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

882 points embedding-shape | 11 comments | 09 Dec 25 16:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom

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?

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flkiwi ◴[09 Dec 25 18:08 UTC] No.46208295[source]▶
I read comments citing AI as essentially equivalent to "I ran a $searchengine search and here is the most relevant result." It's not equivalent, but it has one identical issue and one new-ish one:

1. If I wanted to run a web search, I would have done so 2. People behave as if they believe AI results are authoritative, which they are not

On the other hand, a ban could result in a technical violation in a conversation about AI responses where providing examples of those responses is entirely appropriate.

I feel like we're having a larger conversation here, one where we are watching etiquette evolve in realtime. This is analogous to "Should we ban people from wearing bluetooth headsets in the coffee shop?" in the 00s: people are demonstrating a new behavior that is disrupting social norms but the actual violation is really that the person looks like a dork. To that end, I'd probably be more for public shaming, potentially a clear "we aren't banning it but please don't be an AI goober and don't just regurgitate AI output", more than I would support a ban.

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1. charcircuit ◴[09 Dec 25 18:29 UTC] No.46208592[source]▶
>If I wanted to run a web search, I would have done so

While true, many times people don't want to do this because they are lazy. If they just instead opened up chatgpt they could have instantly gotten their answer. It results in a waste of everyone's time.

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2. droopyEyelids ◴[09 Dec 25 18:45 UTC] No.46208827[source]▶
Well put. There are two sides of the coin: the lazy questioner who expects others to do the work researching what they would not, and the lazy/indulgent answerer who basically LMGTFY's it.

Ideally we would require people who ask questions to say what they've researched so far, and where they got stuck. Then low-effort LLM or search engine result pages wouldn't be such a reasonable answer.

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3. MarkusQ ◴[09 Dec 25 18:47 UTC] No.46208857[source]▶
This begs the question. You are assuming they wanted an LLM generated response, but were to lazy to generate one. Isn't it more likely that the reason they didn't use an LLM is that they didn't want an LLM response, so giving them one is...sort of clueless?

If you asked someone how to make French fries and they replied with a map-pin-drop on the nearest McDonald's, would you feel satisfied with the answer?

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4. officeplant ◴[09 Dec 25 18:51 UTC] No.46208914[source]▶
> If they just instead opened up chatgpt they could have instantly gotten their answer.

Great now we've wasted time & material resources for a possibly wrong and hallucinated answer. What part of this is beneficial to anyone?

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5. charcircuit ◴[09 Dec 25 19:09 UTC] No.46209172[source]▶
It's more like someone asks if there are McDonald's in San Francisco, and then someone else searches "mcdonald's san francisco" on Google Maps and then replies with the result. It would have been faster for the person to just type their question elsewhere and get the result back immediately instead of someone else doing it for them.
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6. allenu ◴[09 Dec 25 19:12 UTC] No.46209197[source]▶
I think a lot of times, people are here just to have a conversation. I wouldn't go so far as to say someone who is pontificating and could have done a web search to verify their thoughts and opinions is being lazy.

This might be a case of just different standards for communication here. One person might want the absolute facts and assumes everyone posting should do their due diligence to verify everything they say, but others are okay with just shooting the shit (to varying degrees).

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7. charcircuit ◴[09 Dec 25 19:23 UTC] No.46209333[source]▶
I've seen this happen too. People will comment and say in the comment that they can't remember something when they could have easily refound that information with chatgpt or google.
8. MarkusQ ◴[09 Dec 25 19:45 UTC] No.46209645{3}[source]▶
Right. If someone asks "What does ChatGPT think about ...", I'd fully agree that they're being lazy. But if that's _not_ what they ask, we shouldn't assume that that's what they meant.

We should at least consider that maybe they asked how to make French fries because they actually want to learn how to make them themselves. I'll admit the XY problem is real, and people sometimes fail to ask for what they actually want, but we should, as a rule, give them the benefit of the doubt instead of just assuming that we're smarter than them.

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9. charcircuit ◴[09 Dec 25 20:08 UTC] No.46209956{4}[source]▶
Such open ended questions are not the kind of questions I'm referring to.
10. WorldPeas ◴[09 Dec 25 21:57 UTC] No.46211300[source]▶
I haven't thought about LMGTFY since stackoverflow. Usually though I see responses with people thrusting forth AI answers that provide more reasoning, back then LMGTFY was more about rote conventions(e.g. "how do you split a string on ," and ai is used more for "what are ways that solar power will change grid dynamics")
11. Kim_Bruning ◴[09 Dec 25 23:12 UTC] No.46212009[source]▶
Counterpoint:

Frankly, it's a skill thing.

You know how some people can hardly find the back of their own hands if they googled them?

And then there's people (like eg. experienced wikipedians doing research) who have google-fu and can find accurate information about the weirdest things in the amount of time it takes you to tie your shoes and get your hat on.

Now watch how someone like THAT uses chatgpt (or some better LLM) . It's very different from just prompting with a question. Often it involves delegating search tasks to the LLM (and opening 5 google tabs alongside besides) . And they get really interesting results!