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

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.

>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.

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?

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.

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.