While the guidelines were written (and iterated on) during a different time, it seems like it might be time to have a discussion about if those sort of comments should be welcomed on HN or not.
Some examples:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46164360
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46200460
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46080064
Personally, I'm on HN for the human conversation, and large LLM-generated texts just get in the way of reading real text from real humans (assumed, at least).
What do you think? Should responses that basically boil down to "I asked $LLM about $X, and here is what $LLM said:" be allowed on HN, and the guidelines updated to state that people shouldn't critique it (similar to other guidelines currently), or should a new guideline be added to ask people from refrain from copy-pasting large LLM responses into the comments, or something else completely?
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.
i don't think it is likely to catch on, though, outside of culturally multilingual environments
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.
It can if the platform has built in translation with an appropriate disclosure! for instance on Twitter or Mastodon.
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.
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
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!
(while AFAICT Google hasn't explicitly said so, it's almost certainly also powered by an autoregressive transformer model, just like ChatGPT)
I'm fine with reading slightly incorrect English from a non-native speaker. I'd rather see that than an LLM interpretation.
The objective of that model, however, is quite different to that of an LLM.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Its common enough that it must be a literal translation difference between German and English.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.