AI-generated content being passed off as human-written is not a tangential issue. HN staff agree, because posting AI generated comments is explicitly forbidden. I suspect the only reason this isn't extended to submissions is because pretty much all articles about AI are also written by AI, and effectively forbidding positive discussion of AI is obviously against the interests of a VC firm.

HN's guidelines were written under the assumption that submitted articles about [thing] would be written by people who care about [thing] and made a good faith effort to write something interesting about [thing], so it's only fair that any comments would be expected to respect the author's effort and discuss the article in equally good faith.

This assumption completely falls apart when you add AI generated submissions into the mix. If the "author" didn't care and thus couldn't be bothered to write about [thing] themselves, choosing to instead outsource that work to an LLM while they supposedly did something they deemed more valuable with the time they would've spent writing, then why should commenters be expected to dedicate more effort into their discussion of the article than the author dedicated to writing it? It's a bit unfair towards the commenters, don't you think?