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.
If you're going to say that the AI said X, Y, Z, provide a rationale on why it is relevant. If you merely found X, Y and Z compelling, feel free to talk about it without mentioning AI.
> If you merely found X, Y and Z compelling, feel free to talk about it without mentioning AI.
I think you're seeing this as too black-and-white, and missing the heart of the issue.
The purpose of mentioning AI is to convey the level of (un)certainty as accurately as possible. The most accurate way to do that would often be to mention any use of AI, rather than hiding it.
If AI tells me that it believes X is true because of links A and B that it cites, and I find those links compelling, then I absolutely want to mention that AI gave me those links because I have no clue whether the model had any reason to bias itself toward those sources, or whether alternate links may have existed that stated otherwise.
Whereas if a normal web search just gives links that mention terms from my query, then I get a chance to see the other links too, and I end up being the one who actually compare the contents of the different pages and figure out which one is most convincing.
Depending on various factors, such as the nature of the question and the level of background knowledge I have on the topic myself, one of these can provide a more useful response than the other -- but only if I convey the uncertainty around it accurately.
In my experience, LLMs hallucinate citations like crazy. Over 50% of the times I've checked, the citation either didn't exist, or it did but didn't support the LLM's assertions.
This is true not just from the chat, but for Google AI summaries.
When the references are more often wrong than not, you can understand why many will simply downvote you for bringing LLM citations into the conversation. Why quote a habitual liar?
(If you look at my other comments, I'm actually in favor of using LLMs in some capacity for HN comments. Just not in this case.)
However, that's probably not critical enough to formally add to the explicit guidelines, so it's probably fine to leave it in the "case law" realm—especially because downvoters tend to go after such comments.
The comments thing is a lot more intimate in the sense that anyone posting comments is inside the house.
I have a kid with severe written language issues, and the utilisation of speech to text with a LLM-powered edit has unlocked a whole world that was previously inaccessible.
I would hate to see a culture that discourages AI assistance.
> I would hate to see a culture that discourages AI assistance.
Mostly I think the push back is about ai assistance in its current form. It can get in the way of communicating rather than assisting. The cost though is mostly borne by the readers and those not using the AI for assistance. I have seen this happen when the ai adds info and thoughts that were tangental to the original author and I think, but I can not verify times where an author seems to try to dig down on the details but seemingly can not.
These rules are always fuzzy and there's always a long tail of exceptions. All the more so under turbulent conditions like right now. I wrote more about this elsewhere in the thread, in case it's useful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47342616.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47326351
Yes, please at least have a carveout for accessibility. I definitely have dictated HN comments in the past, and my flow uses LLMs to clean it up. It works, and is awesome when you're in pain.
