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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: 0.331s | 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. sebastiennight ◴[09 Dec 25 18:51 UTC] No.46208918[source]▶
Most comments I've seen are comparing this behavior to "I googled it and..." but I think this misses the point.

Someone once put it as, "sharing your LLM conversations with others is as interesting to them as narrating the details of your dreams", which I find eerily accurate.

We are here in this human space in the pursuit of learning, edification, debate, and (hopefully) truth.

There is a qualitative difference between the unreliability of pseudonymous humans here vs the unreliability of LLM output.

And it is the same qualitative difference that makes it interesting to have some random poster share their (potentially incorrect) factual understanding, and uninteresting if the same person said "look, I have no idea, but in a dream last night it seemed to me that..."