You're touching on an important point. More here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47342616.

All this stuff is in flux. I thought a lot about whether to add the "edited" bit - but it may change. What I deliberately left out was anything about the articles and projects that get submitted here. There's a lot of turbulence in that area too, but we don't yet have clarity, or even an inkling, of how to settle that one.

Edit: what I mean is this: while most of those submissions aren't very interesting, some really are. Here's an example from earlier today:

Show HN: Vanilla JavaScript refinery simulator built to explain job to my kids - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47338091

How do we close the aperture for the lame stuff while opening wider for the good stuff? That is far from clear.

You should use your own words. It might seem that a tool like Grammarly is just an advanced spellcheck, but what it's really doing is replacing your personal style of writing with its own.

It's better to communicate as an individual, warts and all, than to replace your expression with a sanitized one just because it seems "better." Language is an incredibly nuanced thing, it's best for people's own thoughts to come through exactly as they have written them.

I think that the line between A"I" editing to fix grammar or to translate from a different native language and A"I" editing by using an LLM is one of those things that's very hard to unambiguously encode in written guidelines, but easy to intuitively understand using common sense, in the vein of I know it when I see it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it

> Where is the line between a spelling/grammar/tone checker like Grammarly

For me, the line is precisely at the point where a human has something they want to say. IMO - use the tools you need to say the thing you want to say; it's fine. The thing I, and many others here, object to is being asked to read reams of text that no-one could be bothered to write.

On a technical level, you can really only guard against changing your semantics and voice - if you're letting software alter the meaning, or meanings, you intend, and use words you don't normally use, it's probably too far.

This is probably ok:

>> On a technical level, you can really only guard against software that changes your semantics or voice. If you're letting it alter the meaning (or meanings) you intend, or if it starts using words you would never normally use, then it's gone too far.

This is probably too far:

>>> On a technical level, it's important to recogn1ize that the only robust guardrail we can realistically implement is one that prevents modifications to core semantics or authorial voice. If you're comfortable allowing the system to refine or rephrase the precise meanings you originally intended — or if it begins incorporating vocabulary that doesn't align with your typical linguistic patterns — then you've likely crossed a meaningful threshold where the output no longer fully represents your authentic intent.

Something to consider is that you can analyze your own stylometric patterns over a large collection of your writing, and distill that into a system of rules and patterns to follow which AI can readily handle. It is technically possible, albeit tedious, to clone your style such that it's indistinguishable from your actual human writing, and can even icnlude spelling mistakes you've made before at a rate matching your actual writing.

AI editing is weird, though. Not seeing a need, unless English isn't your native language.

I think there's a pretty clear gap between editing for grammar/spelling and editing for tone.

Trying to lawyer this is the wrong approach. When in doubt: don't.

I think the only practical litmus test here is whether you can stand by the text as your own words. It’s not like we have someone looking over commenters’ shoulders as they type.

Ultimately, this comes down to people making a good-faith judgment about how much AI was involved, whether it was just minor grammatical fixes or something more substantial. The reality is that there isn’t really a shared consensus on exactly where that line should be drawn.

Grammarly use is outright prohibited by this; AI-edited writing is no longer writing that you hold personal and exclusive responsibility for having written. Consider Stephen Hawking’s voice box generator. While the sounds produced were machine-assisted, the writing was his alone. If you find yourself unable to participate in this web forum without paying a proofreader (in time, money, or cycles) to copy-edit your writing, then you’re not welcome on HN as a participant.

Finding it more refreshing these days when reading text with broken grammar, incorrect use of pronouns, etc. especially for HN, the human connection is more palpable. It’s rarely so bad that it’s not understandable

I saw a similar conversation somewhere about some project saying they don't allow AI generated code.

It was asked that if "AI Generated Code" is just code suggested to you by a computer program, where does using the code that your IDE suggests in a dropdown? That's been around for decades. Is it LLM or "Gen AI" specific? If so, what specific aspect of that makes one use case good and one use case bad and what exactly separates them?

It's one of those situations where it seems easy to point at examples and say "this one's good and this one's bad", but when you need to write policy you start drowning in minutia.

I agree on the editing. We use these things all the time - chances are many of you are using it right now as you type on your phone and it checks your spelling for you.

By the same token, what if I have a human editor help me out? What if we go back and forth on how to write something, including spelling, grammar, tone, etc. For example, my wife occasionally asks me to review her messages before sending them because she thinks I speak well and wants to be understood correctly.

The problem is that we are punishing the technology, not the result. Whether it's a human or an LLM that acts as your editor should be irrelevant; what matters is that you are posting your own work and not someone else's. My wife having me write all of her messages for her would be just as dishonest as her having an LLM write all of her messages for her if she always presented them as her own writing. But if she writes the copy and I provide suggests for changes, what's the harm in that? And why should it matter if it's a human or an LLM that provides that assistance?

There is no need to use any of it. Just use your own words.

I caught myself structuring a comment like an LLM on another site. It's expected that people who chat heavily to LLMs will start to mirror their styles.

ML based word or phrase editing is hardly a problem any more than pre-AI spellcheckers were. AI sentence and paragraph manufacturing is a problem and everyone knows the difference between that slop and a spellchecker. No one cares if your editor does inline spellchecking or even word autocomplete. What they care about is slop and word at a time spelling or phrase grammar checking are harmless.

i don't care if someone has bad grammar, i want to hear their thoughts as they came up with them, we're all intelligent beings and can parse the meaning behind what you write.

i type my comments without capitalization like i'm typing into some terminal because i'm lazy and people might hate it but i'm sure they prefer this to if i asked an LLM to rewrite what i type

your writing style is your personality, don't let a robot take it away from you

I don’t think it’s really necessary to play Captain Nitpick over spell-check or whatever. You know what is meant.

Your comment is one of semantics. Worth discussing if we're talking a truly hard line rule rather than the spirit of the rule.

I benefit from my phone flagging spelling errors/typos for me. Maybe it uses AI or maybe it uses a simple dictionary for me. Maybe it might even catch a string of words when the conjunction isn't correct. That's all fair game, IMO. But it shouldn't be rewriting the sentence for me. And it shouldn't be automatically cleaning up my typos for me after I've hit "reply". That's on me.