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While we will never be able to get folks to stop using AI to “help” them shape their replies, it’s super annoying to have folks think that by using AI that they
by gortok 10mo ago
While we will never be able to get folks to stop using AI to “help” them shape their replies, it’s super annoying to have folks think that by using AI that they’re doing others a favor. If I wanted to know what an AI thinks I’ll ask it. I’m here because I want to know what other people think.
At this point, I make value judgments when folks use AI for their writing, and will continue to do so.
- sbrother 10mo agoI strongly agree with this sentiment and I feel the same way. 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.
- justin66 10mo agoAs AIs get good enough, dealing with someone struggling with English will begin to feel like a breath of fresh air.
- tensegrist 10mo agoone solution that appeals to me (and which i have myself used in online spaces where i don't speak the language) is to write in a language you can speak and let people translate it themselves however they wish i don't think it is likely to catch on, though, outside of culturally multilingual environments
- internetter 10mo ago> i don't think it is likely to catch on, though, outside of culturally multilingual environments It can if the platform has built in translation with an appropriate disclosure! for instance on Twitter or Mastodon. https://blog.thms.uk/2023/02/mastodon-translation-options https://blog.thms.uk/2023/02/mastodon-translation-options
- AnimalMuppet 10mo agoMaybe they should say "AI used for translation only". And maybe us English speakers who don't care what AI "thinks" should still be tolerant of it for translations.
- kps 10mo agoWhen I occasionally use MTL into a language I'm not fluent in, I say so. This makes the reader aware that there may be errors unknown to me that make the writing diverge from my intent.
- sejje 10mo agoI think multi -language forums with AI translators is a cool idea. You post in your own language, and the site builds a translation for everyone, but they can also see your original etc. I think building it as a forum feature rather than a browser feature is maybe worth.
- pjerem 10mo agoYou know that this is the most hated feature of reddit ? (because the translations are shitty so maybe that can be improved)
- sejje 10mo agoI didn't, but I don't think it would work well on an established English-only forum. It should be an intentional place you choose, and probably niche, not generic in topic like Reddit. I'm also open to the thought that it's a terrible idea.
- monerozcash 10mo agoI think the audience that would be interested in this is vanishingly small, there exist relatively few conversations online that would be meaningfully improved by this. I also suspect that automatically translating a forum would tend to attract a far worse ratio of high-effort to low-effort contributions than simply accepting posts in a specific language. For example, I'd expect programmers who don't speak any english to have on average a far lower skill level than those who know at least basic english.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- emaro 10mo agoAgreed, but if someone uses LLMs to help them write in English, that's very different from the "I asked $AI, and it said" pattern.
- SoftTalker 10mo agoI honestly think that very few people here are completely non-conversant in English. For better or worse, it's the dominant language. Amost everyone who doesn't speak English natively learns it in school. I'm fine with reading slightly incorrect English from a non-native speaker. I'd rather see that than an LLM interpretation.
- Wowfunhappy 10mo ago...I'm not sure I agree. I sometimes have a lot of trouble understanding what non-English speakers are trying to say. I appreciate that they're doing their best, and as someone who can only speak English, I have the utmost respect anyone who knows multiple languages—but I just find it really hard. Some AI translation is so good now that I do think it might be a better option. If they try to write in English and mess up, the information is just lost, there's nothing I can do to recover the real meaning.
- guizadillas 10mo agoNon-native English speaker here: 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
- coffeefirst 10mo agoBetter yet, I prefer to read some unusual word choices from someone who’s clearly put a lot of work into learning English than a robot.
- buildbot 10mo agoYep, it’s a 2 way learning street - you can learn new things from non native speakers, and they can learn from you as well. Any kind of auto Translation removed this. (It’s still important to have for non fluent people though!)
- dhosek 10mo agoIndeed, this sort of “writing with an accent” can illuminate interesting aspects of both English and the speakers’ native language that I find fascinating.
- VBprogrammer 10mo agoYeah, the German speakers I work with often say "Can you do this until [some deadline]?" When they mean "can you complete this by [some deadline]?" Its common enough that it must be a literal translation difference between German and English.
- RankingMember 10mo ago100%! I will always give the benefit of the doubt when I see odd syntax/grammar (and do my best to provide helpful correction if it's off-base to the extent that it muddies your point), but hit me with a wordy, em-dash battered pile of gobbledygook and you might as well be spitting in my face.
- parliament32 10mo ago> I'm not sure what the solution here 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!
- smallerfish 10mo agoGoogle Translate doesn't hold a candle to LLMs at translating between even common languages.
- akavi 10mo agoYou are aware that insofar as AI chat apps are "hallucinatory text generator(s)", then so is Google Translate, right? (while AFAICT Google hasn't explicitly said so, it's almost certainly also powered by an autoregressive transformer model, just like ChatGPT)
- swiftcoder 10mo ago> it's almost certainly also powered by an autoregressive transformer model, just like ChatGPT The objective of that model, however, is quite different to that of an LLM.
- parliament32 10mo agoI have seen Google Translate hallucinate exactly zero times over thousands of queries over the years. Meanwhile, LLMs emit garbage roughly 1/3 of the time, in my experience. Can you provide an example of Translate hallucinating something?
- Teever 10mo agoEvery single time it mistranslates something it is hallucinations.
- lazide 10mo agoAgreed, and I use G translate daily to handle living in a country where 95% of the population doesn’t speak any language I do. It occasionally messes up, but not by hallucinating, usually grammar salad because what I put into it was somewhat ambiguous. It’s also terrible with genders in Romance languages, but then that is a nightmare for humans too. Palmada palmada bot.
- SAI_Peregrinus 10mo agoIf I want to participate in a conversation in a language I don't understand I use machine translation. I include a disclaimer that I've used machine translation & hope that gets translated. I also include the input to the machine translator, so that if someone who understands both languages happens to read it they might notice any problems.
- MLgulabio 10mo agoYou are joking right? I mean we probably don't talk about someone not knowing english at all, that wouldn't make sense but i'm german and i probably write german. I would often enough tell some LLM to clean up my writing (not on hn, sry i'm to lazy for hn)
- KaiserPro 10mo agoYou are adding your comments and translating them, thats fine. If it was just a translation, then that adds no value.
- jampa 10mo agoI wrote about this recently. You need to prompt better if you don't want AI to flatten your original tone into corporate speak: https://jampauchoa.substack.com/p/writing-with-ai-without-the-slop 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.
- estebarb 10mo agoI have found that prompting "translate my text to English, do not change anything else" works fine. 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.
- carsoon 10mo agoI think even when this is used they should include "(translated by llm)" for transparency. When you use a intermediate layer there is always bias. 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.
- sejje 10mo agoThis is the only reasonable take. 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.
- fwip 10mo agoI'd love to see that for article submissions, as well.
- manmal 10mo agoWhat LLM generate is an amalgamation of human content they have been trained on. I get that you want what actual humans think, but that’s also basically a weighted amalgamation. Real, actual insight, is incredibly rare and I doubt you see much of it on HN (sorry guys; I’ll live with the downvotes).
- dogleash 10mo agoI'm downvoting exclusively for your comment about downvotes.
- dinkleberg 10mo agoWhy do you suppose we come to HN if not for actual insight? There are other sites much better for getting an endless stream of weighted amalgamations of human content.
- ergonaught 10mo agoComing here for insight does not in any way demonstrate that genuine insight is actually widely available here.
- manmal 10mo agoIt’s obviously an amalgamation that’s weighted in favor of your interests.
- hotsauceror 10mo agoI agree with this sentiment. 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."
- gardenhedge 10mo agoI disagree. It's not a potential avenue for further investigation. Imo ai should always be consulted
- OptionOfT 10mo agoBut I'm not interested in the AI's point of view. I have done that myself. I want to hear your thoughts, based on your unique experience, not the AI's which is an average of the experience of the data it ingested. The things that are unique will not surface because they aren't seen enough times. Your value is not in copy-pasting. It's in your experience.
- zby 10mo agoWhat if I agree with what AI wrote? Should I try to hide that it was generated?
- MarkusQ 10mo agoDid you agree with it before the AI wrote it though (in which case, what was the point of involving the AI)? If you agree with it after seeing it, but wouldn't have thought to write it yourself, what reason is there to believe you wouldn't have found some other, contradictory AI output just as agreeable? Since one of the big objections to AI output is that they uncritically agree with nonsense from the user, scycophancy-squared is even more objectionable. It's worth taking the effort to avoid falling into this trap.
- zby 10mo ago
- whimsicalism 10mo agoI think there's well done and usually unnoticeable and poorly done and insulting. I don't agree that the two are always the same, but I think lots of people might think they are doing the former but are not aware enough to realize they are doing the latter.
- amelius 10mo ago"I asked AI and it said basically the same as you."
- deadbabe 10mo agoOn a similar sentiment, I’m sick and tired of people telling others to go google stuff. The point of asking on a public forum is to get socially relatable human answers.
- cindyllm 10mo ago[dead]
- jedbrooke 10mo agoI’ve seen so many SO and other forum posts where the first comment is someone smugly saying “just google it, silly”. 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
- jquery 10mo agoOr worse, you google an obscure topic and the top reply is “apple mountain sleep blue chipmunk fart This comment was mass deleted with Redact” and the replies to that are all “thanks that solved my problem”
- delecti 10mo agoAgreed, with a caveat. If someone is asking for an objective answer which could be easily found with a search, and hasn't indicated why they haven't taken that approach, it really comes across as laziness and offloading their work onto other people. Like, "what are the best restaurants in an area" is a good question for human input; "how do you deserialize a JSON payload" should include some explanation for what they've tried, including searches.
- subscribed 10mo agoYeah, but you get two extremes. 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.
- delfinom 10mo agoIt's kinda funny how we once in internet culture had "lmgtfy" links because people weren't just searching google instead of asking questions. But now people are vomiting chatgpt responses instead of linking to chatgpt.
- subscribed 10mo agoNo, linking to chatgpt is not a response. For some sort of questions it (which model exactly is it?) might be better, for some might be worse.
- TheAdamist 10mo agoSame acronym still works, just swap gemini in place of google.
- Balgair 10mo agoAside: 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.
- officeplant 10mo ago>Should asking for sources be banned too? 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.
- Kim_Bruning 10mo agoI actually use LLMs to help me dig up the sources. It's quicker than google and you get them nicely formatted besides. 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.
- zby 10mo agoI strongly disagree - when I post something that AI wrote I am doing it because it explains my thoughts better than I can - it digs deeper and finds the support for intuitions that I cannot explain nicely. I quote the AI - because I feel this is fair - if you ban this you would just lose the information that it was generated.
- simianparrot 10mo agoYou have to be joking
- dhosek 10mo agoMeh. Might as well encourage people to post links to search results then too.
- zby 10mo agoI like when someone links to where he found the information.
- SunshineTheCat 10mo agoThis is like saying "I use a motorized scooter at walmart, not because I can't walk, but because it 'walks' better than I can."
- officeplant 10mo ago> if you ban this you would just lose the information that it was generated. The argument is that the information it generated is just noise, and not valuable to the conversation thread at all.
- i80and 10mo agoThis is... I'll go with "dystopian". If you're not sure you can properly explain an idea, you should think about it more deeply.
- jon-wood 10mo agoOr simply not participate in that conversation. It’s not obligatory to have an opinion on all subjects.
- SunshineTheCat 10mo agoI am just sad that I can no longer use em dashes without people immediately assuming what I wrote was AI. :(
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- MarkusQ 10mo agoGo ahead, use em—let the haters stew in their own typographically-impoverished purgatory.
- dinkleberg 10mo agoSome will blindly dismiss anything using them as AI generated, but realistically the em-dash is only one sign among many. Way more obvious is the actual style of the writing. I use Claude all of the time and I can instantly tell if a blog post I’m reading was written with Claude. It is so distinctive. People use some of the patterns it uses some of the time. But it uses all of them all of the time.
- Kim_Bruning 10mo agoYou're absolutely right. No wonder you can recognize it so easily. Let me just sit with that. edit 1: The sincerest form of flattery edit 2: To be fair, Claude Opus 4.5 seems to encourage people to be nicer to each other if you let them.
- SoftTalker 10mo agoAgree and I think it might also be useful to have that be grounds for a shadowban if we start seeing this getting out of control. I'm not interested, even slightly, in what an LLM has to say about a thread on HN. If I see an account posting an obvious LLM copy/paste, I'm not interested in seeing anything from that account either. Maybe a warning on the first offense is fair, but it should not be tolerated or this site will just drown in the slop.
- neltnerb 10mo agoI think what's important here is to reduce harm even if it's still a little annoying. Because if you try to completely ban mentioning something is LLM written you'll just have people doing it without a disclaimer... 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.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- BrtByte 10mo agoHN is the mix of personal experience, weird edge cases, and even the occasional hot take. That's what makes HN valuable
- that_guy_iain 10mo agoThere will be many cases you won't even notice. When people know how to use AI to help with their writing, it's not noticable.
- delaminator 10mo agoWhile, I don't disagree with the general sentiment, a black and white ban leaves no room for nuance. 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.
- stephen_g 10mo agoBut if I wanted to ask an AI I would put that into ChatGPT, not ask HN. I would only ask that on HN if I wanted other people's opinions! 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.
- delaminator 10mo agoOnly people with a paid subscription can do that. The top story on here for 2 days has been “Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 hallucinates the HN front page 10 years from now” I could have typed that into an LLM myself too. Before that it was “llm tries to recreate Space Jam website”
- danielmarkbruce 10mo agoAnd yet people ask for sources all the time. "I don't care what you think, show me what someone else thinks".
- crazygringo 10mo agoI actually disagree, in certain cases. Just today I saw: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46204895 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 https://archive.today... links that are frequently the top comment.
- zacmps 10mo agoLLM 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 https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.00025
- crazygringo 10mo agoWhen there's nothing else to go on, it's still more useful than nothing. The story was being upvoted and on the front page, but with no substantive comments, clearly because nobody understood what the significance of the paper was supposed to be. I mean, HN comments are wrong all the time too. But if an LLM summary can at least start the conversation, I'm not really worried if its summary isn't 100% faithful.
- Rarebox 10mo agoThat'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.
- Semiapies 10mo agoIt's at least a factor in why I value HN commentary so much less than I used to.
- ferngodfather 10mo agoYeah like if I wanted to know what a particular AI says, I'd have asked it..