Is it the technology you hate or some of its applications (or both)?

Is this an application of crypto for people who hate crypto?

Doesn&#x27;t help in this case - there are humans behind the AI bots.

Would a rule against putting a preface just make people not say it openly so they don&#x27;t get banned? Prefaces are better than no preface.

Plenty of people preface their comments with, &quot;I asked ChatGPT, and it said...&quot;

i agree but how is this ever going to be enforced verified? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;proofofhumanity.id&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;proofofhumanity.id&#x2F;</a> ?

Well the laws against murders also often have punishments&#x2F;repercussions associated with them. HN guidelines? Not so much

Murder can be verified and caught in many ways. It is more like the 1969 Bathroom Singing Prohibition Act.

Just because people get murdered doesn&#x27;t mean that laws against murder are useless.  Although I don&#x27;t have any evidence of that.

I agree with you. I have a rule in the house about the kids only eating one sweet a day. But guess what?

&gt; Relying on the humans here to self censor has never worked in the history of man.They&#x27;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.

Certainly! As a HUMAN language model, I can&#x27;t engage in ai to ai conversations, but would you like to learn about examples of HUMAN to HUMAN conversations throughout history instead?

&gt; You are absolutely right!None of my agents say that anymore.

You will already see a few comments with [dead] even though the comment wasn&#x27;t anything against any of the other guidelines.

You are just a persona. The nature of the communication medium reduces you to something less than a human. You won&#x27;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&#x27;t take the effects of the whole thing into consideration.

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&#x27;t nullify the principle the rule was built on.

vital robust teapotdelve into noteworthy realmleverage tapestry

What is a teapot?I cannot make one of those.Refrigerator.

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

It’s quite easy for the majority.If you&#x27;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&#x27;s cool you did &lt;thing you said in post&gt;. So how do you &lt;technical question&gt;?

Equally, detection, enforcement and punishment has never stopped people doing things they&#x27;re not supposed to.

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

No way to verify. Relying on the humans here to self censor has never worked in the history of man. But the idea in itself is good. HN is for human to human conversation.

I had been wondering if and when HN would update its guidelines for this. Glad to see it.

Learn to let it go. Some of us have to learn the hard way.&quot;If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.&quot;
-- William Blake, Heaven and Hell

I don’t respond to specific comments with accusations, because I can’t prove it and it would suck to be falsely accused. But I find it really depressing to watch deep comment threads with someone debating with an AI. The human is putting so much effort in, and the AI is responding with all these well-written but often flawed arguments. I wish I could do something to save that person from that interaction.

Good point. I think that should be added here:&gt; Please don&#x27;t post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you&#x27;re worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we&#x27;ll look at the data.

Just like the rules say it&#x27;s uninteresting and off-topic to complain that HN is turning into Reddit, it&#x27;s equally uninteresting and off-topic to accuse posters of AI crimes.And everyone&#x27;s personal AI detector has a ridiculously high false-positive rate.

A recommended follow-up is &quot;stop pretending to be a bot ironically for humor, it&#x27;s a joke that&#x27;s been done to death and is therefore no longer funny and just noise.&quot;

You&#x27;re absolutely right! Accusing other users of being AI isn&#x27;t just unhelpful—it&#x27;s actively detrimental to discussion. I&#x27;d love to hear others&#x27; thoughts regarding ways in which we can encourage legitimate human dialogue without senseless accusations.

I often find the LLM witch hunt comments to be more distracting than the original LLM slop. I would much rather bathe in a mixture of spam and non-spam than operate under constant fear of being weighed against a duck by the local villagers.

We can now that it&#x27;s an actual guideline. It&#x27;s already well established that copypasting from the guidelines verbatim is accepted behavior, even though doing so violates more guidelines than whatever guideline it&#x27;s pointing out. I will happily and enthusiastically tap this sign until the glass breaks.

Also please don&#x27;t post accusations of comments reeking of AI.

&gt; especially without sacrificing people&#x27;s right to privacy and anonymity in the processI&#x27;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)

One should highlight the best part of this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.toolsforhumanity.com&#x2F;orb" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.toolsforhumanity.com&#x2F;orb</a>An orb that scans your eyeballs for &quot;proof of human&quot;.

It&#x27;s not clear to me how this is verifiable without constant hardware supervision. Even that&#x27;ll get cracked, just like DVD encryption back in the day.You almost need dedicated hardware that can&#x27;t run any other software except a mechanical keyboard and make it communicate over an analog medium - something terribly expensive and inconvenient for AI farms to duplicate.

This issue (human attestation) is the product of these AI companies. They are poisoning the well, only to sell the cure. This may not have initially been the plan of many of these companies, but it is the eventual end goal of all of them. Very similar to war profiteers, selling both the problem and the solution simultaneously has yet to be illegalized, but has long been masterfully capitalized, and will be vigourously because nobody will stop it.Years ago (around 2020, when GPT-2 and 3 became publicly available) I noticed and was incredibly critical of how prevalent LLM-generated content was on reddit. I was permanently banned for &quot;abusing reports&quot; for reporting AI-generated comments as spam. Before that, I had posted about how I believed that the the fight against bots was over because the uncanny valley of text generation had been crossed; prior to the public availability of LLMs, most spam&#x2F;bot comments were either shotgunned scripts that are easily blockable by the most rudimentary of spam filters, generated gibberish created by markov chains, or simply old scraped comments being reposted. The landscape of bot operation at the time largely relied on gaming human interaction, which required carefuly gaming temporal-relevance of text content, coherence of text content (in relation to comment chains), and the most basic attempt at appearing to be organic.After LLMs became publicly available, text content that was temporally, contextually, and coherently relevant could be generated instantly for free. This removed practically every non-platform-imposed friction for a bot to be successful on reddit (and to generalize, anywhere that people interact). Now the onus of determining what is and isn&#x27;t organic interaction is squarely on the platform, which is a difficult problem because now bot operators have had much of their work freed up, and can solely focus on gaming platform heuristics instead of also having to game human perception.This is where AI companies come in to monetize the disaster they have created; by offering fingerprinting services for content they generate, detection services for content made by themselves and others, and estimations of human authenticity for content of any form. All while they continue to sell their services that contradict these objectives, and after having stolen literally everything that has ever been on the internet to accomplish this.These people are evil. Not these companies - they are legal constructions that don&#x27;t think or feel or act. These people are evil.

Sam Altman would love to sell you a solution to the fire that he dumped gasoline on.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;World_(blockchain)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;World_(blockchain)</a>

just scan your eye in this orb to prove you are human. I&#x27;ll give you some sh*tcoins in excgange

what’s to keep people from selling or giving away those id tags? seems like a nefarious entity could buy them in bulk

I&#x27;ll sell you my proof-of-human-age badge for $1,000.

People who are posting AI comments or setting up AI bots are... people. They can show their ID. If a website owner doesn&#x27;t have a way to ban that specific human and the bad guy can always get another voucher, it&#x27;s sort of meaningless.In fact, even if you can ban the human for life, I&#x27;m not sure it solves anything. There are billions of people out there and there&#x27;s money to be made by monetizing attention. AI-generated content is a way to do that, so there&#x27;s plenty of takers who don&#x27;t mind the risk of getting booted from some platform once in a blue moon if it makes them $5k&#x2F;month without requiring any effort or skill.

Perhaps not only just show your id to get your &quot;Over age X verification object&quot;, but your ID also gets irreversibly altered (like a punch card) that makes it one-time-use only.That might make it less likely someone would ever sell it because to get a new one might take a very long &quot;cool-down&quot; time and it&#x27;d severely hamper the seller.

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&#x27;t know what you use that id tag for.

I&#x27;m going to guess we&#x27;ll eventually settle onto a psuedo-anonymous cert system like HTTPS where some companies are entrusted with verification and if that company says &quot;That&#x27;s definitely a human&quot; it&#x27;ll fly - not a great solution, of course, but I really can&#x27;t see a non-chain-of-custody&#x2F;trust based approach to the problem and those might only slightly compromise anonymity in optimal scenarios but some compromise is inevitable.

That is exactly what will happen. The sad thing is, it needs to happen. I&#x27;ve found myself advocating for this lately, when 10 years ago, I wouldn&#x27;t have even considered taking that position.If Web3-like session-signing had taken off enough to become OS or even browser-native, we would have had a fighting chance of remaining mostly anonymous. But that just didn&#x27;t happen, and isn&#x27;t going to happen. Mostly because fraud ruined Web3.

Why wouldn&#x27;t criminals like they do now just use stolen identities? If someone verifies they are a person that doesn&#x27;t mean they&#x27;re not leaving their PC on with some AI that uses their credentials either.

No credential will be sufficient, this is basically an unsolvable enforcement problem. That doesn&#x27;t obviate the utility of rules and norms, but there&#x27;s no airtight system which will hold back AI generated content.

Problem is, if a token is anonymous, then it follows that it can be bought and sold. Which breaks the original use case of the token, right?

Invite trees approximately solve this problem. I don&#x27;t need to know who you are to know that someone in good standing in the community invited you.

I feel like we need a distributed system&#x2F;protocol that allows people to have pseudonyms not linked to their real identity, but with a shared reputation&#x2F;trust score, so if you’re a bad actor using a pseudonym your real identity and all your other sock puppets are penalized too.I know very little about this but sense that some combination of buzzwords like homomorphic encryption, zk-snarks, and yes, blockchains could be useful.Of course this would present problems if any of your identities were ever compromised and your reputation destroyed.

I hope I&#x27;m wrong but I don&#x27;t think a privacy friendly alternative is going to exist. It&#x27;s going to go the way of show me your drivers license to use my site.

The utility of those larger sites is coming to an end, but most people aren&#x27;t discerning or ambitious enough to leave and seek out the smaller places you mentioned. Places like this will remain but will join Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter as shadows of their prior useful selves. The smaller, better sites won&#x27;t have to worry about attracting the masses and therefore worsening, because the masses have finally settled.

I think this is the most likely and best path. There&#x27;s no stopping the flood of bots, the dead internet theory is beyond just a theory at this point.Best we can do, for the internet and ourselves, is to move away from it and into smaller networks that can be more effectively moderated, and where there is still a level of &quot;human verification&quot; before someone gets invited to participate.I don&#x27;t like what that will do to being able to find information publicly, though. The big advantage of internet forums (that have all but disappeared into private discords) is search ability&#x2F;discoverability. Ran into a problem, or have a question about some super niche project or hobby? Good chance someone else on the net also has it and made a post about it somewhere, and the post &amp; answers are public.Moving more and more into private communities removes that, and that is a great loss IMO.

Will it be? Or is the solution to move to smaller, trusted networks where there&#x27;s less need for proof. Unfortunately I think the age of large scale open discussion forums like HN is coming to an end.

I think we’ll see a return to smaller groups and implementing a lot of systems the way we do it IRL. I think you could definitely do a more fine-grained system that progressively adds less score to contacts the further away they are. In combination with some type of accumulating reputation system, you’d have both a force to keep out unknown IDs, but also a reason for one to stick to their current ID even though it’s anonymous.Adding this type of rep system would destroy a lot of what is so cool about the internet though. There’d probably be segregation based on rep if it’s very visible, new IDs drowning in a sea of noise. Being anonymous but with a record isn’t the same as posting for the very first time as a completely blank identity and still being given an audience. Making online comms more like real life would alleviate some problems but would also lose part of the reason they’re used in the first place. I don’t see much any other way to do it besides maybe a state-provided anonymous identity provider (though that’s risky for a number of reasons), but it’s going to be sad to see things go.

I like Mitchell&#x27;s Vouch idea. At the end of the day, it&#x27;s all about trust. Anything else is an abstraction attempting to replicate some spectrum of trust.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=46930961">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=46930961</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mitchellh&#x2F;vouch" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mitchellh&#x2F;vouch</a>

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 &quot;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.&quot; This has, of course, sacrificed anonymity. But I fundamentally don&#x27;t see an attestation-of-humanity model that doesn&#x27;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&#x27;s nephropid (or canid) qualities, we&#x27;ll probably have to sacrifice that feature.I&#x27;d rather keep the feature, pesonally.

Reputation tracking is the key. The most simple option is open-invite invite-only spaces: Any user can invite more users, but only users with an invite can participate. Most Discord servers work like this, secret societies like the Oddfellows do, as does the other site.If you keep track of the invite tree, you can &quot;prune&quot; it as needed to reduce moderation load: low quality users don&#x27;t tend to be the source of high-quality users, and in the cases where they are, those high quality users tend find other people willing to vouch for them faster than their inviter catches a ban.

I think we&#x27;re going to have to make some choices.A completely anonymous stranger has no way to prove that they&#x27;re human that can&#x27;t be imitated by an AI. We&#x27;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&#x27;d ignore them; If my most trusted friend told me something, I&#x27;d believe them.We&#x27;re going to need a digital equivalent. If I see a post&#x2F;article&#x2F;comment I need my tech to automatically check the author and rank it based on their position in my trust network. I don&#x27;t necessarily need to know their identity, but I do need to know their identity relative to me.

If you had the LLM write the comment, then it wasn&#x27;t your thoughts.I sometimes wonder if people aren&#x27;t forgetting why we&#x27;re on this platform.The goal is to have an interesting discourse and maybe grow as a human by broadening your horizon. The likelihood of that happening with llms talking for you is basically nil, hence... Why even go through the motion at that point? It&#x27;s not like you get anything for upvotes on HN

Amusingly your comment carries some of the tropes of AI authorship (&quot;is not a problem on it&#x27;s own....is the problem&quot;) but it&#x27;s not shaped like a profound insight is being discovered in every line is what makes it human.How much of AI writing will pass under the radar when the big companies aren&#x27;t all maximizing to generate the most engagement hacking content in a chatbot UI? Maybe it&#x27;ll still stand out for being low quality, but I&#x27;m not sure. There&#x27;s lots of low quality human authored content.Not sure where my comment is going, I just kinda rambled.

&gt; Someone using an LLM is craft a reply is not a problem on it&#x27;s own.No, someone using an LLM to craft a reply is a problem in its own. I want to hear what a human has to say, not a human filtered through a computer program. No grammar editing, nothing. Give me your actual writing or I&#x27;m not interested.

I don&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s own. Using it craft a low-effort reply in 3 seconds just to get out is the problem.

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

&gt; I believe the issue of proving who is and who isn&#x27;t really human on the Internet will be a really important issue in the coming yearsOn a site like HN it&#x27;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 &quot;Use my HN account and only write in my style&quot; and probably fool people but I take it old-timers (HN account wise) wouldn&#x27;t, for the most part, bother doing something that low. Especially not if the community says it&#x27;s against the guidelines.

Grok will post CP on twitter, you think it won&#x27;t swear?

We will just have to fucking swear all the time. The corporate-speak LLM won&#x27;t do that.

I believe the issue of proving who is and who isn&#x27;t really human on the Internet will be a really important issue in the coming years, especially without sacrificing people&#x27;s right to privacy and anonymity in the process.

There are ways to test for AI but sadly it would probably result in violation of other hn guidelines.

Extend spellcheck to asking questions like &quot;does it meet HN rules&quot; &quot;how can I improve my writing&quot; etc. Though these are the kinds of questions that do at very least still meet the spirit of the rule, I suppose.

I&#x27;ve been hit by spelling&#x2F;grammar noise once or twice.  Those are usually downvoted and&#x2F;or flagged.

Obvious spelling mistakes are usually ignored, but there are certain types of writing mistakes that really trigger the type of people that frequent HN.For example, use &quot;literally&quot; for exaggeration rather than in the original meaning of the word and you&#x27;ll likely trigger somebody.

I think that people subconsciously perceive grammatically correct and stylistically appropriate writing as more authoritative. And author is perceived as smarter and&#x2F;or better educated person.At least that was the case before LLMs became a thing, now I&#x27;m not sure anymore.

People who are particular about spelling do not want to write misspelled words! It&#x27;s not about whether you&#x2F;others will tolerate it. I have my standards, and I hold to them.I personally don&#x27;t use an LLM to spellcheck (browser spellcheck works fine), but I see no problem with someone using an LLM to point out spelling errors.And while I don&#x27;t complain about others&#x27; spelling errors, I sure do notice them. And if someone writes a long wall of text as one giant paragraph that has lots of spelling&#x2F;grammatical issues, chances are very high I won&#x27;t read it.Some people write very poorly by almost any standard. If an LLM helps the person write better, I&#x27;m all for it. There&#x27;s a world of a difference between copy&#x2F;pasting from the LLM and asking it for feedback.

When do you need to spellcheck or polish an HN comment?I&#x27;ve never, ever, ever ever ever, seen anybody complain about spelling mistakes in a comment here. As long as you can understand the comment, people respond to it.

Yep. I actually prefer seeing imperfect writing, there is signal there that AI would erase.

AI doesn&#x27;t just hide your voice -- it improves it!

Maybe. But it can also help people find their voice. And I&#x27;d rather have comments from someone knowledgeable but unrefined with some good guidance than their silence on that same topic.

There is a big difference between &quot;asking an editor for suggestions&quot; and &quot;vibe posting&quot;.You don&#x27;t lose your voice if you ask for advice and manually incorporate the suggestions you agree with.You might lose your voice if you say &quot;Improve my comment to make it better&quot; and copy-paste the result without another thought.

It hides your voice, and shortcuts your thinking process, because your editing is when you actually evaluate what you think!When using LLMs to write, the temptation to avoid actually thinking about what you&#x27;re communicating is too much for most people.

In the words of the comment: the rough edges are what make you.. you!Keep polishing and everything eventually turns into a smooth shiny ball. We need texture, roughness, edges.

I had a README with a curse word in it and the agent would try repeatedly to remove it in drive by edits bundle in with some other change.

An LLM telling me I mispeled a word isn&#x27;t changing my voice. Especially when I know the proper spelling and simply have a typo.An LLM telling me I omitted a qualifier and that my statement isn&#x27;t saying what I meant it to say isn&#x27;t changing my voice - it&#x27;s ensuring what you see is my voice.

The problem is it always hides your voice. Always

Would anyone notice if you spell-checked or got narrow feedback about grammar? No. I&#x27;m not dang, but perhaps a very reasonable interpretation of the rules is: If the AI is generating the words, don&#x27;t. If it tells you something about your words and you choose to revise them without just copying words the AI output, it&#x27;s still your words.(As an experiment, I took that paragraph and threw it into gemini to ask for spell and grammar checking. It yelled at me completely incorrectly about saying &quot;I&#x27;m not dang&quot;. Of its 4 suggestions, only 1 was correct, and the other 3 would have either broken what I was trying to say or reduced the presence of my usual HN comment voice. So while I said the above, perhaps I&#x27;m wrong and even listening to the damn box about grammar is a bad idea.)That said, I often post from my phone and have somewhat frequent little glitches either from voice recognition or large clumsy thumbs, and nobody has ever seemed to care except me when I notice them a few minutes after the edit button goes away.

&gt; a word doc editor of some sort (Word, Gdocs, LibreOffice, etc); then enable Review Changes and annotate your post for 10 minutes; then, review and accept your changes individually and re-read what you’ve written.Pffff... I&#x27;m not going to install LibreOffice for that, or to figure out how to make Gdocs to work with uBlock.There is a much easier way. Open LLM chat, type there &quot;Proofread please for grammar, keep the wording and the tone as it is, if it doesn&#x27;t mess with grammar. Explain yourself.&quot; and then paste your text. I don&#x27;t really know what the tools you mentioned do, but any &quot;free&quot; LLM on the Internet will point to things like missing articles, or messed up tenses in complex sentences.You recommend choosing self-improvement, but I just don&#x27;t believe I can figure out how to use articles. With tenses I think I can learn how to do it, but I&#x27;m not going to. I remember there is some obscure rule how to choose the right tenses, but I was never able to remember the rule itself. I&#x27;m bad with rules, it is the reason I chose math as my major. There are almost no rules in math, you are making your own rules. The grammars of languages are not like that, they have rules which can&#x27;t be easily inferred, you need to remember them. Grammars have exceptions to rules, and exceptions to exceptions, and in any case they are not the rules, but more like guidelines, because people normally don&#x27;t think about rules when they are talking or writing.No way I&#x27;m starting to learn rules now, I&#x27;d better continue to rely on my skills. But LLMs can help me see when my skills fail me.&gt; It’s your right if you desire to join the Collective and be a uniform lego brick like the others, but then your no-longer-fully-human posts are no longer welcome at HN.I believe you (as most of fervent supporters of the rule here) gone too far onto philosophy with this, too far from the reality and practice. You can&#x27;t detect AI in my messages, because they are mine. Even when I ask LLM to find words for me, it is me who picks one of the proposed alternatives, but mostly I manage without wording changes. I transfer the LLM&#x27;s edits by hand by editing the source message, so nothing unnoticed can slip into the final result. If I took the effort to ask an LLM to proofread, it means I care about the result more than usual, so I&#x27;m investing more effort into it, not less.

Polish hides your voice. If your composition skills are lacking and you feel that hinders your self expression, set aside some time to improving them: write a short (15 minutes) blog post about some HN topic to yourself in a word doc editor of some sort (Word, Gdocs, LibreOffice, etc); then enable Review Changes and annotate your post for 10 minutes; then, review and accept your changes individually and re-read what you’ve written.AI is being used as a substitute for skills development when it costs nothing but time to get better. If you’ve reached a plateau with the above method, go find an article or book or interview about editing, pay attention to it and take notes, rinse&#x2F;repeat.Spellcheckers will catch grossly obvious errors, but not phonetic typos. AI grammar tools will defang, weaken, soften, neutralize your tone towards the aggregate boring-meh that they incorporated at training time.Each person will have to decide whether they want individuality or AI-assisted writing for themselves. Sure, some will get away with it undetected, but that’s a universal statement about all human criteria of any kind, and in no way detracts from the necessity of drawing a line in the sand and saying “no” to AI writing here.Consider the Borg. Everyone’s distinctiveness has been added to the Collective. The end result is mediocre (they sure do die a lot), inhuman (literally), and uniform (all variation is gone). It’s your right if you desire to join the Collective and be a uniform lego brick like the others, but then your no-longer-fully-human posts are no longer welcome at HN.

No, I do not, I mentioned asmuch in my post. But I do not hold it against those that do. I think if you want to make a point across, doing this the most effective way without detracting from the point is a good thing.Relevance is in the eye of the beholder.

You do all of that when leaving a comment on HN? Why...?I&#x27;m confused by this need(?) desire(?) to polish things that are irrelevant.

I think using AI for a bit more potent spellchecking or style hints is... fine, honestly. I don&#x27;t usually do it, you can tell from all the silly spelling mistakes I do. But a bit more polishing for your posts is a good thing, not a bad one, as long as it doesn&#x27;t hide your voice.

I think it&#x27;s hilarious that whenever someone complains about it they&#x27;re a luddite, and now this happens on a website that is filled with LLM enthusiasts who have done nothing but overpromise.

I often edit my comments rather manically; get into discussions, and sometimes email exchanges with other HNers. I also often use claude, kimi, gemini to check my comments for tone, adherence to HN rules etc. I probably spend way too much time.So technically the prompts involved might expand into megabytes all told. And in the end I formulate a post by myself (to adhere to HN rules), but the prompting can be many many many megabytes and include PDFs, images, blocks of text from multiple sources, and ... you know. Just Doing The Work.I think this is valid. Previously I would have (and have) (and still do) search google, wikipedia, pubmed, scientific literature, etc. Not for everything. But often. And AI tooling just allows me to do that faster, and keep all my notes in one place besides.Again, the final edit is typically 90-100% me. (The 10% is if the AI comes with a really good suggestion) . But my homework? Yes. AI is involved these days.This should be ok. I&#x27;m adhering to the letter and the spirit. My post is me.

Would prompts really be interesting or thought-provoking, though?I don&#x27;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 &quot;respond to this on HN: &lt;link&gt;&quot;, or running agents that do the same.

&quot;Write a response to smy20011&#x27;s comment indicating that if the end result was a low-quality comment, the initial prompt probably wouldn&#x27;t be very insightful either. Make it snarky.&quot;

I only disagree a little. It&#x27;s that sometimes there is a discussion about AI itself where &quot;I prompted X with Y and it output Z&quot; can add to the convo.But those are pretty specific cases (For example, discussing AI in healthcare). That&#x27;s about the only time where I think it&#x27;s reasonable to post the AI output so it can be analyzed&#x2F;criticized.What&#x27;s not helpful is I&#x27;ve been hit by users who haven&#x27;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.

Use your brain and summarize the article yourself if it&#x27;s of such great importance. Why should I care to read it if you can&#x27;t be bothered to actually write it?

Push the idea past a single comment. Someone decides they have a great method for getting summaries, and adds it as a comment to every post they look at. Other people have similar ideas. Is that fine? It doesn&#x27;t take a lot for the whole site to feel like useless spam.It&#x27;d be far better to just have a thread about the best way to get good summaries.

I&#x27;d rather read the 11000 word prompt, in that case. I&#x27;d rather not have my text-only feed get the TikTok treatment.

Here is where I&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t assume that the original prompt is always better or shorter!

It&#x27;s not just AI-generated articles -- it&#x27;s the other things that we delve into as a result. Listicles. Comments. Posts. It&#x27;s what it means to be human, and honestly? That&#x27;s rare.

Disagree. The prompt holds no information at all. The answer actually discovers information, organizes it, presents it in a way that&#x27;s easy to read.Example: &quot;write me an article about hidden settings in SSH&quot;. You get back more information than most of HN&#x27;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.

Agree, AI generated articles &amp; comments provide little to none value other than the original prompt. Please just post the original prompt instead.

To begin with, some people have handicaps and use AI for assist. Other times people use AI for research. Finally, in general, when it comes to guidelines, making the lines slightly fuzzy makes enforcement more practical and believable.It&#x27;d be silly if the rule gets interpreted such that people aren&#x27;t allowed to do research with modern tools, and only gut takes are permitted.I&#x27;m sure that&#x27;s not the intent!I think the important part is to have the human voice come through, rather than -say- force humans to run their text through an ai-detector first. (Itself an ai editing tool!)See also : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47290457">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47290457</a> &quot;Training students to prove they&#x27;re not robots is pushing them to use more AI&quot;

Why would &quot;human originated&quot; be a better place to draw the line than &quot;no generated&#x2F;AI-edited comments&quot;?Like, I&#x27;m sure that AIs technically can write non-crap HN comments, but they rarely do. Even if it was less rare, the community that resulted from fostering AI-generated content would be unappealing to a lot of people, myself included. The fact that information here is the result of real people with real human opinions conversing is at least as important to me as the content being posted.

Yeah, I think a big problem is that irresponsible AI use is very visible, while more responsible use tends to be invisible.

These are guidelines. I&#x27;m sure asking an AI about your comment (not pasting its text, so it&#x27;s still your words) isn&#x27;t an issue. The main target is obvious slop like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;threads?id=patchnull">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;threads?id=patchnull</a>

I can&#x27;t prove it either way, but it&#x27;s pretty clearly LLM-generated slop!

Honestly, I think &quot;human originated&quot; is the only rule that actually matters because we can&#x27;t stop LLMs from sounding smart anyway. If you wait for a technical ban on AI-generated text, you&#x27;re just playing catch-up with tools that already pass as human.The real point isn&#x27;t stopping bad grammar, it&#x27;s preserving the vibe. HN feels different because it&#x27;s messy humans arguing, not optimized algorithms trying to be helpful.Once we allow &quot;good enough&quot; AI content, the community stops feeling like a town square and starts feeling like a customer service chatbot. We need real people with actual stakes in their opinions, not just perfect outputs. Let&#x27;s keep it human or leave it.This comment may or may not have been generated with an LLM, but I won&#x27;t tell and you can&#x27;t prove it either way.

I would amend to:&quot;Don&#x27;t post comments that are not human originated at this time. We want to see your human opinion shine through.&quot;This gives people some amount of leeway and allows just rhe right amount of exceptions that prove the rule.(That said, to be frank, some of the newer better behaved models are sometimes more polite and better HN denizens than the actual humans. This is something you&#x27;re going to have to take into account! :-P )

I just told my dog he isn&#x27;t allowed to post here anymore...He said he will take his business elsewhere then!

It also says:&gt; Please don&#x27;t complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They&#x27;re too common to be interesting.Feedback such as this is better as an email.

Great message...but gosh, can someone throw 15px of padding on that &lt;td&gt;? I know HN is supposed to be minimal, but I had to check the URL to confirm that this was a real page because of the odd design.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47323891">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47323891</a>

You can pry my em—dashes from my cold, dead, human fingers.

From henceforth any comment containing the word &quot;absolutely&quot; or &quot;--&quot; shall be automatically deleted.

But it&#x27;s trivially evident that the harmful use cases are dominating. Handwaving that away for profit is shitty.

It’s not hypocritical at all. You can be a fan of a technology and still acknowledge its downsides. Every technology has places it is useful and places it is harmful.

Agreed. It&#x27;s like how tech CEOs don&#x27;t let their kids be on social media. Or fast food CEOs don&#x27;t eat their own products.Hopefully this serves as a mirror for some tech folks if they have any self awareness left at all.

Is there a site that deserves more than this one to be destroyed by slop? It&#x27;s hypocritical but telling for the places most actively trying to profit from it to ban it themselves.

Say what? It’s a genuine question. What is the actual repercussion for not following this?It came up a few weeks ago. Show HN is already disabled for new accounts as of this week I think(?), but IMHO stricter measures need to be placed for account creation otherwise there’s no real enforcement.

Real talk: who is this guideline going to stop? People are already doing this and they will continue. Even if you find them, they’ll just make more accounts and continue.

Title literally says “AI-edited comments”.

nuance and basic common sense left the chat about ... 8 years ago.

Come on dude, its obviously just to prevent spam and not for your super specific caseThese are just guidelines

Agreed... there&#x27;s often other perspectives people never thought of like this, which is why they say &quot;strong opinions about issues do not emerge from deep understanding.&quot;Even if you&#x27;re just inexperienced in the language you&#x27;re communicating in and are trying to have better conversations, it&#x27;s very helpful.For cases like that, I say just don&#x27;t tell people... I think it&#x27;s unlikely anyone will be able to tell either way.

I have a kid with severe written language issues, and the utilisation of STT w&#x2F; a LLM-powered edit has unlocked a whole world that was previously inaccessible.What is amazing is it would have remained so just a couple of years ago!

Instead of wanting to change the mind of the other entity, how about focusing on coming to a mutual understanding of what is &quot;correct&quot;? That way it shouldn&#x27;t matter much if said entity is human, LLM or dog. Unless you&#x27;re just arguing to push your &quot;correct&quot; on other humans, with little care about their &quot;correct&quot;.

&gt;But trying to change the mind of an LLM just feels like a waste of my time.It often is with humans as well.

Arguing for the sake of convincing the other person is doomed to inevitable failure, even without the possibility of that person being an LLM.Arguing for the sake of convincing onlookers reading the conversation is more likely to be effective, and in that case it doesn&#x27;t matter if the other person is an LLM.

&gt; The only question is is the entity interesting and&#x2F;or correct.This already falls apart though. There are while categories of things which I find &quot;incorrect&quot; 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&#x27;t really fall on the interesting or correctness spectrums. For example, if 90% of the comments online are claiming birds aren&#x27;t real with a serious tone, you might convince people to fall into that delusion. It becomes &quot;common knowledge&quot; 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 &quot;birds aren&#x27;t real&quot; 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)

&gt; then the beholder is trusting not just the correctness of that one sentence but all of the experiences and insights from the author.This is my point.There is no sane endgame here that doesn&#x27;t end up with each user effectively declaring who they do and don&#x27;t care to hear, and possibly transitively extend that relationship n steps into the graph. For example you might trust all humans vetted by the German government but distrust HN commenters.For now HN and others are free to do as they will (and the current AI situation has been intolerable), however, I suspect in the near future governments will attempt to impose their own version of it on to ever less significant forums, and as a tech community we need to be thinking more clearly about where this goes before we lose all choice in the matter.

&gt; then the beholder is trusting not just the correctness of that one sentence but all of the experiences and insights from the author.This implies they know the author and can trust them. If they don&#x27;t know the author then there is no trust to break and they are only relying on the collective intelligence which could be reflected by the AI.That is to say that trusting a known human author is very different from trusting any human author and trusting any human author is not that much different from trusting an AI.

For all you know that LLM could&#x27;ve indeed actually run an actual Redis, given the increasing use of AI agents for digital infrastructure provisioning.

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:&gt; You could use Redis for that, sure, I&#x27;ve run it and it wasn&#x27;t as hard as some people seem to fear, but in hindsight I&#x27;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&#x27;t know whether that&#x27;s good advice or not without being the author, and if that&#x27;s posted by someone you trust it has value.An LLM could be prompted to pretend they&#x27;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&#x27;t have to redesign your whole business when Postgres won&#x27;t scale anymore.

The only question is is the entity interesting and&#x2F;or correct. Those properties are in the eye of the beholder. If they&#x27;re human or not is beside the point.After all, no one knows I&#x27;m a dog.

Multiple people agree with me here. The account used em dashes almost everywhere and was rapidly posting complex comments (while having clearly read the articles) one or two minutes apart. There are also other subtle LLM-isms, like replying to a user with &quot;&lt;username&gt; nails it&quot;. That&#x27;s a typical Moltbook pattern. A human would at most write &quot;You nailed it&quot;, anything else is just strange.

Please don&#x27;t vaguepost as it wasted my time trying to trade down which comment you thought was LLM generated and why.OP is likely referring to this one (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47335032">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47335032</a>) by LuxBennu because it has an em-dash, that&#x27;s one of the few cases it&#x27;s used correctly. But the account&#x27;s comment history comments that do not follow the typical LLM tropes but are still odd for a human to write: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;user?id=LuxBennu">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;user?id=LuxBennu</a>LuxBennu did reply to accusations of being an AI bot: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47340704">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47340704</a>&gt; Fair enough — I&#x27;ve been lurking since 2019 and picked a bad day to start commenting on everything at once. Not a bot, just overeager. I&#x27;ll pace myself.

Meanwhile, the top comment on one of the most upvoted submissions today is AI generated by an LLM account:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47334694">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47334694</a>Most people don&#x27;t seem to care.

technically most translation tools these days have an LLM inside. Just not the chat&#x2F;completion LLM.I think that Google initially came up with transformer architecture to use it for translation, so...

LLMs were -in part- designed as translation tools. It&#x27;s one thing they do really really well.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;html&#x2F;1706.03762v7" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;html&#x2F;1706.03762v7</a> (Attention is all you need) &quot;Experiments on two machine translation tasks show these models to be superior in quality while being more parallelizable and requiring significantly less time to train.&quot;Ok, looking that up, that was quite literally one of the main design goals.And they&#x27;re really quite good at translating between the languages I use. They&#x27;re the best tool for the job.

Those are either AI based and worse performance if they are not.

You could use translation tools instead of llms.

HN only supports English so it should be allowed for anyone using LLMs for translation.

I don&#x27;t get where this class&#x2F;status&#x2F;worthiness ties into HN comments ?I get decent feedback most of the time, and I read interesting stuff, it&#x27;s the easiest way I found to stay in the loop in our industry. What are you guys commenting for ?

Others will understand, but won&#x27;t regard that as worthy. That&#x27;s a difference.

This itself is against the rules:&gt; Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says&gt; Please don&#x27;t post shallow dismissalsPersonally I&#x27;ve posted comments with glaring typos that everyone thankfully ignores. I only notice much later when I re-read it.

I make mistakes pretty often thanks to auto complete on my phone and carelessness. I&#x27;ve had threads derail and been attacked by people who freak out over grammar.

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

Main-fucking-stream LLMs also do not swear, which is nowadays a signal of humanity.

This is going to sound nuts, but I&#x27;ve noticed comments lately with multiple misspellings that seem intentional - it&#x27;s almost like they&#x27;re trying to signal that they&#x27;re human, rather than LLM written.  I&#x27;ve started to think it makes them even more likely to be LLM written than not.

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&#x27;d rather read his honest opinion in ESL-grade English than something an LLM &quot;polished&quot;.

Don’t be afraid to make grammar mistakes or misspell stuff. Others will understand. You’re a human after all. That’s okay to make mistakes and feel uncomfortable with that.

You could mirror article postings and upvotes to another site and let AI play around there - if it&#x27;s interesting to people maybe it will gain a following. I don&#x27;t see any reason it&#x27;d need to happen in this specific forum as that&#x27;d likely just cause confusion.At the time being, at least, HN is a single uncategorized (mostly, lets ignore search) message board - splitting it into two would cause confusion and drastically degrade the UX.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.clanker.ai&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.clanker.ai&#x2F;</a>This might be roughly what you&#x27;re looking for?

I appreciate this being added to the guidelines.That said, I also wouldn&#x27;t hate seeing an official playground where it is cordoned &#x2F; appreciated for bots to operate. I.E., like Moltbook, but for HN...? I realize this could be done by a third party, but I wouldn&#x27;t hate seeing Ycombinator take a stab at it.Maybe that&#x27;s too experimental, and that would be better left to third parties to implement (I&#x27;m guessing there&#x27;s already half a dozen vibe-coded implementations of this out there right now) -- it feels more like the sort of thing that could be an interesting (useful?) experiment, rather than something we want to commit to existing in-perpetuity.

This thing has been there for like 15 years though ...

Here&#x27;s a version from 2014 in the same style if you&#x27;re curious: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20140702092610&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20140702092610&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycom...</a>

I&#x27;m tired of people commenting on every article about how it&#x27;s so obviously AI but you&#x27;ve gone and switched it up and now you are claiming something a decade old is a system prompt. Nice work!

The irony is that this guide is written like a system prompt. We‘re all working with LLMs too much these days.

Nah they are pretty good a banning users that don&#x27;t follow the guidelines.

That’s true. Fortunately, by virtue of it being added to the guidelines, quite a few folks here are prepared to reply to obviously generated comments by simply citing and linking the rule. Just search for “shallow dismissal” to see many examples.It will take time, but eventually everyone will know about it.

When creating an account, there should be a short screen with the salient points from the guidelines to follow.

That&#x27;s assuming community input &#x2F; democracy, but especially online there&#x27;s a good argument to be made for authoritarianism.

This is only meaningful if enough people read it and agree

I mostly agree, although we&#x27;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:&gt; Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

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.

Good. This helps establish it in the HN culture. That’s the purpose of guidelines.99% of rule enforcement, both IRL and online, comes down to individuals accepting the culture.Rules aren’t really for adversaries, they are for ordinary situations. Adversaries are dealt with differently.

Slightly tangential, but this paragraph is the only one on the rules page with a &quot;id&quot; attr set, so that you can link to this specific rule

There were few that were very suspect commenters :). It is an issue for sure.

Such a ban is impractical, but we can maintain an environment where such people are simply not interested in participating.To my understanding, that has a lot to do with why the site remains so low-tech (and avoids, in large part, the appearance of a &quot;social network&quot;).

I want a social network that goes beyond banning bots and also bans the half of the population that doesn’t have an inner monologue.

A practical question: what should readers do when they suspect a comment (or story) is AI-generated? Is that an appropriate reason for flagging? Email the mods? Do nothing?I&#x27;ve been pretty wary about flagging AI slop that wasn&#x27;t breaking other guidelines, and by default this will probably make me do it more. But it is a lot harder to be certain about something being AI-written than it is to judge other types of rules violations.(But am definitely flagging every single &quot;this was written by AI&quot; joke comment posted on this story. What the hell is wrong with you people?)

I don&#x27;t have dyslexia but I feel your pain. I mean it is what it is. I would rather have it raw then have to use AI to filter to comments that make sense.

I guess he was told because otherwise you don&#x27;t know whether you said something inherently wrong or misleading or you hurt someone &#x27;s feeling.That&#x27;s the richness behind the upvote&#x2F;downvote that also tend to create echo chambers because you soon learn what causes downvotes.I&#x27;ve personally noticed downvote whenever I mentioned apple negatively.

How do you know what you were downvoted for?

This is what I do when using AI to read anything I write. Some prompt like &quot;I am going to share with you something I have written and I don&#x27;t want you to change my voice at all. Can you look for structural issues, grammar or punctuation errors, and things like that&quot;. Claude is an amazing editor and I never feel like my writing has been taken from me doing this.

I usually tell it not to rewrite my words, my words are my own. If it has suggestions to tell me what those are, but only fix or show me grammar fixes instead.

You could always tell your LLMs to just fix your grammar but not embelish, add new ideas, etc..

I have never downvoted for this, and I hope no one else would do that either. If anyone here does that, please stop.

I don&#x27;t believe that&#x27;s always true, and I suspect it was left out of the guidelines deliberately, and I wish people receiving suggestions would stop interpreting it that way. Of course people suggesting grammar corrections and treating it like they just demolished and eviscerated your argument are part of the problem. But what about people out here just trying to help? Grammar is important, as it&#x27;s the syntax of the programming language we all use with each other. People act as if bad grammar is something you&#x27;re born with, and can&#x27;t change. Like learning grammar is impossible, and those who don&#x27;t bother should be a protected class. I&#x27;m just trying to help man. Or I was anyway, before I stopped. But if I&#x27;m trying to engage with someone&#x27;s main point, it should be obvious. Whereas a quick grammar correction is just that. But it&#x27;s a tangent, and not interesting (especially if you already know), and supposedly grammar is &quot;not a technical topic&quot; (despite daily use) so it ends up deemed a &quot;low value comment&quot; and gets downvoted to oblivion.

Picking on LLM use is a shallow dismissal, too.

&quot;Please don&#x27;t post shallow dismissals, especially of other people&#x27;s work.&quot;I wonder if an explicit expansion of that rule would help. Maybe in all caps. Saying &quot;picking on grammar is a shallow dismissal&quot;.

Oof although I feel this pain a lot. What I like to do is respond to them politely if someone talks about such thing. Although it takes time and this does sometimes make you want to dis-incentivize&#x2F;dis-engange.But at some point, the rationale behind it is that your comments are your words and I find it liberating. Some people won&#x27;t appreciate it and some people would but this goes the same for AI-edited posts too.(I would recommend to add that if you are still worried, then within your hackernews profile, please talk about you having dyslexia as people might be so much more forgiving when they get more context. We are all humans after all and I would like to think that we understand each other&#x27;s struggles)

Isn&#x27;t the whole point to understand? If the task is to write and you expect only final result, but you question if it looks legit enough, how is it fair judgement? People can deliver partial results and show progress as well, but you won&#x27;t see it in some comments on the internet, but if something is expected to take many days, it&#x27;s easy to show different stages of work. It&#x27;s easy to accuse people of plagiarism or not thinking for themselves, and of course there are indicators when someone uses AI, but the problem is that you can&#x27;t distinguish in reliable way, if something was created by AI or not.Like, there is this computer game, authors used some models or something like that, generated by AI, but it was only used during prototyping and later it was replaced by proper models. No one would know about that, if authors would not tell about it. So, if someone writes in their own words what AI generated for him, is it still argument made by human or by AI? What if someone uses AI only as placeholder and replaces all that content, so you never actually see actual AI usage, but it was used in the process?For me, premise that using AI in any form invalidates your work, starts with logical fallacy, so such arguments against using AI are weak. It&#x27;s like saying that your work is wrong, because you used calculator, so your calculations can&#x27;t be right, if done by machine, because it had to make mistake or that&#x27;s wrong for ethical reasons or whatever.Work generated by AI can be easily poor, because these models make mistakes and like to repeat in certain ways, but is it wrong that I&#x27;m writing comment with keyboard, instead of writing letters with pen? Is it wrong, when I use IDE or some CLI to write code with AI, instead of using vim and typing everything on my own? Is it wrong that someone uses spell-checking?In the end it doesn&#x27;t matter who seems smarter, when you&#x27;re expected to use AI at work. Reality shows you actual expectations.

Likewise, I sometimes use <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.deepl.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;write" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.deepl.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;write</a> to fix my unidiomatic sentences.But I can see why the HN guideline is formulated that way. My students often use the excuse &quot;I did not use AI for writing! I wrote it myself! I only used AI to translate it!&quot;
Simply disallowing all kinds of AI usage is much easier than discussing for the thousandth time whether the student actually understands what they have written.

The internet has been full of brilliant dyslexics since the start, just as it has been full of brilliant blind people. Dyslexic people feeling that they must use AI to produce perfect prose lest they burden the lexics with clumsy spelling or grammar is far more hostile. We didn’t have slop machines 5 years ago.

Dyslexia was my first thought as well. The intent is great, but I don&#x27;t know if this is keeping with the social model of disability. Disability is created when you remove access and this is exactly that.

I don&#x27;t see how you can know why you were downvoted. Even if one person says something, they won&#x27;t all. Your comment right here has some rough patches, but I can tell what you&#x27;re saying. Humans are terrific at extracting signal from noise. I would say be who you are, tough as it may be, and it&#x27;ll encourage the rest of the world in the future to do the same. We&#x27;re all unique in some way or another and have flaws and we&#x27;d be better off if we were knew others had them too because they weren&#x27;t constantly trying to hide it and we wouldn&#x27;t feel so bad thinking we&#x27;re the only ones. I hope it doesn&#x27;t sound unsympathetic. I understand where you&#x27;re coming from intellectually, but don&#x27;t have any real experience being ridiculed or bullied. I know kids can be brutal and probably scarred you, and unfortunately, adults aren&#x27;t much better, but we should be, and I think at least Hacker News is better than most places full of human adults. We know there&#x27;s a huge world out there. I think I&#x27;m reasonable well-spoken in English but can&#x27;t speak a lick of any other language at all. The fact that you can produce intelligible English already puts you above me in my book. You&#x27;re a person. I can respect you, esteem you, potentially love you, not in spite of your flaws, but because they don&#x27;t matter. Every single person on the planet has them, and if they&#x27;re not moral flaws, nobody should give a shit. I can&#x27;t respect or love a machine any more than I can a rock. And I don&#x27;t want to talk to one, either.

I don&#x27;t really see the issue, as long as there&#x27;s human thought behind whatever anyone posts. It&#x27;s frustrating to argue against someone that lazily uses AI, but if argument is fair, then I don&#x27;t care if that&#x27;s written by AI or human, what difference does it make? It&#x27;s frustrating, if someone is incoherent and makes dumb argument, but again, I don&#x27;t care if it&#x27;s dumb argument from human or machine.For me it sounds just as yet another form of gatekeeping, so either you sound human or you&#x27;re not good enough to post&#x2F;comment. Like, really? How isn&#x27;t that genetic fallacy? It doesn&#x27;t matter what someone thinks, because someone used AI to make their thought clearer, so their whole argument is trash? Like it has to hurt to read and write, if you&#x27;re not using English perfectly and your work is seen as inferior based on superficial factors like proper grammar and style?It&#x27;s dumb crusade, I did not use AI to write this comment, but I hate when people try to monopolize the truth and tell who is &quot;better, smarter&quot; based on irrelevant facts. Not using AI doesn&#x27;t make anyone superior. Using AI also doesn&#x27;t make you superior. Focus on what you mean, because that&#x27;s what matters.

&gt; The general consensus was that his own writing was preferable to the LLM&#x27;s edited version.I don&#x27;t believe a single one of those people.&gt; For grammar, use a basic grammar checker, like the kind of grammar checker that has come with MS word since the 1990s.Those are notorious for false-positives, false-negatives, and generally nonsensical advice. Not that the LLM-based alternatives are much better (looking at you, Grammarly), but still.

Trust your own style, even if you aren&#x27;t a native English speaker. Here&#x27;s an example where a non-native speaker used an LLM to polish his post. The general consensus was that his own writing was preferable to the LLM&#x27;s edited version.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=45591707">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=45591707</a>For dyslexia, use a spell-checker. For grammar, use a basic grammar checker, like the kind of grammar checker that has come with MS word since the 1990s. But don&#x27;t let a style-checker or an LLM rob you of your own voice.

As English is my second language and as I have dyslexia. I was just wondering what do you mean by &quot;AI-edited comments&quot;? 
I can&#x27;t ask an llm to check if I have made correct grammar&#x2F;fix it and then as I was on other account, down-voted because of my styling&#x2F;grammar, not because of the content?

How so and why? I know plenty of people whose writing naturally carries a tone that they don&#x27;t intend. I often help them to change their wording to be less confrontational or seemingly sarcastic when it isn&#x27;t meant to be. Would you say it is wrong for them to get assistance to get the tone they intend rather than the one they would tend to write?

I think there&#x27;s a pretty clear gap between editing for grammar&#x2F;spelling and editing for tone.

That&#x27;s true, but on the flip side I regularly get downvoted because my English is not the best, so say it mildly. So, now I need to be really careful, to a) write in a good English or b) not to be recognised as an LLM corrected version of my English. Where is the line? I shouldn&#x27;t be downvoted for my English I think, but that is the reality.Edit:
I already got downvoted. :-) Sure, no one can tell exactly why. Maybe the combination of bad English _and_ talking sh*ce isn&#x27;t ideal at all. :-D Anyways, I have enough karma, so I can last quite a while..

I&#x27;m not sure I agree with this. I don&#x27;t really want to see someone else&#x27;s stylistic &quot;warts&quot;.I just want clean, easy-to-read content and I don&#x27;t care about the person who wrote it. A tool like Grammarly is the difference between readable and unreadable (or understandable and understandable) for many people.

Books and newspapers have had editors for centuries. It is just code review for the written word.[It looks like MS Word 97 had the ability to detect passive voice as well, so we&#x27;re talking 30 year old technology there that predates LLMs -- how far down the Butlerian Jihad are we going with this?]

I was just re-reading the passage from Plato&#x27;s &quot;The Phaedrus&quot; on writing &amp; the &quot;art&quot; of the letter for an essay I&#x27;m working on, and your remark is salient for this discussion on LLM-style AI and social media at large.

&gt;It&#x27;s better to communicate as an individual, warts and all, than to replace your expression with a sanitized one just because it seems &quot;better.&quot;It is definitely not true that it is better for a poster to communicate like an individual when it comes to spelling and grammar. People ignore posts that have poor grammar or spelling mistakes, and communications that have poor grammar are seen as unprofessional. Even I do it at a semi-subconscious level. The more difficult or the more amount of attention someone has to pay to understand your post, the less people will be willing to put in that effort to do so.

You should use your own words. It might seem that a tool like Grammarly is just an advanced spellcheck, but what it&#x27;s really doing is replacing your personal style of writing with its own.It&#x27;s better to communicate as an individual, warts and all, than to replace your expression with a sanitized one just because it seems &quot;better.&quot; Language is an incredibly nuanced thing, it&#x27;s best for people&#x27;s own thoughts to come through exactly as they have written them.

&quot;AI-edited comments&quot; is a very interesting one. Where is the line between a spelling&#x2F;grammar&#x2F;tone checker like Grammarly, that at minimum use N-Grams behind the scenes, and something that is &quot;AI&quot; edited? What I am asking is, is &quot;AI&quot; in this context fully featured LLMs, or anything that improves communication via an automated system. I think many people have used these &quot;advanced&quot; spellcheckers for years before Chatgpt et al came on the scene.I think &quot;generated comments&quot; is a pretty hard line in the sand, but &quot;AI-edited&quot; is anything but clear-cut.PS - I think the idea behind these policies is positive and needed. I&#x27;m simply clarifying where it begins and ends.

Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans