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.
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."
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.
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.
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 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.
I find the second paragraphs contradictory - either you fear that I would agree with random stuff that the AI writes or you believe that the sycophant AI is writing what I believe. 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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.