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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: 0.229s | 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?

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gortok ◴[09 Dec 25 16:17 UTC] No.46206694[source]▶
While we will never be able to get folks to stop using AI to “help” them shape their replies, it’s super annoying to have folks think that by using AI that they’re doing others a favor. If I wanted to know what an AI thinks I’ll ask it. I’m here because I want to know what other people think.

At this point, I make value judgments when folks use AI for their writing, and will continue to do so.

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SunshineTheCat ◴[09 Dec 25 18:33 UTC] No.46208639[source]▶
I am just sad that I can no longer use em dashes without people immediately assuming what I wrote was AI. :(
replies(3): >>46208733 #>>46208747 #>>46209996 #
dinkleberg ◴[09 Dec 25 20:12 UTC] No.46209996[source]▶
Some will blindly dismiss anything using them as AI generated, but realistically the em-dash is only one sign among many. Way more obvious is the actual style of the writing. I use Claude all of the time and I can instantly tell if a blog post I’m reading was written with Claude. It is so distinctive. People use some of the patterns it uses some of the time. But it uses all of them all of the time.
replies(1): >>46211654 #
1. Kim_Bruning ◴[09 Dec 25 22:34 UTC] No.46211654[source]▶
You're absolutely right. No wonder you can recognize it so easily. Let me just sit with that.

edit 1: The sincerest form of flattery

edit 2: To be fair, Claude Opus 4.5 seems to encourage people to be nicer to each other if you let them.