Should "I asked AI" replies be forbidden on HN?

Like horoscopes, only they're not actually that bad so roll a D20 and on a set of numbers known only to the DM (and varying with domain and task length) you get a textbook answer and on the rest you get convincing nonsense.

"People are responsible for the comments that they post no matter how they wrote them. If you use tools (AI or otherwise) to help you make a comment, that responsibility does not go away"

i don't think it is likely to catch on, though, outside of culturally multilingual environments

Just use a spell checker and that's it, you don't need LLMs to translate for you if your target is learning the language

The solution is to use a translator rather than a hallucinatory text generator. Google Translate is exceptionally good at maintaining naturalness when you put a multi-sentence/multi-paragraph block through it -- if you're fluent in another language, try it out!

https://jampauchoa.substack.com/p/writing-with-ai-without-th...

TL;DR: Ask for a line edit, "Line edit this Slack message / HN comment." It goes beyond fixing grammar (because it improves flow) without killing your meaning or adding AI-isms.

However, now I prefer to write directly in English and consider whatever grammar/ortographic error I have as part of my writing style. I hate having to rewrite the LLM output to add myself again into the text.

I've written blog articles using HTML and asked llms to change certain html structure and it ALSO tried to change wording.

If a user doesn't speak a language well, they won't know whether their meanings were altered.

It's a huge asterisk to avoid stating something as a fact, but indicates something that could/should be explored further.

(This would be nonsense if they sent me an email or wrote an issue up this way or something, but in an ad-hoc conversation it makes sense to me)

I think this is different than on HN or other message boards, it's not really used by people to hedge here, if they don't actually personally believe something to be the case (or have a question to ask) why are they posting anyway? No value there.

I have a less cynical take. These are casual replies, and being forthright about AI usage should be encouraged in such circumstances. It's a cue for you to take it with a grain of salt. By discouraging this you are encouraging the opposite: for people to mask their AI usage and pretend they are experts or did extensive research on their own.

If you wish to dismiss replies that admit AI usage you are free to do so. But you lose that freedom when people start to hide the origins of their information out of peer pressure or shame.

Only that, I’m not the one who posted the original question, I DID google (well DDG) it, and the results led me to someone asking the same question as me, but it only had that one useless reply

Most often I see these answers under posts like "what's the longest river or earth", or "is Bogota a capital of Venezuela?"

Like. Seriously. It often takes MORE time to post this sort of lazy question than actually look it up. Literally paste their question into $search_engine and get 10 the same answers on the first page.

Actually sometimes telling a person like this "just Google it" is beneficial in two ways: it helps the poster develop/train their own search skills, and it may gently nudge someone else into trying that approach first, too. At the same time slowing the raise of the extremely low effort/quality posts.

But sure, sometimes you get the other kind. Very rarely.

But: Just because it's easy doesn't mean you're allowed to be lazy. You need to check all the sources, not just the ones that happen to agree with your view. Sometimes the ones that disagree are more interesting! And at least you can have a bit of drama yelling at your screen at how dumb they obviously are. Formulating why they are dumb, now there's the challenge - and the intellectual honesty.

But yeah, using LLMs to be more intellectually rigorous: Totally a thing.

IMO, HN commenters used to at least police themselves more and provide sources in their comments when making claims. It was what used to separate HN and Reddit for me when it came to response quality.

But yes it is rude to just respond "source?" unless they are making some wild batshit claims.

The argument is that the information it generated is just noise, and not valuable to the conversation thread at all.

You could reply with "Hey you could ask [particular LLM] because it had some good points when I asked it" but I don't care to see LLM output regurgitated on HN ever.

I don't think this is a good example personally.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.00025

But I'm not usually reading the comments to learn, it's just entertainment (=distraction). And similar to images or videos, I find human-created content more entertaining.

One thing to make such posts more palatable could be if the poster added some contribution of their own. In particular, they could state whether the AI summary is accurate according to their understanding.

Tbh the comments in the topic shouldn't be completely banned. As someone else said, they have a place for example when comparing LLM output or various prompts giving different hallucinations.

But most of them are just reputation chasing by posting a summary of something that is usually below the level of HN discussion.

In a discussion of RISC v5 and if it can beat ARM someone just posting “ChatGPT says X” ads absolutely nothing to the discussion but noise.

"I googled this" is only helpful when the statistic or fact they looked up was correct and well-sourced. When it's a reddit comment, you derail into a new argument about strength of sources.

The LLM skips a step, and gets you right to the "unusable source" argument.