←back to thread

Ask HN: Should "I asked $AI, and it said" replies be forbidden in HN guidelines?

882 points embedding-shape | 1 comments | 09 Dec 25 16:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.303s | source

As various LLMs become more and more popular, so does comments with "I asked Gemini, and Gemini said ....".

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?

1. mindcandy ◴[09 Dec 25 16:31 UTC] No.46206934[source]▶
Is the content of the comment productive to the conversation? Upvote it.

Is the content of the comment counter-productive? Downvote it.

I could see cases where large walls of text that are generally useless should be downvoted or even removed. AI or not. But, the first example

> faced with 74 pages of text outside my domain expertise, I asked Gemini for a summary. Assuming you've read the original, does this summary track well?

to be frank, is a service to all HN readers. Yes it is possible that a few of us would benefit from sitting down with a nice cup of coffee, putting on some ambient music and taking in 74 pages of... whatever this is. But, faced with far more interesting and useful content than I could possibly consume all day every day, having a summary to inform my time investment is of great value to me. Even If It Is Imperfect