While the guidelines were written (and iterated on) during a different time, it seems like it might be time to have a discussion about if those sort of comments should be welcomed on HN or not.
Some examples:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46164360
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46200460
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46080064
Personally, I'm on HN for the human conversation, and large LLM-generated texts just get in the way of reading real text from real humans (assumed, at least).
What do you think? Should responses that basically boil down to "I asked $LLM about $X, and here is what $LLM said:" be allowed on HN, and the guidelines updated to state that people shouldn't critique it (similar to other guidelines currently), or should a new guideline be added to ask people from refrain from copy-pasting large LLM responses into the comments, or something else completely?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
(This is a broader restriction than the one you're looking for).
It's important to understand that not all of the rules of HN are on the Guidelines page. We're a common law system; think of the Guidelines as something akin to a constitution. Dan and Tom's moderation comments form the "judicial precedent" of the site; you'll find things in there like "no Internet psychiatric diagnosis" and "not owing $publicfigure anything but owing this community more" and "no nationalist flamewar" and "no hijacking other people's Show HN threads to promote your own thing". None of those are on the Guidelines page either, but they're definitely in the guidelines here.
One comment stands out to me:
> Whether to add it to the formal guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) is a different question, of course. I'm reluctant to do that, partly because it arguably follows from what's there, partly because this is still a pretty fuzzy area that is rapidly evolving, and partly because the community is already handling this issue pretty well.
I guess me raising this question is because it feels maybe slightly off that people can't really know about this unwritten rule until they break it or see someone else break it and people tell them why. It is true that the community seems to handle it with downvotes, but it might not be clear enough why something gets downvoted, people can't see the intent. And it also seems like an inefficient way of communicating community norms, by telling users about them once they've broken them.
Being upfront with what rules and norms to follow, like the guidelines already do for most things, feels more honest and welcoming for others to join in on discussions.
* First, the guidelines get too large, and then nobody reads them all, which makes the guideline document less useful. Better to keep the guidelines page reduced down to a core of things, especially if those things can be extrapolated to most of the rest of the rules you care about (or most of them plus a bunch of stuff that doesn't come up often enough to need space on that page).
* Second, whatever you write in the guidelines, people will incline to lawyer and bicker about. Writing a guideline implies, at least for some people, that every word is carefully considered and that there's something final about the specific word choices in the guidelines. "Technically correct is the best kind of correct" for a lot of nerds like us.
Perhaps "generated comments" is trending towards a point where it earns a spot in the official guidelines. It sure comes up a lot. The flip side though is that we leave a lot of "enforcement" of the guidelines up to the community, and we have a pretty big problem with commenters randomly accusing people of LLM-authoring things, even when they're clearly (because spelling errors and whatnot) human-authored.
Anyways: like I said, this is pretty well-settled process on HN. I used to spend a lot of time pushing Dan to add things to the guidelines; ultimately, I think the approach they've landed on is better than the one you (and, once, I) favored.
dang: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
tomhow: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Where does that saying come from? I keep seeing it in a lot of different contexts but it somehow feels off to me in a way I can't really explain.
> no hijacking other people's Show HN threads to promote your own thing
This seems to happen a lot, so apparently not a very well enforced rule.
The pre-LLM equivalent would be: "I googled this, and here's what the first result says," and copying the text without providing any additional commentary.
Everyone should be free to read, interpret and formulate their comments however they'd like.
But if a person outsources their entire thinking to an LLM/AI, they don't have anything to contribute to the conversation themselves.
And if the HN community wanted pure LLM/AI comments, they'd introduce such bots in the threads.
As I see it, down-voting is an expression of the community posture, rules are an expression of the "space" posture. It's up to the space to determine if there is something relevant enough to include it in the rules.
And again, as I see it, community should also have a way to at least suggest modifications of the rules.
I agree with you in "People who can't take a hint aren't going to read the rules". But as they say: "Ignorance of the law does not exempt one from compliance."
I tend to dislike these type of posts but a properly designed and functioning vote mechanism should take care of it.
If not, it is the voting mechanism that should be tuned - not new rules.
Can't find the link right now (cause why would i save a thread like that..) but I've seen more than once situations where people get defensive of others that post AI slop comments. Both times it was people in YC companies that have personal interest related to AI. Both times it looked like a person defending sockpuppets.
A lot of the guidelines are about avoiding comments that aren’t interesting. A copy/paste from an LLM isn’t interesting.
1. If I wanted to run a web search, I would have done so 2. People behave as if they believe AI results are authoritative, which they are not
On the other hand, a ban could result in a technical violation in a conversation about AI responses where providing examples of those responses is entirely appropriate.
I feel like we're having a larger conversation here, one where we are watching etiquette evolve in realtime. This is analogous to "Should we ban people from wearing bluetooth headsets in the coffee shop?" in the 00s: people are demonstrating a new behavior that is disrupting social norms but the actual violation is really that the person looks like a dork. To that end, I'd probably be more for public shaming, potentially a clear "we aren't banning it but please don't be an AI goober and don't just regurgitate AI output", more than I would support a ban.
Except it's "...and here is the first result it gave me, I didn't bother looking further".
Web search has the same issue. If you don't validate it, you wind up in the same problem.
The social norm has always been that you write comments on the internet for yourself, not others. Nothing really changes if you now find enjoyment in adding AI output to your work. Whatever floats your boat, as they say.
Sure, the motivation for many people to write comments is to satisfy themselves. The contents of those comments should not be purely self-satisfying, though.
But what if the AI is used to build up a(n otherwise) genuine human response, like: 'Perhaps the reason behind this is such-and-such, (a quick google)|($AI) suggests that indeed it is common for blah to be blah, so...'
Same logic still applies. If I gave a shit what it "thought" or suggests, I'd prompt the $AI in question, not HN users.
That said, I'm not against a monthly (or whatever regular periodic interval that the community agrees on) thread that discusses the subject, akin to "megathreads" on reddit. Like interesting prompts, or interesting results or cataloguing changes over time etc etc.
It's one of those things that can be useful to discuss in aggregate, but separated out into individual posts just feels like low effort spam to farm upvotes/karma on the back of the flavor of the month. Much in the same way that there's definitely value in the "Who's Hiring/Trying to get hired" monthly threads, but that value/interest drops precipitously if each comment/thread within them were each their own individual submission.
While true, many times people don't want to do this because they are lazy. If they just instead opened up chatgpt they could have instantly gotten their answer. It results in a waste of everyone's time.
If you asked someone how to make French fries and they replied with a map-pin-drop on the nearest McDonald's, would you feel satisfied with the answer?
This might be a case of just different standards for communication here. One person might want the absolute facts and assumes everyone posting should do their due diligence to verify everything they say, but others are okay with just shooting the shit (to varying degrees).
Great now we've wasted time & material resources for a possibly wrong and hallucinated answer. What part of this is beneficial to anyone?
Ideally we would require people who ask questions to say what they've researched so far, and where they got stuck. Then low-effort LLM or search engine result pages wouldn't be such a reasonable answer.
I'm not so sure they actually believe the results are authoritative, I think they're being lazy and hoping you will believe it.
To introspect a bit, I think the rote regurgitation aspect is the lesser component. It's just rude in a conventional way that isn't as threatening. It's the implied truth/authority of the Great Oracular Machine which feels more-dangerous and disgusting.
It’s clumsy and has the opposite result most of the time, but people still do it for all manner of trends.
> 1. If I wanted to run a web search, I would have done so
Not everyone has access to the latest Pro models. If AI has something to add for the discussion and if a user does that for me I think it has some value.
2. People behave as if they believe AI results are authoritative, which they are not
AI is not authoritative in 2025. We don’t know what will happen in 2026. We are at the initial transition stage for a new technology. Both the capabilities of AI and people’s opinions will change rapidly.
Any strict rule/ban would be very premature and shortsighted at this point.
That said, I've also grown exceedingly tired of everyone saying, "I see an em dash, therefore that comment must have come from AI!"
I happen to like em dashes. They're easy to type on macOS, and they're useful in helping me express what I'm thinking—even if I might be using them incorrectly.
I do wish people wouldn’t do it when it doesn’t add to the conversation but I would advocate for collective embarrassment over a ham-fisted regex.
In a discussion of RISC v5 and if it can beat ARM someone just posting “ChatGPT says X” adds 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.
We can't stop AI comments, but we can encourage good behavior/disclosure. I also think brevity should still be rewarded, AI or not.
At this point, I make value judgments when folks use AI for their writing, and will continue to do so.
The one exception for me though is when non-native English speakers want to participate in an English language discussion. LLMs produce by far the most natural sounding translations nowadays, but they imbue that "AI style" onto their output. I'm not sure what the solution here is because it's great for non-native speakers to be able to participate, but I find myself discarding any POV that was obviously expressed with AI.
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!
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.
i don't think it is likely to catch on, though, outside of culturally multilingual environments
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.
When I hear "ChatGPT says..." on some topic at work, I interpret that as "Let me google that for you, only I neither care nor respect you enough to bother confirming that that answer is correct."
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.
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When someone says: "Source?", is that kinda the same thing?
Like, I'm just going to google the thing the person is asking for, same as they can.
Should asking for sources be banned too?
Personally, I think not. HN is better, I feel, when people can challenge the assertions of others and ask for the proof, even though that proof is easy enough to find for all parties.
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.
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 help with actually doing the research? Totally a thing.
Yes, comments of this nature are bad, annoying, and should be downvoted as they have minimal original thought, take minimal effort, and are often directly inaccurate. I'd still rather they have a disclaimer to make it easier to identify them!
Further, entire articles submitted to HN are clearly written by a LLM yet get over a hundred upvotes before people notice whether there's a disclaimer or not. These do not get caught quickly, and someone clicking on the link will likely generate ad revenue that incentives people to continue doing it.
LLM comments without a disclaimer should be avoided, and submitted articles written by a LLM should be flagged ASAP to avoid abuse since by the time someone clicks the link it's too late.
It's not worth polluting human-only spaces, particularly top tier ones like HN, with generated content--even when it's accurate.
Luckily I've not found a lot of that here. That which I do has usually been downvoted plenty.
Maybe we could have a new flag option, which became visible to everyone with enough "AI" votes so you could skip reading it.
But now people are vomiting chatgpt responses instead of linking to chatgpt.
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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.
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.
The point of asking on a public forum is to get socially relatable human answers.
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.
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
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I think its a very valid question to ask the AI: "which coding languages is most suitable for you to use and why" or other similar questions.
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.
The argument is that the information it generated is just noise, and not valuable to the conversation thread at all.