alt Hacker NewsI actually disagree, in certain cases. Just today I saw:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46204895
when it had only two comments. One of them was the Gemini summary, which had already been massively downvoted. I couldn't make heads or tails of the paper posted, and probably neither could 99% of other HNers. I was extremely happy to see a short AI summary. I was on my phone and it's not easy to paste a PDF into an LLM.
When something highly technical is posted to HN that most people don't have the background to interpret, a summary can be extremely valuable, and almost nobody is posting human-written summaries together with their links.
If I ask someone a question in the comments, yes it seems rude for someone to paste back an LLM answer. But for something dense and technical, an LLM summary of the post can be extremely helpful. Often just as helpful as the https://archive.today... links that are frequently the top comment.
Replies
That's a pretty good example. The summary is actually useful, yet it still annoys me.
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.
LLM summaries of papers often make overly broad claims [1].
I don't think this is a good example personally.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.00025