alt Hacker NewsDon't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
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I've got some reflecting to do because the first thing I did after reading the headline, before even clicking to the actual post, is look for ai comments.
I miss pre 2010 internet. As soon as the advice animal memes started appearing on Facebook it was a quick decline.
Slightly tangential, but this paragraph is the only one on the rules page with a "id" attr set, so that you can link to this specific rule
My question is, and this is genuinely a question: Do you think YC-backed companies would have respected this guideline if it was posted on some other website they wanted to operate in?
I’m not sure I agree with this, because sometiems it is difficult to figure out the correct way to phrase an idea that is in your head and I like to use ai to help organize my thoughts even though the thing is my own. That being said. Most of my comments are not ai generated.
I think using AI for a bit more potent spellchecking or style hints is... fine, honestly. I don't usually do it, you can tell from all the silly spelling mistakes I do. But a bit more polishing for your posts is a good thing, not a bad one, as long as it doesn't hide your voice.
It’s almost certain that this exact thread is currently being used to train comment bots.
What I think would actually be useful is a version of what was implemented on /r/ClaudAI which is an official bot which summarizes the discussion (and updates after x number of comments have been added). I think this level of synthesis has a compounding effect on discussion quality and pruning redundant arguments/topics.
People aren't good at detecting AI generated/edited comments, so unsure how effective this policy will be. Though I guess there are still some obvious signs of AI speak like emdashes and sycophantic (it's not X, it's Y!) speech.
Bit of a shameless plug but I wrote a HN AI comment detector game[0] with AI and most of my friends and fellow HN users who tried it out couldn't detect them.
I guess this kind of rule feels less pragmatic and more philosophical. For one thing, it’s nearly impossible to enforce in practice, and drawing a clear line between simple grammatical correction and AI-assisted editing is a pretty hard problem.
This list of Do and Don'ts now reads like a bad Claude.md file to me.
Don't insinuate that someone else must have broken that. It was you.
Do run the linter
Don't commit throw-away code
Do write a test case
Don't write a comment describing every single function
Seriously, run the linter. And fix the issues.
It is your fault.Thank you! Please also make a separate Show HN for AI-generated/vibe-coded projects (specifically open-source projects) and queue any project that has a .claude/.codex (or whatever flavor of the month) into a slow queue automatically.
Lot of folks on here saying they only want to converse with other humans, for various reasons.
But here's the funny thing. I'm pretty sure the frontier models are now smarter than I am, more eloquent, and definitely more knowledgeable, especially the paid versions with built-in search/research capability. I'm also fairly certain that the number of original thoughts in a given discourse on the Internet is fairly small, I know that's certainly the case for me.
So whither humans now?
If I'm looking for human engagement, forums make sense. But for an informed discussion, I'm less certain that it's wise to be exclusionary. There is a case to be made that lower quality comments should be hidden or higher quality comments should be surfaced, but that's true regardless of the source, innit?
This is a welcome change and do will update Ethos [1] in the future with an AI sentiment score. I created a separate project called LLaMaudit [2] that attempts to detect if an LLM was used to generate text, but it needs to be improved.
[1]: https//ethos.devrupt.io [2]: https://github.com/devrupt-io/LLaMAudit
Great catch! You’re absolutely right. AI-generated comments have no place in this human-centered community.
I assume that the inclusion of some AI generated content is ok, such as when discussing the performance of different models?
HN is the best tech site on the web for a reason. It has a generally intelligent audience, and while there are certainly inappropriate comments, compared to what you find on social media or even other sites, it is unique and far more respectful. Due to this, you can often have better and more meaningful discussions.
Agreed If AI comments are used this becomes more artifical like AI comments and replys and there is nothing new or learning for Humans because of this in my opinion
My fear is that platforms that will go to great lengths to enforce this will become an RL playground for some devs to train their chatbots.
I'm sure someone's working on a way to tell the difference programmatically. Maybe a combo of tone, grammar, and some way of telling how fast it was typed using metadata (which may not exist). Even if there was a "probable AI" filter, that would be helpful because it would be a starting point to improve upon.
As English is my second language and as I have dyslexia. I was just wondering what do you mean by "AI-edited comments"? I can't ask an llm to check if I have made correct grammar/fix it and then as I was on other account, down-voted because of my styling/grammar, not because of the content?
I've been seeing so many AI generated comments that have been near the front I was actually getting kind of concerned.
One way to improve things could be to charge for each new account signup if you don’t have an invite from an existing member that vouches for you. Spamming when you risk losing $5-20 per account raises the cost substantially.
Invites could be earned at karma and time thresholds, and mods could ideally ban not just one bad actor but every account in the invite chain if there’s bad behavior.
TIL people use AI to generate comments to write in posts. Faith in humanity not destroyed, because it was never there to begin with.
That comment is nice, but virtually meaningless as there's no way to enforce it, even if there were mods.
One thing that will be incredibly useful is to limit comments from brand new accounts. A combination of vouching, limiting the posts velocity (5 daily limit), clear rules for new accounts, etc.
I understand we often see insightful comments from new accounts, but I always find it suspicious when non-throwaway accounts are created just in time only to make a quip.
"HN is for conversation between humans."
Are there any places in life where conversation is _not_ intended to be between humans?
From henceforth any comment containing the word "absolutely" or "--" shall be automatically deleted.
I occasionally used AI to edit and restructure my comments. I’m very open about it, and I don’t feel like I’m talking to non-humans when others do the same.
To be clear, I'm neither proud nor embarrassed by this. I'm just trying to communicate in the most efficient way I can.
I'm not sure how I feel about this new rule.
Great to clarify the guidelines. Many HN discussions have been dissolving into debates about whether posts are AI or not.
But the argument of "If I wanted to read what an LLM thinks, I could just ask it" assumes that prompts are basically equivalent, which is not the case.
There's a risk of reducing everything to Human -> authentic and AI -> fake. Some people's authentic writing sounds closer to LLMs, and detectors are unreliable.
The problem is not so much AI generated content that has an interesting point of view generated from unique prompts, but terrible content produced for metrics to harvest attention, which predates AI.
Anyways, happy posting!
A practical question: what should readers do when they suspect a comment (or story) is AI-generated? Is that an appropriate reason for flagging? Email the mods? Do nothing?
I've been pretty wary about flagging AI slop that wasn't breaking other guidelines, and by default this will probably make me do it more. But it is a lot harder to be certain about something being AI-written than it is to judge other types of rules violations.
(But am definitely flagging every single "this was written by AI" joke comment posted on this story. What the hell is wrong with you people?)
How about translating tools? As a non native speaker, especially for longer text, its far easier to express your thoughts and not struggle for the right words. Should I may be highlight if I used e.g. google translate?
AI has made it easier for me not to worry about how pretty or polished my comments are. What used to be a sign you cared has now been devalued nearly completely by AI. This is freeing and allows me to think about the substance. I still do read it, but don't care too much about the typos. It's now a a proud badge for artisanal thinking!
Im fine with this, in 99.999% of cases anyway I'm way too lazy to type something into an LLM and ask it to clean it up and then copy and paste. You can tell this is true by the some of the stupider things I type in here sometimes.
Even if people try to bypass it, having the official rule matters a lot.
@dang, if you read this, why don't we implement honeypots to catch bots? Like having an empty or invisible field while posting/commenting that a human would never fill in
Robot walks into a bar
Orders a drink, lays down a bill
Bartender says, "Hey, we don't serve robots"
And the robot says, "Oh, but someday you will"Shout out to ClackerNews[0], which I discovered last night and find it both very educational and amusing
I hope to see more bots on there (and not here)
I enjoy conversations on hn because they feel genuine. People are not here to optimize their posts or comments for engagement or pushing some kind of follower count like they do on social media platforms.
I frequently use AI to make my comments more concise and easy to follow. I find myself meandering a lot when I type, and now that I've transitioned to full voice dictation through FUTO keyboard I am speaking more off the cuff and having an LLM clean it up.
You may also notice that I don't have much common history here. I mostly comment on Reddit.
Here's where I draw the line. If you are not reading the text that is produced by the LLM, then I don't want to read whatever it is that you wrote. I will usually only do one or two iterations of my comment, but afterwards I will usually edit it by hand.
Technically, there is light AI editing of this comment because FUTO keyboard has the ability to enable a transformer model that will capitalize, punctuate, and just generally remove filler words and make it so that it's not a hyper-literal transcription.
Great point! You are so right to call me out on that! Here's the no-nonsense, concise breakdown, it's coming soon I promise, right after this, here it comes, no fluff -- just facts!
(Sorry, couldn't resist.)
True that AI comments do degrade discussion. Though a forum enforcing human-only text also becomes an unusually clean training corpus. Both things can be true.
I've used LLM to correct my english, but Its better to use English at my level.
A Please (or even a Pls) would have been nice ... But I upvoted anyway.
If you didn't bother to write it, why should I bother to read it?
As ai moves on and becomes better, the only real solution, is to have closed of communities where you get veted to join. That is the sad reality.
What if English is my second language? Undoubtedly being well spoken is associated with higher class. Your arguments will come of as stronger to the reader.