https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

(This is a broader restriction than the one you're looking for).

It's important to understand that not all of the rules of HN are on the Guidelines page. We're a common law system; think of the Guidelines as something akin to a constitution. Dan and Tom's moderation comments form the "judicial precedent" of the site; you'll find things in there like "no Internet psychiatric diagnosis" and "not owing $publicfigure anything but owing this community more" and "no nationalist flamewar" and "no hijacking other people's Show HN threads to promote your own thing". None of those are on the Guidelines page either, but they're definitely in the guidelines here.

One comment stands out to me:

> Whether to add it to the formal guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) is a different question, of course. I'm reluctant to do that, partly because it arguably follows from what's there, partly because this is still a pretty fuzzy area that is rapidly evolving, and partly because the community is already handling this issue pretty well.

I guess me raising this question is because it feels maybe slightly off that people can't really know about this unwritten rule until they break it or see someone else break it and people tell them why. It is true that the community seems to handle it with downvotes, but it might not be clear enough why something gets downvoted, people can't see the intent. And it also seems like an inefficient way of communicating community norms, by telling users about them once they've broken them.

Being upfront with what rules and norms to follow, like the guidelines already do for most things, feels more honest and welcoming for others to join in on discussions.

* First, the guidelines get too large, and then nobody reads them all, which makes the guideline document less useful. Better to keep the guidelines page reduced down to a core of things, especially if those things can be extrapolated to most of the rest of the rules you care about (or most of them plus a bunch of stuff that doesn't come up often enough to need space on that page).

* Second, whatever you write in the guidelines, people will incline to lawyer and bicker about. Writing a guideline implies, at least for some people, that every word is carefully considered and that there's something final about the specific word choices in the guidelines. "Technically correct is the best kind of correct" for a lot of nerds like us.

Perhaps "generated comments" is trending towards a point where it earns a spot in the official guidelines. It sure comes up a lot. The flip side though is that we leave a lot of "enforcement" of the guidelines up to the community, and we have a pretty big problem with commenters randomly accusing people of LLM-authoring things, even when they're clearly (because spelling errors and whatnot) human-authored.

Anyways: like I said, this is pretty well-settled process on HN. I used to spend a lot of time pushing Dan to add things to the guidelines; ultimately, I think the approach they've landed on is better than the one you (and, once, I) favored.

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

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

Where does that saying come from? I keep seeing it in a lot of different contexts but it somehow feels off to me in a way I can't really explain.

If it helps, you can think of it as saying more about possible disagreeing opinions than about the specific opinion expressed. "This answer is right, and the people who disagree are 'objectively' wrong."

It took me some time to catch on to this. It can certainly be jarring or obnoxious, though sometimes it can be helpful to say "yo people, you're treating this like a subjective opinion, but there are objective reasons to conclude X."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46209137

Edit: Rereading the comments, I agree (heheh) with you analysis. I hadn't considered saying "I agree", because I didn't feel I was expressing an opinion, but a fact, like 1+1=2. The comment stated that the mods in fact disallow those comments and provided proof, so I didn't consider it an opinion.

I really like this conversation by the way. I'm actively trying to become a better writer (by doing copywork of my favourite writers), and no other forum on Earth has this sort of conversation in such an interesting, nuanced way.

Ultimately, I put it because:

- It was the most directly informative comment on the thread;

- It had been downvoted (greyed out) to the very bottom of the thread; and

- I wanted to express my support before making a fairly orthogonal comment without whiplashing everyone.

The whiplashing concern is the problem I run into most generally. It can be hard to reply to someone with a somewhat related idea without making it seem like you're contradicting them, particularly if they're being dogpiled on with downvotes or comments. I'd love to hear other ways to go about this, I'm always trying to improve my communication.

The pre-LLM equivalent would be: "I googled this, and here's what the first result says," and copying the text without providing any additional commentary.

Everyone should be free to read, interpret and formulate their comments however they'd like.

But if a person outsources their entire thinking to an LLM/AI, they don't have anything to contribute to the conversation themselves.

And if the HN community wanted pure LLM/AI comments, they'd introduce such bots in the threads.

1. If I wanted to run a web search, I would have done so 2. People behave as if they believe AI results are authoritative, which they are not

On the other hand, a ban could result in a technical violation in a conversation about AI responses where providing examples of those responses is entirely appropriate.

I feel like we're having a larger conversation here, one where we are watching etiquette evolve in realtime. This is analogous to "Should we ban people from wearing bluetooth headsets in the coffee shop?" in the 00s: people are demonstrating a new behavior that is disrupting social norms but the actual violation is really that the person looks like a dork. To that end, I'd probably be more for public shaming, potentially a clear "we aren't banning it but please don't be an AI goober and don't just regurgitate AI output", more than I would support a ban.

Except it's "...and here is the first result it gave me, I didn't bother looking further".

Web search has the same issue. If you don't validate it, you wind up in the same problem.

The social norm has always been that you write comments on the internet for yourself, not others. Nothing really changes if you now find enjoyment in adding AI output to your work. Whatever floats your boat, as they say.

Sure, the motivation for many people to write comments is to satisfy themselves. The contents of those comments should not be purely self-satisfying, though.

It seems a lot like code. You can "vibe code" your way into an ungodly mess, but those who used to enjoy the craft of writing high quality code before LLMs arrived still seem to insist on high quality code even if an LLM is helping produce it now. It is highly likely that internet comments are no different. Those who value quality will continue to. Those who want garbage will produce it, AI or not.

Much more likely is seeing the user base shift over time towards users that don't care about quality. Many a forum have seen that happen long before LLMs were a thing, and it is likely to happen to forums again in the future. But, the comments aren't written for you (except your own, of course) anyway, so... It is not rational to want to control what others are writing for themselves. But you can be responsible for writing for yourself what you want to see!

But what if the AI is used to build up a(n otherwise) genuine human response, like: 'Perhaps the reason behind this is such-and-such, (a quick google)|($AI) suggests that indeed it is common for blah to be blah, so...'

Same logic still applies. If I gave a shit what it "thought" or suggests, I'd prompt the $AI in question, not HN users.

That said, I'm not against a monthly (or whatever regular periodic interval that the community agrees on) thread that discusses the subject, akin to "megathreads" on reddit. Like interesting prompts, or interesting results or cataloguing changes over time etc etc.

It's one of those things that can be useful to discuss in aggregate, but separated out into individual posts just feels like low effort spam to farm upvotes/karma on the back of the flavor of the month. Much in the same way that there's definitely value in the "Who's Hiring/Trying to get hired" monthly threads, but that value/interest drops precipitously if each comment/thread within them were each their own individual submission.

I'm not so sure they actually believe the results are authoritative, I think they're being lazy and hoping you will believe it.

While true, many times people don't want to do this because they are lazy. If they just instead opened up chatgpt they could have instantly gotten their answer. It results in a waste of everyone's time.

If you asked someone how to make French fries and they replied with a map-pin-drop on the nearest McDonald's, would you feel satisfied with the answer?

We should at least consider that maybe they asked how to make French fries because they actually want to learn how to make them themselves. I'll admit the XY problem is real, and people sometimes fail to ask for what they actually want, but we should, as a rule, give them the benefit of the doubt instead of just assuming that we're smarter than them.

This might be a case of just different standards for communication here. One person might want the absolute facts and assumes everyone posting should do their due diligence to verify everything they say, but others are okay with just shooting the shit (to varying degrees).

Great now we've wasted time & material resources for a possibly wrong and hallucinated answer. What part of this is beneficial to anyone?

Frankly, it's a skill thing.

You know how some people can hardly find the back of their own hands if they googled them?

And then there's people (like eg. experienced wikipedians doing research) who have google-fu and can find accurate information about the weirdest things in the amount of time it takes you to tie your shoes and get your hat on.

Now watch how someone like THAT uses chatgpt (or some better LLM) . It's very different from just prompting with a question. Often it involves delegating search tasks to the LLM (and opening 5 google tabs alongside besides) . And they get really interesting results!

Ideally we would require people who ask questions to say what they've researched so far, and where they got stuck. Then low-effort LLM or search engine result pages wouldn't be such a reasonable answer.

To introspect a bit, I think the rote regurgitation aspect is the lesser component. It's just rude in a conventional way that isn't as threatening. It's the implied truth/authority of the Great Oracular Machine which feels more-dangerous and disgusting.

It’s clumsy and has the opposite result most of the time, but people still do it for all manner of trends.

> 1. If I wanted to run a web search, I would have done so

Not everyone has access to the latest Pro models. If AI has something to add for the discussion and if a user does that for me I think it has some value.

2. People behave as if they believe AI results are authoritative, which they are not

AI is not authoritative in 2025. We don’t know what will happen in 2026. We are at the initial transition stage for a new technology. Both the capabilities of AI and people’s opinions will change rapidly.

Any strict rule/ban would be very premature and shortsighted at this point.

As I see it, down-voting is an expression of the community posture, rules are an expression of the "space" posture. It's up to the space to determine if there is something relevant enough to include it in the rules.

And again, as I see it, community should also have a way to at least suggest modifications of the rules.

I agree with you in "People who can't take a hint aren't going to read the rules". But as they say: "Ignorance of the law does not exempt one from compliance."

I tend to dislike these type of posts but a properly designed and functioning vote mechanism should take care of it.

If not, it is the voting mechanism that should be tuned - not new rules.

Can't find the link right now (cause why would i save a thread like that..) but I've seen more than once situations where people get defensive of others that post AI slop comments. Both times it was people in YC companies that have personal interest related to AI. Both times it looked like a person defending sockpuppets.

A lot of the guidelines are about avoiding comments that aren’t interesting. A copy/paste from an LLM isn’t interesting.

That said, I've also grown exceedingly tired of everyone saying, "I see an em dash, therefore that comment must have come from AI!"

I happen to like em dashes. They're easy to type on macOS, and they're useful in helping me express what I'm thinking—even if I might be using them incorrectly.

We can't stop AI comments, but we can encourage good behavior/disclosure. I also think brevity should still be rewarded, AI or not.

This may actually be a good thing because it'd force them to put some thought into dissecting the comment from AI instead of just pasting it in wholesale. Depending on how well they try to disguise it, of course.

I do wish people wouldn’t do it when it doesn’t add to the conversation but I would advocate for collective embarrassment over a ham-fisted regex.

In a discussion of RISC v5 and if it can beat ARM someone just posting “ChatGPT says X” adds absolutely nothing to the discussion but noise.

"I googled this" is only helpful when the statistic or fact they looked up was correct and well-sourced. When it's a reddit comment, you derail into a new argument about strength of sources.

The LLM skips a step, and gets you right to the "unusable source" argument.

Still, I will fight that someone actually doing the leg work even by search engine and reasonable evaluation on a few sources is often quite valuable contribution. Sometimes even if it is done to discredit someone else.

A tip of the hat for this performance art

(written by a human with help from https://aiphrasefinder.com/common-chatgpt-phrases/)

At this point, I make value judgments when folks use AI for their writing, and will continue to do so.

The one exception for me though is when non-native English speakers want to participate in an English language discussion. LLMs produce by far the most natural sounding translations nowadays, but they imbue that "AI style" onto their output. I'm not sure what the solution here is because it's great for non-native speakers to be able to participate, but I find myself discarding any POV that was obviously expressed with AI.

If it was just a translation, then that adds no value.

I mean we probably don't talk about someone not knowing english at all, that wouldn't make sense but i'm german and i probably write german.

I would often enough tell some LLM to clean up my writing (not on hn, sry i'm to lazy for hn)

You post in your own language, and the site builds a translation for everyone, but they can also see your original etc.

I think building it as a forum feature rather than a browser feature is maybe worth.

We heavily use connected translating apps and it feels really great. It would be such a massive pita to copy every message somewhere outside, having to translate it and then back.

Now, discussions usually follow the sun, and when someone not speaking, say, Portuguese wants to join in, they usually use English (sometimes German or Dutch), and just join.

We know it's not perfect but it works. Without the embedded translation? It absolutely wouldn't.

I also used pretty heavily a telegram channel with similar setup, but it was even better, with transparent auto translation.

When I search for something in my native tongue it is almost always because I want the perspective of people living in my country having experience with X. Now the results are riddled with reddit posts that are from all over the world with crappy translation instead.

1. An automatic translation feature.

2. Being able to submit an "original language" version of a post in case the translation is bad/unavailable, or someone can read the original for more nuance.

The only problem I see with #2 involves malicious usage, where the author is out to deliberately sow confusion/outrage or trying to evade moderation by presenting fundamentally different messages.

It should be an intentional place you choose, and probably niche, not generic in topic like Reddit.

I'm also open to the thought that it's a terrible idea.

I also suspect that automatically translating a forum would tend to attract a far worse ratio of high-effort to low-effort contributions than simply accepting posts in a specific language. For example, I'd expect programmers who don't speak any english to have on average a far lower skill level than those who know at least basic english.

Just use a spell checker and that's it, you don't need LLMs to translate for you if your target is learning the language

Its common enough that it must be a literal translation difference between German and English.

I'm fine with reading slightly incorrect English from a non-native speaker. I'd rather see that than an LLM interpretation.

Some AI translation is so good now that I do think it might be a better option. If they try to write in English and mess up, the information is just lost, there's nothing I can do to recover the real meaning.

The solution is to use a translator rather than a hallucinatory text generator. Google Translate is exceptionally good at maintaining naturalness when you put a multi-sentence/multi-paragraph block through it -- if you're fluent in another language, try it out!

Caveat: The remaining thing to watch out for is that some LLMs are not -by default- prompted to translate accurately due to (indeed) hallucination and summarization tendencies.

* Check a given LLM with language-pairs you are familiar with before you commit to using one in situations you are less familiar with.

* always proof-read if you are at all able to!

Ultimately you should be responsible for your own posts.

(while AFAICT Google hasn't explicitly said so, it's almost certainly also powered by an autoregressive transformer model, just like ChatGPT)

The objective of that model, however, is quite different to that of an LLM.

It occasionally messes up, but not by hallucinating, usually grammar salad because what I put into it was somewhat ambiguous. It’s also terrible with genders in Romance languages, but then that is a nightmare for humans too.

Palmada palmada bot.

The big difference? I could easily prompt the LLM with “i’d like to translate the following into language X. For context this is a reply to their email on topic Y, and Z is a female.”

Doing even a tiny bit of prompting will easily get you better results than google translate. Some languages have words with multiple meanings and the context of the sentence/topic is crucial. So is gender in many languages! You can’t provide any hints like that to google translate, especially if you are starting with an un-gendered language like English.

I do still use google translate though. When my phone is offline, or translating very long text. LLM’s perform poorly with larger context windows.

However, now I prefer to write directly in English and consider whatever grammar/ortographic error I have as part of my writing style. I hate having to rewrite the LLM output to add myself again into the text.

I've written blog articles using HTML and asked llms to change certain html structure and it ALSO tried to change wording.

If a user doesn't speak a language well, they won't know whether their meanings were altered.

i don't think it is likely to catch on, though, outside of culturally multilingual environments

It can if the platform has built in translation with an appropriate disclosure! for instance on Twitter or Mastodon.

https://blog.thms.uk/2023/02/mastodon-translation-options

https://jampauchoa.substack.com/p/writing-with-ai-without-th...

TL;DR: Ask for a line edit, "Line edit this Slack message / HN comment." It goes beyond fixing grammar (because it improves flow) without killing your meaning or adding AI-isms.

When I hear "ChatGPT says..." on some topic at work, I interpret that as "Let me google that for you, only I neither care nor respect you enough to bother confirming that that answer is correct."

It's a huge asterisk to avoid stating something as a fact, but indicates something that could/should be explored further.

(This would be nonsense if they sent me an email or wrote an issue up this way or something, but in an ad-hoc conversation it makes sense to me)

I think this is different than on HN or other message boards, it's not really used by people to hedge here, if they don't actually personally believe something to be the case (or have a question to ask) why are they posting anyway? No value there.

Every time this happens to me at work one of two things happens:

1) I know a bit about the topic, and they're proudly regurgitating an LLM about an aspect of the topic we didn't discuss last time. They think they're telling me something I don't know, while in reality they're exposing how haphazard their LLM use was.

2) I don't know about the topic, so I have to judge the usefulness of what they say based on all the times that person did scenario Number 1.

I have a less cynical take. These are casual replies, and being forthright about AI usage should be encouraged in such circumstances. It's a cue for you to take it with a grain of salt. By discouraging this you are encouraging the opposite: for people to mask their AI usage and pretend they are experts or did extensive research on their own.

If you wish to dismiss replies that admit AI usage you are free to do so. But you lose that freedom when people start to hide the origins of their information out of peer pressure or shame.

Well now you're putting words in my mouth.

If you make it against the rules to cite AI in your replies then you end up with people masking their AI usage, and you'll never again be able to encourage them to do the legwork themselves.

I want to hear your thoughts, based on your unique experience, not the AI's which is an average of the experience of the data it ingested. The things that are unique will not surface because they aren't seen enough times.

Your value is not in copy-pasting. It's in your experience.

If you agree with it after seeing it, but wouldn't have thought to write it yourself, what reason is there to believe you wouldn't have found some other, contradictory AI output just as agreeable? Since one of the big objections to AI output is that they uncritically agree with nonsense from the user, scycophancy-squared is even more objectionable. It's worth taking the effort to avoid falling into this trap.

> I like to think that I can recognise good arguments, but if I am wrong here - then why would you prefer my writing from an LLM generated one?

Because the AI will happily argue either side of a debate, in both cases the meaningful/useful/reliable information in the post is constrained by the limits of _your_ knowledge. The LLM-based one will merely be longer.

Can you think of a time when you asked AI to support your point, and upon reviewing its argument, decided it was unconvincing after all and changed your mind?

Generally if your point holds up under polishing under Kimi pressure, by all means post it on HN, I'd say.

Other LLMs do tend to be more gentle with you, but if you ask them to be critical or to steelman the opposing view, they can be powerful tools for actually understanding where someone else is coming from.

Try this: Ask an LLM to read the view of the person you're answering to, and ask it steelman their arguments. Now think to see if your point is still defensible, or what kinds of sources or data you'd need to bolster it.

Because I'm interested in hearing your voice, your thoughts, as you express them, for the same reason I like eating real fruit, grown on a tree, to sucking high-fructose fruit goo squeezed fresh from a tube.

"I asked an $LLM and it said" is very different than "in my opinion".

Your opinion may be supported by any sources you want as long as it's a genuine opinion (yours), presumably something you can defend as it's your opinion.

edit 1: The sincerest form of flattery

edit 2: To be fair, Claude Opus 4.5 seems to encourage people to be nicer to each other if you let them.

When someone says: "Source?", is that kinda the same thing?

Like, I'm just going to google the thing the person is asking for, same as they can.

Should asking for sources be banned too?

Personally, I think not. HN is better, I feel, when people can challenge the assertions of others and ask for the proof, even though that proof is easy enough to find for all parties.

IMO, HN commenters used to at least police themselves more and provide sources in their comments when making claims. It was what used to separate HN and Reddit for me when it came to response quality.

But yes it is rude to just respond "source?" unless they are making some wild batshit claims.

Yes, comments of this nature are bad, annoying, and should be downvoted as they have minimal original thought, take minimal effort, and are often directly inaccurate. I'd still rather they have a disclaimer to make it easier to identify them!

Further, entire articles submitted to HN are clearly written by a LLM yet get over a hundred upvotes before people notice whether there's a disclaimer or not. These do not get caught quickly, and someone clicking on the link will likely generate ad revenue that incentives people to continue doing it.

LLM comments without a disclaimer should be avoided, and submitted articles written by a LLM should be flagged ASAP to avoid abuse since by the time someone clicks the link it's too late.

It's not worth polluting human-only spaces, particularly top tier ones like HN, with generated content--even when it's accurate.

Luckily I've not found a lot of that here. That which I do has usually been downvoted plenty.

Maybe we could have a new flag option, which became visible to everyone with enough "AI" votes so you could skip reading it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46204895

when it had only two comments. One of them was the Gemini summary, which had already been massively downvoted. I couldn't make heads or tails of the paper posted, and probably neither could 99% of other HNers. I was extremely happy to see a short AI summary. I was on my phone and it's not easy to paste a PDF into an LLM.

When something highly technical is posted to HN that most people don't have the background to interpret, a summary can be extremely valuable, and almost nobody is posting human-written summaries together with their links.

If I ask someone a question in the comments, yes it seems rude for someone to paste back an LLM answer. But for something dense and technical, an LLM summary of the post can be extremely helpful. Often just as helpful as the https://archive.today... links that are frequently the top comment.

I don't think this is a good example personally.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.00025

The story was being upvoted and on the front page, but with no substantive comments, clearly because nobody understood what the significance of the paper was supposed to be.

I mean, HN comments are wrong all the time too. But if an LLM summary can at least start the conversation, I'm not really worried if its summary isn't 100% faithful.

But I'm not usually reading the comments to learn, it's just entertainment (=distraction). And similar to images or videos, I find human-created content more entertaining.

One thing to make such posts more palatable could be if the poster added some contribution of their own. In particular, they could state whether the AI summary is accurate according to their understanding.

If I'm looking for entertainment, HN is not exactly my first stop... :P

But now people are vomiting chatgpt responses instead of linking to chatgpt.

The point of asking on a public forum is to get socially relatable human answers.

Most often I see these answers under posts like "what's the longest river or earth", or "is Bogota a capital of Venezuela?"

Like. Seriously. It often takes MORE time to post this sort of lazy question than actually look it up. Literally paste their question into $search_engine and get 10 the same answers on the first page.

Actually sometimes telling a person like this "just Google it" is beneficial in two ways: it helps the poster develop/train their own search skills, and it may gently nudge someone else into trying that approach first, too. At the same time slowing the raise of the extremely low effort/quality posts.

But sure, sometimes you get the other kind. Very rarely.

Only that, I’m not the one who posted the original question, I DID google (well DDG) it, and the results led me to someone asking the same question as me, but it only had that one useless reply

I think its a very valid question to ask the AI: "which coding languages is most suitable for you to use and why" or other similar questions.

You could reply with "Hey you could ask [particular LLM] because it had some good points when I asked it" but I don't care to see LLM output regurgitated on HN ever.

The argument is that the information it generated is just noise, and not valuable to the conversation thread at all.

This is neither the mechanism nor the goal of human communication, not even on the internet.

I'm not sure a full ban is possible, but LLM-written comments should at least be strongly discouraged.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36735275

Just curious if chatGPT is actually formally banned on HN?

Hacker News <hn@ycombinator.com> Sat, Jul 15, 2023, 4:12 PM to me

Yes, they're banned. I don't know about "formally" because that word can mean different things and a lot of the practice of HN is informal. But we've definitely never allowed bots or generated comments. Here are some old posts referring to that.

dang

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35984470 (May 2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35869698 (May 2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35210503 (March 2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35206303 (March 2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33950747 (Dec 2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33911426 (Dec 2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32571890 (Aug 2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27558392 (June 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26693590 (April 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22744611 (April 2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22427782 (Feb 2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21774797 (Dec 2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19325914 (March 2019)"

(Edit: oh, it's not 2024 anymore. How time flies!)

I do find it more helpful when people specify why they think something was AI-generated. Especially since people are often wrong (fwict).

For example, some people seem to be irritated by jokes and being able to ignore +5 funny comments might be something they want.

Strong agree.

If you can make an actually reliable AI detector, stop wasting time posting comments on forums and just monetize it to make yourself rich.

If you can't, accept that you can't, and stop wasting everyone else's time with your unvalidated guesses about whether something is AI or not.

The least valuable lowest signal comments are "this feels like AI." Worse, they never raise the quality of the discussion about the article.

It's "does anyone else hate those scroll bars" and "this site shouldn't require JavaScript" for a new generation.

Also, I'm pretty sure most people can spot blogspam full of glaringly obvious cliche AI patterns without being able to create a high reliability AI detector. To set that as the threshold for commentary on whether an article might have been generated is akin to arguing that people shouldn't question the accuracy of a claim unless they've built an oracle or cracked lie detection.

In one recent case (the slop article about adenosine signalling) a commenter had a link to the original paper that the slop was engagement-farming about. I found that comment very helpful.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45652349

GPT has ruined my enjoyment of using em dashes, for instance.

Small exception if the user is actually talking about AI, and quoting some AI output to illustrate their point, in which case the AI output should be a very small section of the post as a whole.

Obviously cut&pasting the raw output of a google search or pubmed search or etc would be silly. Same goes for AI generated summaries and such. But references you find this way can certainly be useful.

And using spelling checkers, grammar checkers, style checkers, translation tools or etc (old fashioned or new AI-enhanced) should be ok if used wisely.

Whether prompt engineering is a skill is perhaps a different topic. I just found this meta statistic in this thread interesting to observe

What did we used to call it? Google-fu?

Though this is unlikely a scenario that happened, I’d equate this with someone asking me what I thought about something, and me walking them over to a book on the shelf to show them what that author thought. It’s just an aggregated and watered-down average of all the books.

I’d rather hear it filtered through a brain, be it a good answer or bad.

If you just say, "here is what llm said" if that turns out to be nonsense you can say something like, "I was just passing along the llm response, not my own opinion"

But if you take the llm response and present it as your own, at least there is slightly more ownership over the opinion.

This is kind of splitting hairs but hopefully it makes people actually read the response themselves before posting it.

"People are responsible for the comments that they post no matter how they wrote them. If you use tools (AI or otherwise) to help you make a comment, that responsibility does not go away"

People will still do it, but now they're doing it intentionally in a context where they know it's against the guidelines, which is a whole different situation. Staying up late to argue the point (and thus add noise) is obviously not going to work.

I'd prefer the guideline to allow machine translation, though, even when done with a chatbot. If you are using a chatbot intentionally with the purpose of translating your thoughts, that's a very different comment than spewing out the output from a prompt about the topic. There's some gray area where they fuzz together, but in my experience they're still very different. (Even though the translated ones set off all the alarm bells in terms of style, formatting, and phrasing.)

Saying “ChatGPT told me …” is a fast track to getting your input dismissed on our team. That phrasing shifts accountability from you to the AI. If we really wanted advice straight from the model, we wouldn’t need a human in the loop - we’d ask it ourselves.

The intent isn't to shift accountability, it's to brainstorm. A shitty idea gets shot down quickly, whereas a good idea gets implemented.

Edit: sentence

Sure, I'll occasionally ask an LLM about something if the info is easy to verify after, but I wouldn't like comments here that were just copy-pastes of the Google search results page either.

1) borderline. Potentially provides some benefit to the thread for readers who also don't have time or expertise to read an 83 page paper. Although it would require someone to acknowledge and agree that the summary is sound.

2) Acceptable. Dude got grok to make some cool visuals that otherwise wouldn't exist. I don't see what the issue is with something like this.

3) borderline. Same as 1 mostly.

The more I think about this, the less bothered I am by it. If the problem were someone jumping into a conversation they know nothing about, and giving an opinion that is actually just the output of an LLM, I'd agree. But all the examples you provided are transformative in some way. Either summarizing and simplifying a long article or paper, or creating art.