Ask HN: Should "I asked $AI, and it said" replies be forbidden in HN guidelines?
While the guidelines were written (and iterated on) during a different time, it seems like it might be time to have a discussion about if those sort of comments should be welcomed on HN or not.
Some examples:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46164360
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46200460
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46080064
Personally, I'm on HN for the human conversation, and large LLM-generated texts just get in the way of reading real text from real humans (assumed, at least).
What do you think? Should responses that basically boil down to "I asked $LLM about $X, and here is what $LLM said:" be allowed on HN, and the guidelines updated to state that people shouldn't critique it (similar to other guidelines currently), or should a new guideline be added to ask people from refrain from copy-pasting large LLM responses into the comments, or something else completely?
200 comments
[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 97.9 ms ] threadBut I don't know that we need any sort of official ban against them. This community is pretty good about downvoting unhelpful comments, and there is a whole spectrum of unhelpful comments that have nothing to do with genAI. It seems impractical to overtly list them all.
At this point, I make value judgments when folks use AI for their writing, and will continue to do so.
Obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/810/
I find myself downvoting (flagging) them when I see them as submissions, and I can't think of any examples where they were good submission content; but for comments? There's enough discussion where the AI is the subject itself and therefore it's genuinely relevant what the AI says.
Then there's stuff like this, which I'd not seen myself before seeing your question, but I'd say asking people here if an AI-generated TLDR of 74 (75?) page PDF is correct, is a perfectly valid and sensible use: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46164360
I'm not sure a full ban is possible, but LLM-written comments should at least be strongly discouraged.
I feel like the HN guidelines could take inspiration from how Oxide uses LLMs. (https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576). Specifically the part where using LLMs to write comments violates the implicit social contract that the writer should put more care and effort and time into it than the reader. The reader reads it because they assume this is something a person has put more time into than they need to. LLMs break that social contract.
Of course, if it’s banned maybe people just stop admitting it.
We can't stop AI comments, but we can encourage good behavior/disclosure. I also think brevity should still be rewarded, AI or not.
I have a coworker who does this somewhat often and... I always just feel like saying well that is great but what do you think? What is your opinion?
At the very least the copy paster should read what the llm says, interpret it, fact check it, then write their own response.
> 1. Existing guidelines already handle low-value content. If an AI reply is shallow or off-topic, it gets downvoted or flagged. > > 2. Transparency is good. Explicitly citing an AI is better than users passing off its output as their own, which a ban might encourage. > > 3. The community can self-regulate. We don't need a new rule for every type of low-effort content. > > The issue is low effort, not the tool used. Let downvotes handle it.