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

882 points embedding-shape | 2 comments | 09 Dec 25 16:02 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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?

Show context
JohnFen ◴[09 Dec 25 16:15 UTC] No.46206671[source]▶
I find such replies to be worthless wastes of space on par with "let me google that for you" replies. If I want to know what genAI has to say about something, I can just ask it myself. I'm more interested in what the commenter has to say.

But I don't know that we need any sort of official ban against them. This community is pretty good about downvoting unhelpful comments, and there is a whole spectrum of unhelpful comments that have nothing to do with genAI. It seems impractical to overtly list them all.

replies(1): >>46206696 #
Scene_Cast2 ◴[09 Dec 25 16:17 UTC] No.46206696[source]▶
There is friction to asking AI yourself. And a comment typically means that "I found the AI answer insightful enough to share".
replies(4): >>46206774 #>>46206804 #>>46206981 #>>46207036 #
1. WesolyKubeczek ◴[09 Dec 25 16:38 UTC] No.46207036[source]▶
Then state your understanding of what it said in your own words, maybe you’ll realize it’s bunk mid-sentence.
replies(1): >>46213588 #
2. darthwalsh ◴[10 Dec 25 03:15 UTC] No.46213588[source]▶
I'd rather you attribute your facts to an LLM vs. rephrase a hallucination that sounds right.