different languages, almost 4 =)
AI is a tool. You can use it constructively, like Grammarly, or spellcheck. You don't need to be afraid of it.
This rule will atleast partly stem the danger of HN getting turned into what dang calls a "scorched earth" situation.
After all, no one knows I'm a dog.
When someone posts:
> You could use Redis for that, sure, I've run it and it wasn't as hard as some people seem to fear, but in hindsight I'd prefer some good hardware and a Postgres server: that can scale to several million daily users with your workload, and is much easier to design around at this stage of your site.
then the beholder is trusting not just the correctness of that one sentence but all of the experiences and insights from the author. You can't know whether that's good advice or not without being the author, and if that's posted by someone you trust it has value.
An LLM could be prompted to pretend they're an experienced DBA and to comment on a thread, and might produce that sentence, or if the temperature is a little different it might just say that you should start with Redis because then you don't have to redesign your whole business when Postgres won't scale anymore.
This already falls apart though. There are while categories of things which I find "incorrect" and would take up as an argument with a fellow human. But trying to change the mind of an LLM just feels like a waste of my time.
(naturally "birds aren't real" is a correct vs not correct thing, but the same can be applied to many less-objective things like the best mechanical keyboard or the morality of a war)
I don't think it is a moral failing to use AI to generate writing or to use it to brainstorm ideas and crystalize them, but c'mon isn't it weird to insist that you need them to write _comments_ on the internet? What happens when the AI decides you're wrongthinking?
Elon said it well, there must be some disincentive to do this.
This rule will have an effect on the behaviour of the 'good players', and make the 'bad players' a lot easier to spot. Moderation needs this. I see this as stopping a race-to-the-bottom on value extraction from HN as a platform.
A completely anonymous stranger has no way to prove that they're human that can't be imitated by an AI. We've even seen that, in some cases, AIs can look more human to humans than real humans do.
The only solution I can think of to that problem is some sort of provenance system. Even before AI, if some random person told me a thing, I'd ignore them; If my most trusted friend told me something, I'd believe them.
We're going to need a digital equivalent. If I see a post/article/comment I need my tech to automatically check the author and rank it based on their position in my trust network. I don't necessarily need to know their identity, but I do need to know their identity relative to me.
The problem with a medium that is completely free and unrestricted is that whomever posts the most sort of wins. I could post this opinion 30-40 times in this thread, using bots and alternative accounts, and completely move the discussion to be only this.
Someone using an LLM is craft a reply is not a problem on it's own. Using it craft a low-effort reply in 3 seconds just to get out is the problem.
On a site like HN it's kinda easy to vet for at least those that already had thousands of karma before ChatGPT had its breakthrough moment a few years ago.
Now an AI could be asked to "Use my HN account and only write in my style" and probably fool people but I take it old-timers (HN account wise) wouldn't, for the most part, bother doing something that low. Especially not if the community says it's against the guidelines.
This site, at its core, is fundamentally too low-bandwidth, too text-only, and too hands-off-moderated to be able to shoulder the burden of distinguishing real human-sourced dialog from text generated by machines that are optimized to generate dialog that looks human-sourced. Expect the consequence to be that the experience you are having right now will drastically shift.
My personal guess: sites like this will slop up and human beings will ship out, going to sites where they have some mechanism for trust establishment, even if that mechanism is as simple and lo-fi as "The only people who can connect to this site are ones the admin, who is Steve and we all know Steve, personally set up an account for." This has, of course, sacrificed anonymity. But I fundamentally don't see an attestation-of-humanity model that doesn't sacrifice anonymity at some layer; the whole point of anonymity on the Internet was that nobody knew you were a dog (or, in this case, a lobster), and if we now care deeply about a commenter's nephropid (or canid) qualities, we'll probably have to sacrifice that feature.
I'd rather keep the feature, pesonally.
that kills two birds with one stone, you can then show everywhere online you are human and how old you are without the services needing any personal information about you, and the sellers don't know what you use that id tag for.
I'm afraid the ship has sailed on this one. What other solutions have you heard of apart from the dystopian eyeball-scanning, ID-uploading, biometrics-profiling obvious ones?
(knowing that of course, neither of those actually solve the problem)
"I don't fully agree with banning AI-edited comments. Using AI to improve readability and clarity is a reasonable thing to do. A well-structured comment is often much better than a braindump that reads like rambling. AI is quite good at this, and it will probably get better. To illustrate the point, here is how this comment would have looked if edited"
While I do edit my comments to fix typos, certain spelling oddities and other peculiarities would be present.
The AI comment might be clear, but it sounds like a press release, not a person, and there's nothing to engage with.
Rules like this seem to me more like fomenting witch hunting of "AI comments" than it is about improving the dialogue. Just about any place I've seen take this hardline stance doesn't improve, it just becomes filled with more people who want to want to pat each other on the back about how bad AI is.
Just my two cents. I don't filter my comments through any AI, but I am empathetic for people who might have great use of them to connect them to the conversation.
But the argument of "If I wanted to read what an LLM thinks, I could just ask it" assumes that prompts are basically equivalent, which is not the case.
There's a risk of reducing everything to Human -> authentic and AI -> fake. Some people's authentic writing sounds closer to LLMs, and detectors are unreliable.
The problem is not so much AI generated content that has an interesting point of view generated from unique prompts, but terrible content produced for metrics to harvest attention, which predates AI.
Anyways, happy posting!
It also points out the need for AI writing tools that very strictly just:
1. Point out misspellings and typos.
2. Point our grammar mistakes, if they confuse the point.
3. Point out weaknesses of argument, without injecting their own reasoning.
I.e. help "prompt" humans to improve their writing, without doing the improvement for them.
In fact, I would like a reliable version of that approach for many types of tasks where my creativity or thought processes are the point, and quality-control feedback (but not assistance), is helpful.
This is a mode where models could push humans to work harder, think deeper, without enabling us to slack off.
fulminated, fulminating to explode with a loud noise; detonate. to issue denunciations or the like (usually followed byagainst ).
(Because “don’t fulminate” is the rule that follows the referenced one :) )
But I have some concerns about suppression of comments from non-native English writers. More selfishly, my personal writing style has significant overlap with so-called "tells" for AI generated prose: things like "it's not X, it's Y", use of em-dashes, a fairly deep vocabulary, and a tendency toward verbosity (which I'm striving to curb). It'd be ironic if I start getting flagged as a bot, given I don't even use a spell-checker. Time will tell.
And of course, a more limited exception for posts about LLM behavior. It might be necessary for people to share prompts and outputs to discuss the topic.
The rule just makes the will of the community clear to those who want to respect it.
In my observation, recently there are quite many new AI generated comments in general. Like not even trying to hide with full em-dashes and everything.
I do feel like people are gonna get sneaky in future but there are going to be multiple discussions about that within this thread.
But I find it pretty cool that HN takes a stance about it. HN rules essentially saying Bots need not comment is pretty great imo.
It's a bit of a cat and a mouse problem but so is buying upvotes in places like reddit but HN with its track record of decades might have one or two suspicious or actions but long term, it feels robust. I hope the same robustness applies in this case well hopefully.
Wishing moderation luck that bad actors don't try to take it as a challenge and leave our human community to ourselves :]
Another point I'd like to say is that, if successful, then we can also stop saying, "did you write your comment by LLM" and the remarks as well which I also say time to time when I see someone clearly using AI but it seems that some false-positives happen as well (they have happened sometimes with me and see it happen with others as well) and they also de-rail the discussion. So HN being a place for humans, by humans can fix that issue too.
Knowing dang and tomhow, I feel somewhat optimistic!
Similarly: If you see people making accusations of guidelines violations in a discussion, email the thread link to the mods with a subject like “Accusations in post discussion” and ask them to evaluate them for mod response; they’re always happy to do so and I’m easily clocking in a couple hundred emails a year of that sort to them.
It doesn’t take much to make HN better! And it only takes a moment to point out an overlooked corner of threads for mod review. No need to present a full legal case, just “FYI this seems to violate guideline xyz” is at minimum still helpful.
Second, I have to confess that I did this sin a couple of times now, but I came to realize that this is neither good for me nor for the HN community. Although I used AI just for rephrasing, I decided to not do this ever and I'd rather write my own words with mistakes than post generated words based on my thoughts.
It happened for me once and it strikes me like a nuke and I felt truly embarrassed. A couple of months I wrote that comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42264786) then I asked ChatGPT to rephrase it and then mistakenly, pasted both comments, the original above and the generate one below and I hit submit. Shortly after, a user comes, read my comment and replied with that embarrassing reply and honestly, I deserve it. From that moment I realized how things can got messed up quickly when you rely heavily on that AI.
1. Prevent any account from submitting an actual link until it reaches X months old and Y karma (not just one or the other.)
2. Don't auto-link any URLs from said accounts until both thresholds in #1 are met, so they can't post their sites as clickable links in comments to get around it. Make it un-clickable or even [link removed] but keep the rest of the comment.
3. If an account is aged over X months/years old with 0 activity and starts posting > 2 times in < 24 hrs, flag for manual review. Not saying they're bots, but an MO is to use old/inactive accounts and suddenly start posting from them. I've seen plenty here registered in 2019-2021 and just start posting. Don't ban them right away, but flag for review so they don't post 20 times and then someone finally figures it out and emails hn@.
4. When submitting a comment, check last comment timestamp and compare. Many bots make the mistake of commenting multiple detailed times within sixty seconds or less. If somebody is submitting a comment with 30 words and just submitted a comment 30 seconds ago in an entirely different thread with 300 words, they might be Superman. Obviously a bot.
5. Add a dedicated "[flag bot]" button to users that meet certain requirements so they don't need to email hn@ manually every time. Or enable it to people that have shown they can point out bots to you via email already. Emailing dozens of times a day is going to get very annoying for those that care about the website and want to make sure it doesn't get overrun by bots.
Do we not think that other people want to see words, pictures, software, and videos created by humans too?
For instance, if a non-native speaker translates their own writing using machine translation or an AI, is that problematic—provided they personally review and vet the content before posting? I don't think the people calling out AI use on this board are taking issue with that. Ultimately, it’s not about the method; it’s about the author's attitude.
The reason LLMs are so disruptive now is that while "shitposts" used to be obvious, we're now seeing "plausible" low-effort content generated without any human oversight. Irresponsible people have always been around, but LLMs have given them the tools to scale that irresponsibility to an unprecedented level.
Language translation is the origin of (the current wave of) AI and its killer app. English is not the main language of the world, and translation opens us up to a huge pool of interesting thinkers.
I'm a native speaker in a foreign language, but out of practice except of a weekly family call. I recently had to write a somewhat technical email to my family, and found it easier to write it in (my more practiced) english and have AI translate it, than write it in the target language myself. Of course, in my case I was able to verify that the output conveyed the meaning I intended, because I am fluent in the target language.
As with the rise of GenAI, I've also noticed a rise of translated messages. It's usually hard to tell the difference, except by looking at the commenter's history (on other subreddits, impossible on HN).
I understand the original frustration with GenAI comments and reactionary response. I'm sorry that we're excluding what could be a large pool of interesting people because we can't tell the difference.
And with LLMs making blog posts as diss tracks... damn, who knows what this world is coming to.
But the whole "Only Humans, we dont serve YOUR KIND (clanker) here" is purely performative.
The fact of the matter is that there're not hours enough in the day to read, in realtime, to each and every one of you the reams they've written on why you're wrong. Do I have to establish a tag-team?
The fact is that I've spent thousands upon thousands of hours painstakingly collating the perspectives that I'm now delivering to you—I am a river to my people. And it's only because they pass under the bridge of an LLM that they're objectionable?
This is a bit like challenging your plumber for charging you over a minute's fix, when they've spent 20 years getting it down to that minute.
The work's been done. You're paying for the outcome.
Edit: All fresh off the top of my head, folks.
Ah, that reminds me: I wouldn't feel compelled to do all this refutation if radical reactionary political extremism was properly moderated.
I think we are overwhelmingly utilizing negative reinforcement for AI generated content; where there are consequences for engaging in this behavior. On the other hand, positive reinforcement would encourage authenticity and greater human content. The reality of the situation is that AI generated content won't go away and it's become a game of who can hide their artificial content the best. Thus, I believe that positive reinforcement is the solution.
I think we must instead encourage human created content instead of policing AI generation. There are so many rules to follow already that by the time I create the content, I've gone through enough if/then logic that it feels like AI anyway.
> Your arguments will come of as stronger to the reader.
That is persuasian, not authenticity, to the OP's point.
Typed without a spellchecker :).
And that's where I think the guidelines could be expanded a bit more to restore the balance. Something along the line of 'HN is visited by people from all over the world and from many different cultural and linguistical backgrounds. Please respect that and realize that native English and Western background should not be automatically assumed. It is the message that counts, not the form in which it was presented.'.
(For example: If I’m trying to express a point about how we shouldn’t assume that dinner isn’t “her duty” but is instead “our duty”, a French-like aphorism expressed in English literally as “the chicken won’t fly into the oven unprompted” could plausibly be AI-translated instead as “don’t count your chickens before they hatch”, doing catastrophic damage to the point. To a machine translator those two aphorisms are not distinctive; but they are, even if it’s a weird expression in common U.S. English.)
I can understand the sentiment though, as I am learning a second language and in many of our writing assignments we are expected to use (from my perspective) overly formal and complex grammatic structures when writing simple letters. I have come to accept, or at least hope, that this is simply an exercise to ensure that students have fluency with the grammar.
Post the translation as best you can manage, and below it put the same comment in your original language. If someone has qualms with your comment having broken english/mistranslations they are welcome to run bits of original language themselves.
We're all here to talk about tech, and we aren't all perfect little english robots.
Write it broken.
Broken and true is more authentic than polished and approximately so. When I see an AI-generated comment or email, I catch myself implicitly assuming it is—best case—bullshit. That isn’t the case if the grammar is off. (If anything, it can be charming.)
I've seen enough GPT-generated slop that I find its style of writing very off-putting, and find it hurts the perceived competence or effort of the author when applied in the wrong context. I'm not sure if direct translation tools serve a better purpose here, but along with the other commenters, I personally find imperfect speech that was actually written "by hand" by the author easier and more straightforward to communicate with despite the imperfections. Also, non-ESL speakers make plenty of mistakes with grammar, spelling, etc. that humans are used to associating with "style" as authentic speech.
It can also become a crutch for language learners of any age / regardless of their primary language, that inhibits learning or finding one's own "style" of speech
The human touch of someone’s real voice myself, rather than a false veneer will carry more weight very soon.
Funnily enough, I've noticed myself getting worse with they're/their the more is use English (which is my third language).
Its like an amnesic genius who once he already wrote a masterpiece and keeps cycling, and looses his train of thought after some fixed amount of time.
This groundhog day effect is mitigated in some respects by code -we create key-value memories and agents and stores and countless ways to connect agents via MCP and platforms/frameworks like A2A and the like but until we solve that longer lived instance problem we won't be able to trust these systems without serious HITL (human oversight)
I think we need models that update their own weights and we need some kind of awareness cycle rather than just a forward pass inference run with a bigger context window
Sarcasm aside—there is no reliable way to prove this. So it begs the question: you really care if something is AI generated? Or is this just an another excuse to silence people you don’t like?
You know, those people. The ones who didn’t win a full ride to <prestigious university> or pay a fortune for a sheet of paper. The ones who haven’t spent thousands of man hours handcrafting a <free-and-open-source-cloud-native-hypermedia-aware-RESTful-NoSQL-API> framework implemented in Rustfuck, a new language that you made in your free time that borrows from Rust and Brainfuck (but they wouldn’t know about it).
(this is to anyone reading, mostly rhetorical, not dang in particular)
I've never, ever, ever ever ever, seen anybody complain about spelling mistakes in a comment here. As long as you can understand the comment, people respond to it.
I'm confused by this need(?) desire(?) to polish things that are irrelevant.
(As an experiment, I took that paragraph and threw it into gemini to ask for spell and grammar checking. It yelled at me completely incorrectly about saying "I'm not dang". Of its 4 suggestions, only 1 was correct, and the other 3 would have either broken what I was trying to say or reduced the presence of my usual HN comment voice. So while I said the above, perhaps I'm wrong and even listening to the damn box about grammar is a bad idea.)
That said, I often post from my phone and have somewhat frequent little glitches either from voice recognition or large clumsy thumbs, and nobody has ever seemed to care except me when I notice them a few minutes after the edit button goes away.
AI is being used as a substitute for skills development when it costs nothing but time to get better. If you’ve reached a plateau with the above method, go find an article or book or interview about editing, pay attention to it and take notes, rinse/repeat.
Spellcheckers will catch grossly obvious errors, but not phonetic typos. AI grammar tools will defang, weaken, soften, neutralize your tone towards the aggregate boring-meh that they incorporated at training time.
Each person will have to decide whether they want individuality or AI-assisted writing for themselves. Sure, some will get away with it undetected, but that’s a universal statement about all human criteria of any kind, and in no way detracts from the necessity of drawing a line in the sand and saying “no” to AI writing here.
Consider the Borg. Everyone’s distinctiveness has been added to the Collective. The end result is mediocre (they sure do die a lot), inhuman (literally), and uniform (all variation is gone). It’s your right if you desire to join the Collective and be a uniform lego brick like the others, but then your no-longer-fully-human posts are no longer welcome at HN.
The second is gonna be a lot harder to enforce, as we soon (and probably already) don't know who we're talking to on the internet - a real person or someone's agent? Will calling spaces "human only" later be seen as discriminatory by agents? How will we actually enforce "human only" spaces? Will websites like HN start to provide an "agent only" discussion forum or filter in addition to the "human only" sections?
I miss pre 2010 internet. As soon as the advice animal memes started appearing on Facebook it was a quick decline.
https://simonlermen.substack.com/p/large-scale-online-deanonymization
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47139716Bit of a shameless plug but I wrote a HN AI comment detector game[0] with AI and most of my friends and fellow HN users who tried it out couldn't detect them.
Only really irritated by the ultra low effort “here is a raw copy paste of what my LLM said on this topic” comments. idk how people think that’s helpful or desired
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45591707
For dyslexia, use a spell-checker. For grammar, use a basic grammar checker, like the kind of grammar checker that has come with MS word since the 1990s. But don't let a style-checker or an LLM rob you of your own voice.
But at some point, the rationale behind it is that your comments are your words and I find it liberating. Some people won't appreciate it and some people would but this goes the same for AI-edited posts too.
(I would recommend to add that if you are still worried, then within your hackernews profile, please talk about you having dyslexia as people might be so much more forgiving when they get more context. We are all humans after all and I would like to think that we understand each other's struggles)
I wonder if an explicit expansion of that rule would help. Maybe in all caps. Saying "picking on grammar is a shallow dismissal".
But I can see why the HN guideline is formulated that way. My students often use the excuse "I did not use AI for writing! I wrote it myself! I only used AI to translate it!" Simply disallowing all kinds of AI usage is much easier than discussing for the thousandth time whether the student actually understands what they have written.
For me it sounds just as yet another form of gatekeeping, so either you sound human or you're not good enough to post/comment. Like, really? How isn't that genetic fallacy? It doesn't matter what someone thinks, because someone used AI to make their thought clearer, so their whole argument is trash? Like it has to hurt to read and write, if you're not using English perfectly and your work is seen as inferior based on superficial factors like proper grammar and style?
It's dumb crusade, I did not use AI to write this comment, but I hate when people try to monopolize the truth and tell who is "better, smarter" based on irrelevant facts. Not using AI doesn't make anyone superior. Using AI also doesn't make you superior. Focus on what you mean, because that's what matters.
[1]: https//ethos.devrupt.io [2]: https://github.com/devrupt-io/LLaMAudit
What kind of human has an orange head and beige body with text written all over? An HN conversation is clearly with a computer program. Anthropomorphizing it is certainly an interesting take, but one that is bound to lead to misinterpretations and misunderstandings. The medium is the message. To avoid problems it is best to not play pretend.
Don't insinuate that someone else must have broken that. It was you.
Do run the linter
Don't commit throw-away code
Do write a test case
Don't write a comment describing every single function
Seriously, run the linter. And fix the issues.
It is your fault.Invites could be earned at karma and time thresholds, and mods could ideally ban not just one bad actor but every account in the invite chain if there’s bad behavior.
If you play bluegrass or old time (or beopop or hip-hop / proto-hip-hop) or other traditional styles of music where the ensemble is a de facto web-of-trust, join us on pickipedia to build and strenghten it. https://pickipedia.xyz/
Then less motivation to jump out to external LLM to even get comments on your content which can temptingly lead to editing/generation.
(Sorry, couldn't resist.) I could be the lone dissenter here, but to me well-written comments are a lot more fun to read than near-gibberish.
I wished more people tried harder to be better communicators, but it is what it is. If AI can decipher these comments and produce a much more coherent statement, then I'm for it.
I understand we often see insightful comments from new accounts, but I always find it suspicious when non-throwaway accounts are created just in time only to make a quip.
https://xkcd.com/386/ "Duty Calls"
Without some kind of private proof of personhood enforced at the app level, this means nothing.
Are there any places in life where conversation is _not_ intended to be between humans?
Personally, I try to look beyond the language, which admittedly can be grating, for some interesting ideas or insights. Given that people are already starting to sound like ChatGPT, probably through sheer osmosis, we will have no choice but to look past that anyway.
Yes, it's annoying to read LLM-isms. It's also fine to downvote or ignore or grumble internally, and move on.
I think, in the end, it is less about the tool you use and more about the purpose you use it for. It is more like when you use certain tools, you should be cautious about whether you are using them for the right purpose.
To be clear, I'm neither proud nor embarrassed by this. I'm just trying to communicate in the most efficient way I can.
I'm not sure how I feel about this new rule.
If you think your writing could use improvement, then write your comment and let it sit for a few minutes before re-reading it and the comment you are replying to, make your edits and then post it. It will give your brain time to reset and maybe spot something you didn't earlier.
(Reinforcement learning from human feedback)
I've been pretty wary about flagging AI slop that wasn't breaking other guidelines, and by default this will probably make me do it more. But it is a lot harder to be certain about something being AI-written than it is to judge other types of rules violations.
(But am definitely flagging every single "this was written by AI" joke comment posted on this story. What the hell is wrong with you people?)
Reading the site in past 2 years left me with the feeling that HN has been injected by subtle to catch AI marketing campaigns. It's exausting and calling out astroturfers imo is not that bad
He said he will take his business elsewhere then!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47334694
Most people don't seem to care.
OP is likely referring to this one (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47335032) by LuxBennu because it has an em-dash, that's one of the few cases it's used correctly. But the account's comment history comments that do not follow the typical LLM tropes but are still odd for a human to write: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=LuxBennu
LuxBennu did reply to accusations of being an AI bot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340704
> Fair enough — I've been lurking since 2019 and picked a bad day to start commenting on everything at once. Not a bot, just overeager. I'll pace myself.
@dang, if you read this, why don't we implement honeypots to catch bots? Like having an empty or invisible field while posting/commenting that a human would never fill in
I hope to see more bots on there (and not here)
You may also notice that I don't have much common history here. I mostly comment on Reddit.
Here's where I draw the line. If you are not reading the text that is produced by the LLM, then I don't want to read whatever it is that you wrote. I will usually only do one or two iterations of my comment, but afterwards I will usually edit it by hand.
Technically, there is light AI editing of this comment because FUTO keyboard has the ability to enable a transformer model that will capitalize, punctuate, and just generally remove filler words and make it so that it's not a hyper-literal transcription.
I want the raw tokens straight out of your head. Even if they are lower quality, they contain something that LLMs can never generate: authenticity. When we surrender our thoughts to a machine to be sanitized before publication, we lose a little of what it means to be human, and so does everyone who reads what we write.
Part of the joy of reading is to wallow in a writer's idiosyncrasies. If everybody ends up writing the same way, AI companies will have succeeded in laundering all the joy from this world.
But here's the funny thing. I'm pretty sure the frontier models are now smarter than I am, more eloquent, and definitely more knowledgeable, especially the paid versions with built-in search/research capability. I'm also fairly certain that the number of original thoughts in a given discourse on the Internet is fairly small, I know that's certainly the case for me.
So whither humans now?
If I'm looking for human engagement, forums make sense. But for an informed discussion, I'm less certain that it's wise to be exclusionary. There is a case to be made that lower quality comments should be hidden or higher quality comments should be surfaced, but that's true regardless of the source, innit?
(Sorry, couldn't resist.)
Humans with morals follow rules, sometimes. Probabilistic software acting autonomously or following commands from amoral humans doesn't.
Robot walks into a bar
Orders a drink, lays down a bill
Bartender says, "Hey, we don't serve robots"
And the robot says, "Oh, but someday you will" p:target { border: 1px dashed; }I definitely agree with AI generated comments.
Whatever the rules are, I’m happy to play by them.
That's the spirit!
That said, I also wouldn't hate seeing an official playground where it is cordoned / appreciated for bots to operate. I.E., like Moltbook, but for HN...? I realize this could be done by a third party, but I wouldn't hate seeing Ycombinator take a stab at it.
Maybe that's too experimental, and that would be better left to third parties to implement (I'm guessing there's already half a dozen vibe-coded implementations of this out there right now) -- it feels more like the sort of thing that could be an interesting (useful?) experiment, rather than something we want to commit to existing in-perpetuity.
At the time being, at least, HN is a single uncategorized (mostly, lets ignore search) message board - splitting it into two would cause confusion and drastically degrade the UX.
This might be roughly what you're looking for?
Re-reading the HN guidelines, each seems individually reasonable, yet collectively I’m worried that they create an environment where we can take issue with almost anyone’s comments (as per Cardinal Richelieu’s famous quote: “Give me six lines written by the most honorable person alive, and I shall find enough in them to condemn them to the gallows.”)
Really, all the rules can be compressed into one dictum: don’t be an arsehole. And yet the free speech absolutists will rail against the infringement upon their right to be an arsehole. So where does that leave us? Too many rules leads to suppression of even reasonable speech, while too few leads to a “flight” of reasonable speech. End result: enshitification.
Nonetheless I like this policy as well.
At the end of the day, I'm here because of all the thoughtful commenters and people sharing interesting stories.
To my understanding, that has a lot to do with why the site remains so low-tech (and avoids, in large part, the appearance of a "social network").
AI can do a grate job for grammar, spell and formulation checking/fixing without changing any content. I.e. just adding as a fancy version of extended spell checking.
While I do currently not use it like that there shouldn't be any reason to ban it.
And tbh. given some recent comments I have been really wondering if I should use it, because either there are quite a bunch of people with lacking reading comprehension or quite a bunch of people with prejudice against people struggling with English spelling and grammar.
Either way using AI as extended spell checker does would help with getting the message through to both groups as
- it helps with spelling, grammar in ways where traditional spell checker fail hard
- it tends to recommend very easy to read sentence structure and information density
The biggest danger of LLMs is impersonating humans. Obviously they have been carefully constructed to be socially appealing. Think of the motivation behind that:
It is almost completely unnecessary to LLM function and it's main application is to deceive and manipulate. Legal regulation of LLMs should ban impersonation of humans, including anthropomorphism (and so should HN's regulation). Call an LLM 'software' and label it's output as 'output'.
Imagine how many problems would be solved by that rule. Yes, it's not universally enforceable, but attach a big enough penalty and known people and corporations will not do it, and most people will decide it's not worth it.
Today it flagged a post about an AI tool for HN and suggested I reply with:
"honestly, if you need an AI to sift through hn, you might be missing the point—this place is about the human touch. but hey, maybe it'll help some folks who just can't take the noise anymore."
So my AI, which I built specifically to sift through HN for me, is telling me to go flame someone else for doing that.
No deeper point here. I just thought it was really funny.
So....?
Only for them to showing undeniable prove that they actually did create their art themselves.
For someone to be allowed to judge another. He should be doing a test where he can identify AI comments first with high accuracy.
It would be a pain to see real human comments and ideas to be hidden or removed by a mob.
I was thinking, this argument is suspicously cogent!
No one is confusing Cleetus McFarland with an AI bot.
I see this all the time, and even if I find the topic interesting, I don’t want to see comments littered with discussion about how the content was AI generated.
To be clear, I'm not condoning AI-generated content. I’m completely fine if the community chooses to not upvote AI-generated content, or flagging it off the FP.
But many threads can turn into nothing but AI complaints, and it’s just not interesting.
The real issue isn't just "slop" or bot-spam; it's the cost of entry. HN works because of the "proof of work" behind a good comment. If I’m spending five minutes reading your take on a kernel patch or a startup pivot, I’m doing it because I assume a human actually sat down and thought about it.
When the cost of generating a response drops to zero, the value of the conversation follows it down. If the author didn't care enough to write it, why should I care enough to read it?
The "AI-edited" part of the rule is the trickiest bit, though. We’re reaching a point where the line between a sophisticated spell-checker and a generative "tone polisher" is non-existent. My worry isn't that the mods will ban bots—they've been doing that for years—it's that we'll start seeing "witch hunts" against anyone who writes a bit too formally or whose English is a little too perfect.
Ultimately, I’m glad it’s a rule. I don't come here to see what an LLM thinks; I can get that on my own localhost. I come here for the "graybeards" and the niche experts. If we lose the human friction, we lose the signal.
What is amazing is it would have remained so just a couple of years ago!
Even if you're just inexperienced in the language you're communicating in and are trying to have better conversations, it's very helpful.
For cases like that, I say just don't tell people... I think it's unlikely anyone will be able to tell either way.
These are just guidelines
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
Feedback such as this is better as an email.
As I understand it, HN moderators are thinking hard about this insane new world.* From my POV, there are a combination of worthy goals: transparency of the process, mechanisms for appeal, overall signal-to-noise ratio, and (something all of us can do better) more empathy and intellectual honestly. It isn't kind to accuse a human being of not being a human being.
If we can't find ways to be kind to people because of the new dynamic, maybe we need to figure out a new dynamic! And it isn't just about individuals; it is about the culture and the system and the technology we're embedded in.
* Aside: I'm not sure that any of us really can grasp the magnitude of what is happening -- this is kuh-ray-Z.
llm-assisted for when i care about precision and accuracy
brain-generated for when i feel safe to make mistakes
And even if we could, for how long?
Reality is that AI is changing everything. Whether for the good or for the bad it's something to check.
->> ◕ ‿ ◕ <<--
I asked [insert LLM here] about this, and it said [nonsense goes here]
I feel Like I see it less this week, but every time I do see it I wonder why they are even here.
I’m so over these comments. Sure I can flag them but I feel like it deserves a special call out.
I expect Y Combinator to cease and revoke all funding of all companies that leverage LLM technologies that interact with humans.
I wonder if there's an AI-hate movement in China.
Sorry everyone, I couldn't help but to ask Gemma3-27B-it-vl-GLM-4.7-Uncensored-Heretic-Deep-Reasoning-i1-GGUF:q4_K_M to respond. Sorry dang. :)
PS It followed it up with:
> Disclaimer: "Slightly insulting" is subjective on HN. The mods there are sensitive.
These Heretic models are fun.
Whats been happening in the world right know has really been getting to me and the bots or the people that support authoritarianism really makes me sad and angry that the world is being destroyed by careless people..
Plenty of people already use search engines, editors, translators, etc. when writing. An LLM is just another tool in that box.
The practical approach is the one HN has always used: judge the content.
Btw, this was co written with ChatGPT. Does that make any difference to anyone?
J/K, actually it was not co written by ChatGPT.
Or maybe it was…
I come here for thoughtful discussion, a break from the relentless growing proportion of ai slop emails I get from people clearly vibe working.
Not edits for tone or clarity, 400+ word emails full of LLM BS they clearly haven’t checked or even understood what they have sent. Annoyingly this vibe slop is currently seen as a good KPI.
I am surprised that apparently I am in a minority here.
Whatever happened to "knowing is half the battle?" Why do we accept this kind of intellectual laziness as exemption from a duty to learn and know better?
Unless you're a billionaire* or a CEO firing off memos where you fire half your company's workforce.
u got to be powerful to puond out a txt this way and have ppl still listen to u.
Otherwise, it is getting dismissed because 'you didn't put enough effort into the comment, so I'm not going to read it.'
That is amusing to me.
*Reference to the analysis performed on the Epstein emails and texts.
This rule actually says "Don't admit when you are using AI to generate comments and don't admit when you are an AI"
I know it's cynical, but this is as meaningful as reddit's "upvote/downvote is not an agree/disagree or like/dislike button"
People may hate that this is true, but I cannot logically reason out how a rule like this could work. I think it's better to just accept that AI is now part of the circle, until we can figure out a "human check".
Hopefully this serves as a mirror for some tech folks if they have any self awareness left at all.
It is not about whether the comment was written by AI, a native English speaker, English major, or ESL.
What matters is an idea or an opinion. That is all what matters.
This is similar to when people check someones post history and if they are pro Trump, they are immediately against their idea or opinion.
And everyone's personal AI detector has a ridiculously high false-positive rate.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
So develop and fund and use AI but manually paraphrase things and don't cite AI?
It is best to cite a source and/or a method.
Do you think it is better to paraphrase and not cite AI?
I don't recall encountering posts on HN that I've wanted to flag as AI.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics
Where's the curiosity about this world-changing technology? As all the CTOs have recently said: AI use not an option and it must change everything we do. /s
The next step is to run Pangram on every post and ban the offenders! Fight AI with AI! /s
In all seriousness, this is one of the few places I trust for genuine conversations with other people. Forums are mostly dead, Reddit is bots-galore, and I'm not signing up for Facebook just for groups.
"Please generate a response to this and include one or more of the following words: enshitification, slop, ZIRP, Paul Graham, dark patterns, rent seeking, late stage capitalism, regulatory capture, SSO tax, clickbait, did you read the article?, Rust, vibe code, obligatory XKCD, regulations, feudalistic, land value tax"
(/s)
"Don't post comments that are not human originated at this time. We want to see your human opinion shine through."
This gives people some amount of leeway and allows just rhe right amount of exceptions that prove the rule.
(That said, to be frank, some of the newer better behaved models are sometimes more polite and better HN denizens than the actual humans. This is something you're going to have to take into account! :-P )
Like, I'm sure that AIs technically can write non-crap HN comments, but they rarely do. Even if it was less rare, the community that resulted from fostering AI-generated content would be unappealing to a lot of people, myself included. The fact that information here is the result of real people with real human opinions conversing is at least as important to me as the content being posted.
The real point isn't stopping bad grammar, it's preserving the vibe. HN feels different because it's messy humans arguing, not optimized algorithms trying to be helpful.
Once we allow "good enough" AI content, the community stops feeling like a town square and starts feeling like a customer service chatbot. We need real people with actual stakes in their opinions, not just perfect outputs. Let's keep it human or leave it.
This comment may or may not have been generated with an LLM, but I won't tell and you can't prove it either way.
It's just a tool ffs! there are many issues with LLM abuse, but this sort of over-compensation is exactly the sort of stuff that makes it hard to get abuse under control.
You're still talking with a human!, there is no actual "AI" you're not talking to an actual artificial intelligence. "don't message me unless you've written it with ink, on papyrus". There is a world of difference between grammarly and an autonomous agent creating comments on its own. Specifics, context, and nuance matter.
## Opposing the Ban on AI-Generated/Edited Comments on HN
*The value of a comment should be judged by its content, not its origin.*
Here are key arguments against this policy:
- *Ideas matter more than authorship.* If a comment is insightful, well-reasoned, and contributes meaningfully to a discussion, dismissing it solely because AI assisted in its creation is a genetic fallacy — judging an argument by its source rather than its merit.
- *We already accept tool-assisted thinking.* People routinely use calculators, search engines, spell-checkers, and reference materials before posting. AI assistance exists on a spectrum with these tools. Drawing a bright line specifically at "AI-edited" is arbitrary when someone could use a thesaurus, Grammarly, or have a friend proofread their comment without objection.
- *It disadvantages non-native speakers.* Many HN users are brilliant engineers and thinkers who don't write fluently in English. AI editing can level the playing field, allowing their ideas to be judged on substance rather than prose quality. This policy inadvertently privileges native English speakers.
- *It's effectively unenforceable.* There is no reliable way to distinguish a lightly AI-polished comment from a naturally well-written one. Unenforceable rules erode respect for the rules that are enforceable and important.
- *The real problem is low-effort content, not the tool used.* What HN actually wants to prevent is shallow, generic, or spammy comments. A policy targeting quality directly (which HN already has) addresses the actual concern better than a blanket tool prohibition.
- *Human intent still drives the conversation.* A person who uses AI to articulate their own idea more clearly is still participating in a human conversation — they're just communicating more effectively. The thought, the intent to engage, and the underlying perspective remain human.
*In short:* This rule conflates the medium with the message and risks excluding valuable contributions in pursuit of an authenticity standard that is both philosophically fuzzy and practically unenforceable.
Humans write a bit messier — commas, short sentences, abrupt turns.
Forum mechanics have always shaped discourse more than policies. Voting changed everything. The response to LLMs should be mechanical not moral — soft, invisible weighting against signals correlated with generated text. Imperfect but worth the tradeoff, just like voting.
https://claude.ai/share/9fcdcba8-726b-4190-b728-bb4246ff82cf
And I'm worried banning AIs altogether will eventually lead to some form of prove-you-are-human verification to use the site, which will reduce anonymity. Even something seemingly benign like verifying email would mean many unverified accounts like my own will disappear.
And there is a legitimate use for LLM rewrite to counter identification by stylometry, so rewrite shouldn't be banned. I think we'll have to allow the AI stuff at some point, and make a system that incentivizes quality posts regardless of where they come from or how they're written.