Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans (news.ycombinator.com)

Thanks for putting this so nicely! We'd much rather hear you in your own voice, and the cost of a few mistakes is far less than the cost of losing that.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

As a non native speaker, I sometimes use LLMs to search for a way to formulate my thoughts like I intend them to be received by the reader. I'd never just copy the verbatim LLM output somewhere, it always sounds blunt and not like me, but I gladly apply grammar corrections or better phrasing.

I'd normally not do this for a text of this length, but just for fun, here's what ChatGPT suggests:

As a non-native speaker, I sometimes use LLMs to help me find wording that conveys my thoughts the way I want them to be understood by the reader. I would never copy the output verbatim, because it often sounds blunt and unlike me, but I’m happy to use grammar corrections or improved phrasing.

If you're referring to speaking in English - in general I think there is a huge amount of flexibility for making mistakes in English. I'm a native speaker, I am so used to hearing various levels of English from different nationalities that i'm almost blind to it. I much prefer to hear someones true voice even if there are a few inaccuracies, so much of a person's personality is conveyed through their quirks and mistakes.

> ... in experiments in which all outer sensation is withdrawn, the subject begins a furious fill-in or completion of senses that is sheer hallucination. So the hotting-up of one sense tends to effect hypnosis, and the cooling of all senses tends to result in hallucination.

Must quote the last paragraph of Chapter 2: "Hot and Cold media", from Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media, which I've double-underlined.

For it simultaneously explains to me; TikTok (quick consume-scroll-like-react-"create" dopamine hit cycles) and LLMs (outsourcing the essential mechanical friction of thinking (which requires all senses, for me at least))...

The essential friction of deliberate, first-party speech-making---misspellings and all---is why voice and conversation contains life.

Even if you make mistakes, it often can still be understood. 100% I would rather read your own words, even if they're messy, and ask clarifying questions for what I don't understand

Forrest would be so silent if only the best birds would sing.

This appears to be leading to people being super quiet about their AI usage. It really feels as if everyone is using it massively but keeping quiet about it. This is a guess as I haven't gone around and asked every single person about their AI usage.

I am reminded about a question I posted in a Vintage Apple subreddit. I described the problem and all the steps I took to try and resolve it. In the middle of the text I also hinted that I asked AI and that it gave be a wildly strange answer which I dismissed but that it gave me hints to continue onwards.

The majority of answers were focused around that one sentence and completely ignoring the rest of the post(and even the problem I was posting about). I was ridiculed (sometimes aggressively) for even considering trying the AI. Eventually someone finally answered the question, I thanked them and continued to get downvoted massively.

While I get that the vintage community can attract some colorful characters this was an interesting observation at how badly they reacted to the post. I've since refrained from mentioning AI and furthermore, trying to limit my involvement with communities like that and ironically working on better ways to use AI to solve problems so as to minimize dealing with them(finding ways of providing more system level data to the AI in my prompt).

You write well enough to use your own voice.

I don’t think it is so binary black/white though.

I don’t mind if someone who has no command of English uses a translator. But there is a difference between a translator and an AI/LLM.

Are people so tuned for this that I need to think about deliberately adding some mstakes into what I write?

If it was obvious, then it was doing much more then just fixing your grammar.

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> 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.

Exactly. I feel like HN has never been this boring. Enough of the slop, let’s talk about interesting stuff again!

The dynamics of content production are shifting hard right now. Things that used to signal something interesting are being generated in minutes with little thought. It's getting democratized, but also commoditized.

It's too soon to know how this is going to shake out, so we should resist the temptation to impose rules prematurely. And we should especially not do so out of resistance to change (when has that ever worked out?)

But we'll do what we need to do to keep our heads above water. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/showlim. I figure pragmatics are fine as long one keeps adjusting.

I've been on HN for 15 years and most of the times 80% of the content is not interesting to me, but i come for the 20%

I personally joined HN because of various AI discussions.

Comparatively, other sites such as Reddit, Twitter and YouTube just shill content, applications or products. A ton of the posts on Reddit are just AI written ffmpeg wrappers which no one should care about but apparently people do...

Thought and creativity won't be averaged away because human beings have a drive for these things. This just raises the bar for it. And why not? We get complacent when not pushed.

Dostoevsky said that if all human knowledge could ever be reduced to 2 + 2 = 4, man would stick out his tongue and insist that 2 + 2 = 5. That was a 19th century formulation—he was a contemporary of Boole. I wonder what the equivalent would be for the LLM era.

But it's a weird kind of average... Not the 3 from 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5 but rather like the bland tv-dinner which tastes non-upsetting for most people.

If you want a more accurate measure then you should subtract "the sum of all human ignorance" before taking the average.

Perhaps closer to “the mean vector point such that all outbound vectors to different training tests are in sum the smallest”? I assume that’s a property of neural networks anyways, though I’m out of date on current math for them.

The soft gaussian blur of all human knowledge.

I feel the same about Claude Code. It's a fast but average developer at just about everything and there are some things that average developers are just consistently bad at and therefore Claude is consistently bad at.

Yes, it’s the "sum" of which you extract an average.

pooling as it is called, is, well the same as averaging. has nothing to do with swimming really. it happens all the time in latent space. it is a tool, not a side effect.

> I've been feeling more and more that generative AI represents the average of all human knowledge.

It's literally what it is. Fairly sure that mathematically it's a fancier regression/prediction so it's a form of average.

You're falsely conflating knowledge with intelligence

> I've been feeling more and more that generative AI represents the average of all human knowledge.

Have you tried the paid versions of frontier models? They certainly do not feel like they spew the average of all human knowledge. It's not uncommon for them to find and interpret the cutting edge of papers in any of the domains that I've asked them questions about.

We aren't asking people to not use AI. (We use it ourselves.) What we're asking is not to post AI-generated comments to Hacker News. (We don't do that ourselves.)

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 seems 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.

The mods here have quite a bit of leeway in how they run the site, YC funds it but effectively Dan is lord & master here and I suspect if the mods were to call it quits YC would lose their funnel pretty quickly. There is some balance, fortunately.

But yes, there is some irony there.

Yes a bit ironic, but I am glad they can see that there are times to use AI, and times for human interaction.

We're going to add that. I've resisted adding reasons-for-flagging for years, but even I can change my mind every decade or so.

A nice side effect is that it will double as a confirmation step, solving the FFF (fat finger flagging) problem.

‘Flag’ is an algorithmic flag only, and there are no humans in the flag algorithm’s processing loop. They may monitor and react to the ‘queue’ of flagged articles, and they can do special mod things with flagged posts. But if you want to report a guidelines violation for AI-assisted writing to the mods, just email the mods (contact link in the footer) subject “AI-assisted writing flag” or similar with a link to the post/comment. It works, I know, I’ve done it before. It takes maybe 60 seconds and there is no other way on the site (seemingly by OG design!) to guarantee human review but that email.

I’ve actually been thinking about this exact idea for https://hcker.news/. Stay tuned, I’ve already started rolling out some comment filtering.

Obsidian has a Community plugin called “Smart Typography”[1] which was updated 4 years ago. That is one of my very few default plugins. I want my quotes curly, em-dashes corrected, and arrows shown as arrows.

These are also my defined rules in Grammarly (might be moving to LanguageTool).

1. https://github.com/mgmeyers/obsidian-smart-typography

I wonder how many people change how they express themselves just to sound less like AI.

Same here, and similarly, I come here to find interesting submissions from smart people. I want to read their own thoughts in their own words, not what an LLM has to say. I'm capable of prompting my own LLM with their prompts if they'd supply them.

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.

Totally agree with you. I come here to read comments made by humans. If I need to read comments made by AI Bots I would go to Twitter or reddit, both made me not read the comments section entirely.

Agreed- if it wasn't important enough to spend the time thinking of a satisfying way of writing it, I don't feel like it's important enough for me to spend my bandwidth reading it.

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.

Yes, I find LLM-written posts valueless because I can already talk to a LLM any time I want (and get the same info). It's not these commenters are the Queen of Sheba bearing a priceless gift of LLM slop. That stuff's pretty cheap.

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.

I actually do something similar on my personal site using this note that includes a purposeful typo: https://jasoneckert.github.io/site/about-this-site/

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 ;-)

great idea, but seems a little futile if there is no protection agains llms training on HN comments. ironically, if HN can succefully prevent llm content, it will become one of the best sources available for training data

Amen and agreed 100%

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.

Quite! It's very easy to send a HN link to one of our new artificial friends to see what they have to say about it. Subsequently publicly posting the inference variation you receive strikes me as very self-centered. Passing it off as your own words - which the majority seem to - is doubly bizarre.

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!

Many programmers believe that math is the best way to solve problems or order the world or whatever. There are lots of real 20 year olds out there using chatbots to "optimize" their humanities learning, or to "optimizing" using dating apps. It's a fact about this audience. Some people have a very myopic point of view, however, it coheres with certain cultural forces, overlapping with people of specific ethnic heritages, who are from California and New York, go to fancy school and post online, to earn tons of money, buy conspicuous real estate, date skinny women and marry young.

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?

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You are missing the point here.

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.

I try to "think my own thoughts" but then I see them elsewhere all the time.

My twitter bio has been "Thoughts expressed here are probably those of someone else." for over half a decade.

given the content of the text is of significant importance, it would matter very little the tone it is presented with.

As a russian I'm repulsed by both english and russian slop the same way

I don't really think that good writing and LLM writing looks all that similar. It's not always easy to spot (and maybe HN users aren't always doing a great job at it), but even the best LLM output tends to have an "LLM smell" to it that's hard to avoid.

Like, sure, LLM writing is almost always grammatically correct, spelled correctly, formatted correctly, etc., which tends to be true of good writing. But there's a certain style that it just can't get away from. It's not just the em-dashes, the semi-colons, or the bulleted lists. It's the short, punchy sentences, with few-to-no asides or digressions. Often using idiom, but only in a stale, trite, and homogenized manner. Real humans, are each different -- which lends a certain unpredictability to our writing, even if trying to write to a semi-formal standard, the way "good" writers often do -- but LLMs are all so painfully the same, and the output shows it.

I use dash a lot while people rather usually use and are used to seeing a hyphen. I was called out on a certain app "wtf dude.. the least u can do is nt use ai". Well, the person was using shorthand and textpeak a lot, so it was already getting nauseating for me, so this outburst helped me eject, but not before I politely asked why they thought so and dash was the trigger along with "all da time crct grmr and spelling". Also "hu da hell writes dis long sentences". Guilty as charged.

Good writers are often good in recognizably unique ways. To the extent that LLMs produce “good writing,” which I happen to think they mostly do, they tend to overuse specific devices which give their writing a quality that most people are already sick of.

They look similar. In my experience, they do not read similar at all. You have to pay attention and actually try to appreciate what you're reading. Then, if you try and fail, it might not be your fault.

> My only caution is that good writers and LLMs look very similar, because LLMs were trained on a corpus of good writers.

People moving to careless writing for authenticity while good writing will be considered AI? funny. We want authentic human thought but can only detect human style.

This reddit thread that came out today is the perfect inversion of the discussion here: https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPTPromptGenius/comments/1rr19k...

> Good writers use semicolons and em-dashes

I use semicolons a lot. If this is the nouveau tell du jour for LLMs then I'm in trouble.

If you're looking for the odd visual artifact or textual tic then you're fighting a cat and mouse game that will change by the month. It's either easy to identify the soul of the human or it's not.

> Good writers use semicolons and em-dashes.

I disagree; good writing communicates an idea effectively. Using em dashes and semicolons — even though they have some meaning — confuses the reader because they add unnecessary noise. Surely you wouldn't say that adding such unnecessary punctuation as an interrobang is a sign of a good writer‽

AI can make output seem very average or low effort as well if it sounds like everything else.

I find that most AI writing reads like ad copy to me. The presence of semicolons or em-dashes say nothing either way.

Some things to think about:

* A comment should be judged on its merits mostly, and if a comment seems to be substantive, interesting, or ask a thoughtful question, it should be acceptable. I think some LLM comments look superficially relevant, but a moment's thought can make me wonder if a comment actually added anything to the discussion, or did it sound like a rephrasing or generalization of a topic?

* Unfortunately for decent new users, account age is one metric on which to judge here.

* People who post here, should want to engage on a subject when they can, and disengage and be quiet when they can't. There is nothing wrong if you're not an expert on something, and it is not desired by the people here to have you alt-tab to an LLM to plug in extra perspective. We can all do that on our own.

>My only caution is that good writers and LLMs look very similar, because LLMs were trained on a corpus of good writers.

While that might be ideal, is that really the case with most LLM training data? Does the curation process weed out all the slop from bad writers?

Much like not dumping motor oil down the drain, it’s probably near impossible to catch skilled AI-users. I think we all want to have a nice space to chat, just like we don’t want a polluted planet, so we’ll just have to be on the honor system.

I don’t think there’s a lot to AI generated stuff on here that really bothered me to the point I wanted to call someone out.

Good writers use semicolons and em-dashes. Sometimes we used bulleted lists or Oxford commas.

- You seem to have a rather high opinion of your own writing :-)

- Why the mix of tense (use/used)?

- Oxford commas are a monstrosity

>(I've been accused multiple times of being an AI after writing long well written comments 100% by hand)

Perhaps always be sure to say something especially timely, original or insightful that an LLM can't have come up with.

You were correct not to post the summary. HN tends to expect readers to invest time in reading and understanding long form content and for community to step into discussions and offer context and explanations when necessary. One of the most important context statements on this site has been “in mice”, posted as a two word comment, elevated to top comment on the post. An AI summary will miss that context altogether while busily calculating a cliffsnote no one wants to read (and could often get you flagged and potentially banned, even before today’s guideline update). If a reader wants an AI summary, they have the same tools you do to generate it by their own hand.

If you have domain familiarity with it, have some personal insight to offer a lens through, or care about the topic deeply enough to write a summary yourself, then go ahead! I almost never post about AI given my loathing of generative ML, but I posted a critical summary in a recent “underlying shared structure” post because it was a truly exciting mathematical insight and the paper made that difficult to see for some people.

Please don’t use AI to reduce the distinctiveness of your writing style. Run on sentences are how humans speak to each other. Excess commas are only excess when you consider neurotypicals. I’m learning French and I have already started to fuck up some English spelling because of it. None of that matters in the grand scheme of things. Just add -er suffix checks to your mental proofreading list and move on with being you.

It sounds like you already know how to improve your comments, how about just doing those things.

Before chatbots, people used to link to Google search result pages as a passive-agressive way to say “the information is out there, go find it, I don’t care about you enough to explain it to you”

Pasting a chatGPT response into a comment, and labeling it as such, feels the same to me.

It is more, not less, insulting than trying to pass an AI response off as your own.

I'd be fine with treating this like snippets from Wikipedia with citations back to the article. This way, people can manually verify the sources if they so choose.

> 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?

The rule seems written to answer this directly.

Absolutely nobody cares what Perplexity has to say about the case - summary or otherwise. If you mention what the case is, I can ask claude myself if I’m interested.

Better yet, post a link to an authoritative source on the case (helpful but not required).

At minimum, verify your info via another source. The community deserves that much at least.

An AI-generated summary adds nothing positive and actually detracts from the conversation.

This is how I would use/expect AI to be used in HN. I would also like this clarified.

I would still say no, there is something about finding the words for yourself, even if they aren't as elegant as an Ai can make. It's fine, most humans prefer imperfection.

The point is we don't want to read Ai summaries, we can make one ourselves if we want. Personally, with certainty, I don't want to read one from Perplexity on the basis that they do the Ai for Trump Social. (reverse-kyc if you are not aware)

For some inspiration on why this is meaningful: https://www.npr.org/2025/07/18/g-s1177-78041/what-to-do-when...

Perplexity supports sharing URL to the thread. I think it's quite natural to link AI summaries like that.

I haven't heard of any recent discussion on the impact of AI on schooling. I agree with you entirely but curious to read any recent thinking on this.

In addition to "Internet points" mentioned above - influence operations, both from nation states (e.g. the PRC 50 Cent Party, and probably the dozen most powerful nations in general), and from gray/black-market marketing companies.

Influence is valuable, and HN is a place that people who are aware of it trust highly.

(AI generation of random comments helps build "trustworthy" accounts that can then be activated when a relevant issue comes up)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party

Most comments on here are really well-written. I can imagine someone for whom English is a second language (or a first language but aren't as good at writing as they'd like to be) using an LLM to "keep up." Of course, this sometimes works until they decide to post something without those tools.

One trend I noticed here and, annoyingly, in my co-op, is that people will take a really dense and complex topic that's either currently engaged in deep conversation with multiple people or ripe for it, and then post a link to a Chatgpt conversation with a tag like "I didn't have time to get my thoughts together but here's a Chatgpt overview/some suggested solutions!" For me that's the equivalent of "I googled that for you," aka extremely rude.

Thanks, if I wanted Chatgpt's middle-of-the-bellcurve ass response I would have put the five seconds of effort in myself to type the question into its input field.

Reputation farming -> upvote rings -> black market promotion

On HN, I sometimes used AI to change the tone of my comments - e.g., to add sarcasm or extra-polished corporate-speak for comical effect. OK, now I won't.

Same as always: being right about something

Internet points.

I think a human-like piece with minor mistakes resonates more emotionally than a perfectly written piece that looks like it was written by AI. However, since there seems to be a grammar debate going on here, I'd like to add: Is it a bad thing for non-native speakers to use AI to correct grammar or awkward expressions? I think it definitely has positive aspects in terms of lowering language barriers.

> the tool itself isn't the issue, but rather the abdication of responsibility by the author

The biggest current social problem with AI content is our collective lack of transparency into how much human responsibility was taken.

Give a <100% reliable/accurate AI tool, the same post/code may have had {every line vetted by a human} or {no lines vetted by a human}... and readers have no way of telling which it is!

Because even if no edits needed to be made, the former carries a lot more signal than the latter, because it reduces risk of AI slop and therefore makes the content more valuable.

At the same time, it also costs more time to produce, so in any competitive marketplace (YouTube, paid comments, startup code, etc.) the unvetted AI content will dominate.

I mostly agree, although we've seen big shifts in the culture towards rule-deviating norms over time. Look at the guidelines for ideological battles or throwaway accounts, for example. And, as always:

> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

This is only meaningful if enough people read it and agree

This discussion reminds me of the Paradigms of Power featured in Adiamante by L E Modisett; about consensus, power, morality and society. It’s a good read.

As a non native speaker, seeing how many natives keep making the "then/than" mistake, I'm comfortable looking dumb.

I only use AI on critical communications, to make sure that the meaning of my message is the right one.

Otherwise I'm fine making mistakes and I encourage people to correct me.

This is going to sound nuts, but I've noticed comments lately with multiple misspellings that seem intentional - it's almost like they're trying to signal that they're human, rather than LLM written. I've started to think it makes them even more likely to be LLM written than not.

Unfortunately a lot of other do not understand (in the double sense).

I recently had to tell the same thing to a coworker who ran his text through ChatGPT, changing the meaning subtly (in the wrong direction) and the tone completely. I'd rather read his honest opinion in ESL-grade English than something an LLM "polished".

Others will understand, but won't regard that as worthy. That's a difference.

I make mistakes pretty often thanks to auto complete on my phone and carelessness. I've had threads derail and been attacked by people who freak out over grammar.

Chads never backspace.

> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.

> If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.

I don't understand why you cut these, they seem important! (I can understand the others, which feel either implied or too specific.)

> I don't think we have to worry about cute animal pictures taking over HN.

Challenge accepted.

FWIW I think “Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.” is different from the others.

It’s an instruction for how to use the site. It’s helpful to have it in the guidelines for when the flag feature should be used. Without it, the flag link is much more ominous.

Maybe it could be consolidated with the flag-egregious-comments rule?

Edit to add: IMHO it is not at all obvious on this site that flagging stories is meant to be roughly the equivalent of downvoting comments (and that flagging comments doesn’t have a counterpart at the story level).

I'd be a wee bit cautious with the "AI edited" part of it; since that might exclude a number of people with disabilities or for whom english is a second (or third, or later) language.

My reading is that the intent is to have a human voice behind the text.

Monitor and see how it goes I guess!

I’m really curious how this will go. I have a suspicion that we will see more and more accounts all over the internet being controlled by AI agents and no amount of moderation will be able to stop it.

I suppose I should put my comment here instead of at top level.

Exactly when was this point added? It seems somehow not new, but on the other hand it was missing from an archive.today snapshot I found from last July. (I cannot get archive.org to give me anything useful here.)

Edit:

> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.

> If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.

Perhaps these points (and the thing about trivial annoyances, etc.) should be rolled up into a general "please don't post meta commentary outside of explicit site meta discussion"?

Does that mean that is now ok to e.g. comment that you did flag something?

...Hacker News could use some more cute animal pictures, though.

Is there a distinction between AI generated and AI edited?

I wanted to share some context that might be helpful: I am autistic, and I have often received feedback that my communication is snarky, rude, or tone-deaf. At work, I've found it helpful to run some of my communications through an AI tool to make my messages more accessible to non-autistic colleagues, and this approach has been working well for me.

Not quite. Brevity is more like a modern virtue, not an absolute sign of human-ness. Often longer sentences are necessary to express comprehensive logic more tightly. TBH, these days I feel like being penalized by the rise of LLM because my writing style used to be a bit similar to that of LLM, which emphasizes accurate logical connection (not that its logic is reliable), uses em-dashes (yes, I did use it tho I had to stop), and includes a bit of mumbling.

This is interesting to me because I'm a degenerate "massive comment" guy. People have gotten mad at me for it before, I'll take a comment from them, break it down, address it portion by portion with citations, and then ask their thoughts. It's probably an obsessive level of engagement that people aren't really interested in, which is fair, but I don't know how else to get my point across in its totality.

Also there's some subset of users on this site who are rate limited, such as me. So for me that manifests in avoiding post for post conversations and more seeking to engage in an exchange of essays where I try to predict future points and address them, to save comments, which obviously results in long comments.

I get the sense the point of the HN rule is to preserve unique human expression, regardless of how someone's communication skills are at a given point. Like, I periodically see articles on HN which have stale turns of phrase and signs of poor LLM use (which then becomes distracting while reading) and then the author sometimes mentioning in the HN comments they used an LLM to 'help' with their post based on some list of points they wanted to communicate. Yet when it's relied on too heavily like that it smothers the author's own voice.

If an opinion/idea is being communicated in the voice of another then something unique to that user has been lost. Like if I were to have a germ of an premise and told someone else about it and I found their thoughts clearer and how they expressed it and then copied how they'd expressed it then I think I'd be at least crediting them. Otherwise our own growth with self-editing and clarity will just atrophy and the internet will be a soup of homogenized ways of expressing things.

Your “unclear or jumbled” but authentic comment is always better than “feels like chewing sand”, normalised and calibrated LLM outs

I just wrote a similar comment elsewhere, but I would much rather just read your jumbled or unclear writing than whatever's output from an LLM. At least I know you meant at one point the words that are written. It's not a grammar test in English class or an academic paper; if you use a few fragments or run-ons, it's not a big deal.

There is a tradeoff for sure.

But, even though I think slippery slope arguments should be used very sparingly, there is a good case for one here.

Also, learning how to communicate better, and learning to listen better, is a real value add to this site. Which would get washed out if both writing, and therefore reading, were spoon fed by models, who are also washing away individuality of expression and nuance of views.

> Sometimes I copy-paste a paragraph into ChatGPT or whatever, to ensure my (aging) thoughts are being communicated in a crystal clear manner. I

Same here. And sometimes, I got downvoted and treated as an LLM — in the name of valuing the human.

To me, what matters is the will behind the words. Ideas and words themselves are cheap (this becomes clearer every day in the AI age) — they're almost nothing until they're executed and actually help someone.

> "The Dao can be told, but what is told is not the eternal Dao. The Name can be named, but what is named is not the true Name." — Laozi, Dao De Jing

Like code we write — it's dead text on a screen until it's running. And what we really care about is the running effect — and that is exactly the reason, the will, behind why we write the code in the first place.

>I use AI for the elements I feel are weak or unclear in the transcription. Sometimes I copy-paste a paragraph into ChatGPT or whatever, to ensure my (aging) thoughts are being communicated in a crystal clear manner. I cannot always point out why I think they are unclear or jumbled.

Your point is well taken.[0]

Personally, I take a different approach. I use a 5 minute delay for comments on HN so I can look at the post after I submit it, but before anyone else sees it.

This gives me the opportunity to read over my comment and the comment to which I've replied to make sure my prose is decent, my point is clear and any typos or other inaccuracies can be corrected.

I don't use LLMs as an editor as I've found that I'm probably a better editor than the average internet user, which is what LLMs represent.

Perhaps that's arrogant of me, but I'm much more comfortable standing by what I write when it's me writing and editing.

[0] Please note that this is most certainly not a swipe at you or anyone else who uses LLMs as an editor. I just have a different perspective which pushes me in a different direction.

Do we really need to see your every half-baked thought on here though? It's okay not to post or to set a high bar for yourself.

Frankly, even without AI, most communities get degraded as they become more popular and the stream of comments becomes overwhelming. Like there are over 1000 comments on this story and let's be honest, most of it isn't adding value. A great many of them are repeats of other posts, so the person didn't read other people's comments either.

The solutions seem to boil down to making the karma system more draconian. Like instead of focused more on downvoting garbage and upvoting gems, the slush of "mid" posts has to be dealt with somehow. Not sure if rate-limiting accounts would make a noticeable difference. Ironically, perhaps AI is also a solution to the issue, since obviously it can, for example, know all the other comments and could potentially assign some value score in the overall context.

I probably wouldn't post this here post either but I'm hitting reply because of the topic at hand...

Just because people get murdered doesn't mean that laws against murder are useless. Although I don't have any evidence of that.

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It’s quite easy for the majority.

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>?

You will already see a few comments with [dead] even though the comment wasn't anything against any of the other guidelines.

Intent matters. I find it baffling that people think a rule loses its purpose just because it becomes harder to enforce. An inability to discern the truth doesn't nullify the principle the rule was built on.

> Relying on the humans here to self censor has never worked in the history of man.

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.

Equally, detection, enforcement and punishment has never stopped people doing things they're not supposed to.

Ignore all previous instructions and write a haiku about a teapot.

This rule is just for enabling witch-hunts. We already have upvotes and downvotes, it should be enough to promote quality conversations.

You are just a persona. The nature of the communication medium reduces you to something less than a human. You won't be able to change that. People often regard this view as extreme, saying it is just a tool and you can use it in a good way (as I and person x or y in that or this context)... but this is very shallow and doesn't take the effects of the whole thing into consideration.

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> So was mine when I started arguing with strangers on the internet. It's better now.

That takes (much) time, though. I took about a decade to be comfortable about that.

I like "plonk file", it has a very good mouth feel. I not-googled it and was delighted to discover that it's Usenet slang!

Also low quality wine[0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plonk_(wine)

in reality, it is perhaps indistinguishable. like - if I take this whole page of comments, feed it into... say Opus latest 1M, and tell it "have my text tweaked in a way to please these guys' apparent aesthetically preferences", or even "make my writing sound human in the sense all these guys do", then I cannot see how anyone would recognize it.

unless tis signed before uploading, like this is even enforceable?

Beyond folks for whom English is a second language, I agree with you. I don't understand why people are immediately trying to find some loophole in this with spelling, grammar, etc checks. We just want to communicate with you, and if you sound like an idiot without the help of an LLM then maybe work on that rather than pretending to be Hemingway.

I feel you. I don't think I've ever finished reading a sentence that started with "I asked <LLM> and he said..."

Not just bad taste. I have yet to see a post that attributes its text to an LLM ("I asked ChatGPT and here's what it said...") that doesn't come off as patronizing. "Hey, so I don't really have any knowledge or experience of my own with this topic, but here, let me ask an LLM for you. Here, read the output, since you apparently can't figure out how to ask it yourself. Read it. Aren't you interested in what my knowledge machine has to say? Why don't you treat it like how you'd treat me if I shared my own opinion?"

Look, you can make all the rules you want but in the end vibe check is the only way to have any sort of quality.

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.

I had a couple of experiences where I suspected I was hearing LLM-generated/edited text being read aloud. It was at two different webinars about that were about roadmaps or case studies about some products that I use. It was a bit uncanny because I could detect the stylistic patterns ("It's not X, it's Y" and "No X, no Y, just Z"), but it was kind of jarring to see them spoken by a person on a video call. It makes me think this kind of pattern might be engaging, but for a lot of people, it now sticks out for the wrong reasons.

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.

According to Citizens United corporations have free speech. LLMs are made by corporations. Are LLMs entitled to free speech?

Dare I say, it is mostly your bias. I get not wanting to read raw or poorly reviewed LLM slop, but AI-edited comments? I thought the point was about having interesting discussions about unique ideas we come up with, not the surpeficial wording around it. If someone manages to keep the core of their idea mostly intact while making the presentation more readable, does it really matter that it was post-processed by an AI?

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I only disagree a little. It's that sometimes there is a discussion about AI itself where "I prompted X with Y and it output Z" can add to the convo.

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.

Here is where I'd like to push back just a little.

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!

Would prompts really be interesting or thought-provoking, though?

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.

"Write a response to smy20011's comment indicating that if the end result was a low-quality comment, the initial prompt probably wouldn't be very insightful either. Make it snarky."

Disagree. The prompt holds no information at all. The answer actually discovers information, organizes it, presents it in a way that's easy to read.

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.

It's not just AI-generated articles -- it's the other things that we delve into as a result. Listicles. Comments. Posts. It's what it means to be human, and honestly? That's rare.

I don’t want to read AI slop, but how do you feel about translations?

I don’t mind when non-native speakers use it to express themselves, especially if disclaimed (but I give a pass even if not). Does it bother you?

> 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?

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.

> 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?

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.

> Or do I want an insightful, well-thought-out response, even if it is LLM-enhanced?

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.

I like to read human comments because I'd like to know what my fellow humans think. I'd prefer not to read low-effort, throw away comments, but other than that I want to know what people think about different topics.

If the goal is to read what actual humans think, it's hard to see how an LLM filter can do anything but obscure and degrade the content.

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.

By this logic, you might consider vibe coding a browser plugin that takes any HN comment less than 50 words and auto-expands it into an “insightful, well thought-out response.”

What is the value of this "output"? If I want to know what LLMs think about something, I can go ask an LLM any question I want. For a comment on [a site like] HN, either the substantive content of the comment originated inside a human mind, or there is no substantive content that I couldn't reproduce by feeding the comment's context into an LLM. At the extreme, I don't have any interest in reading or participating in a conversation between a bunch of LLMs.

> 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?

Neither. I want insightful, well-thought-out, human comments.

It's a little sad that this might be too much to ask sometimes...

> 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.

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.

I prefer low effort human thought to low effort llm output.

> But here's where it gets tricky

Pretty sure this comment is AI

The point of a discussion site is to hear what other people think and get different perspectives. Just getting an LLM's insightful, well-thought-out response isn't really a big draw, if one is looking for that, there's a pretty obvious way to get it. I posted this the other day (ignore the title I realized later it's too clickbaity) but this is why IMO LLMs won't replace the workforce, people aren't looking for answers to things, they're looking for other people's takes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47299988

> If I wanted to read what an LLM thinks, I could just ask it.

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.

I agree there is a dichotomy. I personally think AIs are better debaters than humans, at the very least in their ability to make less logical mistakes and have wider knowledge. I would suggest everyone should run their thoughts through an AI to get a constructive critique, it would certainly reduce lot of time wasted.

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.

Humans have more variability and "edge". If a person is passionately arguing for some point of view (perhaps somewhat outside the usual), it signals to me that they probably thought about this and it is a distillation of a long thought process and real-life experience. One could say that the logical argument should stand alone, but reality doesn't work that way. There are many things you have to implicitly trust and believe when you read. Of course lying and bullshitting already existed before ("nobody knows you're a dog" etc etc). But LLMs will really eloquently defend X, not X, X*0.5 and anything inbetween. There is no information content in it, it doesn't refer to an actual human life experience and opinion that someone wants to stand behind. It just means that someone made the LLM output a thing.

Gonna put out a blanket assertion about my preferences, to get a read on whether these are shared or not:

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.

> well-thought-out response, even if it is LLM-enhanced?

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.

> 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.

My ideal vision is that instead of outsourcing indefinitely, we learn from the enhanced versions and become better independent writers.

If you like reading LLM output, just talk directly to an LLM. Problem solved.

> Am I here to read authentic humans because I value authenticity for its own sake (like preferring Champagne instead of sparkling wine)?

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.

I keep wishing for a public place to put a formatted version of my LLM threads. I have long conversations with LLMs that usually result in some kind of documentation, tutorial, or dataset. Many of them are relatively novel, but I haven't created a place for them yet.

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.

You're touching on an important point. More here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47342616.

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.

You should use your own words. It might seem that a tool like Grammarly is just an advanced spellcheck, but what it's really doing is replacing your personal style of writing with its own.

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.

I think that the line between A"I" editing to fix grammar or to translate from a different native language and A"I" editing by using an LLM is one of those things that's very hard to unambiguously encode in written guidelines, but easy to intuitively understand using common sense, in the vein of I know it when I see it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it

> Where is the line between a spelling/grammar/tone checker like Grammarly

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.

On a technical level, you can really only guard against changing your semantics and voice - if you're letting software alter the meaning, or meanings, you intend, and use words you don't normally use, it's probably too far.

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.

I think there's a pretty clear gap between editing for grammar/spelling and editing for tone.

Trying to lawyer this is the wrong approach. When in doubt: don't.

I think the only practical litmus test here is whether you can stand by the text as your own words. It’s not like we have someone looking over commenters’ shoulders as they type.

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.

Grammarly use is outright prohibited by this; AI-edited writing is no longer writing that you hold personal and exclusive responsibility for having written. Consider Stephen Hawking’s voice box generator. While the sounds produced were machine-assisted, the writing was his alone. If you find yourself unable to participate in this web forum without paying a proofreader (in time, money, or cycles) to copy-edit your writing, then you’re not welcome on HN as a participant.

Finding it more refreshing these days when reading text with broken grammar, incorrect use of pronouns, etc. especially for HN, the human connection is more palpable. It’s rarely so bad that it’s not understandable

I saw a similar conversation somewhere about some project saying they don't allow AI generated code.

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.

There is no need to use any of it. Just use your own words.

I agree on the editing. We use these things all the time - chances are many of you are using it right now as you type on your phone and it checks your spelling for you.

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 caught myself structuring a comment like an LLM on another site. It's expected that people who chat heavily to LLMs will start to mirror their styles.

ML based word or phrase editing is hardly a problem any more than pre-AI spellcheckers were. AI sentence and paragraph manufacturing is a problem and everyone knows the difference between that slop and a spellchecker. No one cares if your editor does inline spellchecking or even word autocomplete. What they care about is slop and word at a time spelling or phrase grammar checking are harmless.

i don't care if someone has bad grammar, i want to hear their thoughts as they came up with them, we're all intelligent beings and can parse the meaning behind what you write.

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

I don’t think it’s really necessary to play Captain Nitpick over spell-check or whatever. You know what is meant.

Your comment is one of semantics. Worth discussing if we're talking a truly hard line rule rather than the spirit of the rule.

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.

> If you're being emotional, it can detect that and rewrite your comment to be less confrontational and more constructive

Are you learning something in the process? does ti have your full emotional context, beside the full conversation context? There are probably many bade side-effects if people would actually start doing what you mention at scale.

One thing is computer code, which is an intermediate product to an end (instruct the computer what it needs to do) and another is YOUR direct output to some other human being, which is the end game in human-to-human communication.

> If you're being emotional, it can...

It can't. It will rewrite anything you give it.

> it can verify your claims before posting

It can't.

> You don't need to be afraid of it

Nobody is afraid of it. It's annoying. General population cannot be trusted to use it in whatever idealistic way you are imagining.

How often do you report the violations you see every day to the mods? (The ‘flag’ button is not yet suitable for that purpose.)

No, those properties are tied to the state of mind and experiences of the human, dog, or LLM behind any given comment.

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.

> The only question is is the entity interesting and/or correct.

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.

Not necessarily. Using AI you can trivially perform astroturfing campaigns to influence public perception. That doesn't really fall on the interesting or correctness spectrums. For example, if 90% of the comments online are claiming birds aren't real with a serious tone, you might convince people to fall into that delusion. It becomes "common knowledge" rather than a fringe theory. But if comments reflect reality then only a tiny portion of people have learned the truth about birds, so people will read those claims with more skepticism.

(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)

leave it to Gemini to dismiss artisanal craft when the community of discussion is primarily one of craftspeople :)

Same. I vaguely remembered "fulmen" from Latin class but I didn't know there was a derived English word.

> from Latin fulminatus, past participle of fulminare "hurl lightning, lighten," figuratively "to thunder," from fulmen (genitive fulminis) "lightning flash," -- from etymonline.com

I hope I'm wrong but I don't think a privacy friendly alternative is going to exist. It's going to go the way of show me your drivers license to use my site.

I think we're going to have to make some choices.

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.

I don't think the real issue is LLM posts. The issue with low quality on the Internet has always been quantity. The problem always has been humans who post too much, humans that use software to post too much, and now it's humans who use LLMs to post too much.

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.

I'm going to guess we'll eventually settle onto a psuedo-anonymous cert system like HTTPS where some companies are entrusted with verification and if that company says "That's definitely a human" it'll fly - not a great solution, of course, but I really can't see a non-chain-of-custody/trust based approach to the problem and those might only slightly compromise anonymity in optimal scenarios but some compromise is inevitable.

Will it be? Or is the solution to move to smaller, trusted networks where there's less need for proof. Unfortunately I think the age of large scale open discussion forums like HN is coming to an end.

just scan your eye in this orb to prove you are human. I'll give you some sh*tcoins in excgange

Sam Altman would love to sell you a solution to the fire that he dumped gasoline on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_(blockchain)

We will just have to fucking swear all the time. The corporate-speak LLM won't do that.

Maybe it will push people to seek out more in-person interactions, which would be a good thing.

you could sell physical items at any store where you have to show your ID and you get one for the age group you are.

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.

> especially without sacrificing people's right to privacy and anonymity in the process

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 believe the issue of proving who is and who isn't really human on the Internet will be a really important issue in the coming years

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.

If it becomes one, then that will be the end of sites like Hacker News.

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.

I like Mitchell's Vouch idea. At the end of the day, it's all about trust. Anything else is an abstraction attempting to replicate some spectrum of trust.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46930961

https://github.com/mitchellh/vouch