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

881 points embedding-shape | 1 comments | 09 Dec 25 16:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.32s | 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. lonelyasacloud ◴[09 Dec 25 19:18 UTC] No.46209259[source]▶
TL;DR; Until we are sure we have the moderation systems to assist surfacing the good stuff I would be in favour of temporary guidelines to maintain quality.

Longer ...

I am here for the interesting conversations and polite debate.

In principle I have no issues with either citing AI responses in much the same way we do with any other source. Or with individual's prompting AI's to generate interesting responses on their behalf. When done well I believe it can improve discourse.

Practically though, we know that the volume of content AI's can generate tends to overwhelm human based moderation and review systems. I like the signal to noise ratio as it is; so from my pov I'd be in favour of a cautious approach with a temporary guidelines against it's usage until we are sure we have the moderation tools to preserve that quality.