9 ms·

"AI-edited comments" is a very interesting one. Where is the line between a spelling/grammar/tone checker like Grammarly, that at minimum use N-Grams behind the

"AI-edited comments" is a very interesting one. Where is the line between a spelling/grammar/tone checker like Grammarly, that at minimum use N-Grams behind the scenes, and something that is "AI" edited? What I am asking is, is "AI" in this context fully featured LLMs, or anything that improves communication via an automated system. I think many people have used these "advanced" spellcheckers for years before Chatgpt et al came on the scene. I think "generated comments" is a pretty hard line in the sand, but "AI-edited" is anything but clear-cut. PS - I think the idea behind these policies is positive and needed. I'm simply clarifying where it begins and ends.

happytoexplain 7mo ago
I think there's a pretty clear gap between editing for grammar/spelling and editing for tone.
- RevEng 7mo ago
  How so and why? I know plenty of people whose writing naturally carries a tone that they don't intend. I often help them to change their wording to be less confrontational or seemingly sarcastic when it isn't meant to be. Would you say it is wrong for them to get assistance to get the tone they intend rather than the one they would tend to write?
  - happytoexplain 7mo ago
    It's the difference between correctness and tone/character/semantics (tone and character do affect semantics). We need to do things we don't quite mean in subjective spaces, to learn. Developing yourself is wonderful, but presenting a writing style that does not yet represent your learned tone feels disingenuous to the reader and harms the tone of the whole conversation. Using LLMs to iterate might help you learn, but use that tool privately, or with friends/family/mentors. With others, simply make your mistakes. To be clear, I also think you shouldn't rely on auto-correction or LLMs for correctness (they are great for identifying your mistakes, but I think you should then fix the mistakes yourself, to develop your brain). It's just that "assisted" correctness isn't misleading/harmful in the way that "assisted" tone/character/semantics are.
jaysonelliot 7mo ago
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.
- Aldipower 7mo ago
  That's true, but on the flip side I regularly get downvoted because my English is not the best, so say it mildly. So, now I need to be really careful, to a) write in a good English or b) not to be recognised as an LLM corrected version of my English. Where is the line? I shouldn't be downvoted for my English I think, but that is the reality. Edit: I already got downvoted. :-) Sure, no one can tell exactly why. Maybe the combination of bad English _and_ talking sh*ce isn't ideal at all. :-D Anyways, I have enough karma, so I can last quite a while..
  - ssl-3 7mo ago
    It goes both ways. The quality of my writing varies (based on my mood as much as anything else, I suppose), but when it is particularly good and error-free then I often get accused of being a bot. Which is absurd, since I don't use the bot for writing at all.
  - colpabar 7mo ago
    > I shouldn't be downvoted for my English I think, but that is the reality. How do you know? Is it possible the downvoters just didn't like what you said?
    - phs318u 7mo ago
      It’s possible of course but reading all the comments from various non-native English speakers here it seems like a common story. It may indicate a subliminal bias in readers (most of whom are presumably American).
SecretDreams 7mo ago
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.
glitch13 7mo ago
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.
- kazinator 7mo ago
  Projects cannot allow AI generated code if they require everything to have a clear author, with a copyright notice and license. IDE code suggestions come from the database of information built about your code base, like what classes have what methods. Each such suggestion is a derived work of the thing being worked on.
  - RevEng 7mo ago
    That is not correct because it hasn't been tested in court. In past decisions about who owns the output generated by a computer program the owner has been the operator of the program. You own your Word documents and Photoshopped images. There is good reason to believe that LLM output where you provided the prompt would also fit under that umbrella. We are still waiting for that to be tested in court.
    - kazinator 7mo ago
      OK, make that: many projects whose stewards understand copyright issues cannot accept code contributions whose copyright and licensing theory has not been tested in court.
- sumeno 7mo ago
  Nobody is actually confused about what AI generated code means in those cases, they're just trying to be argumentative because they don't like the rules
Mordisquitos 7mo ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
tsukikage 7mo ago
> 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.
thousand_nights 7mo ago
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
- tempestn 7mo ago
  I, on the other hand, find incorrect grammar mildly annoying, especially when it's due to laziness. It distracts from the thoughts being conveyed. I appreciate when people take the time to format comments as correctly as they're able. In fact, I'd argue that lazy commenting is the real problem, which has now been supercharged by LLMs.
skywhopper 7mo ago
I don’t think it’s really necessary to play Captain Nitpick over spell-check or whatever. You know what is meant.
jacquesm 7mo ago
Trying to lawyer this is the wrong approach. When in doubt: don't.
- Someone1234 7mo ago
  That feels very uncharitable. When a policy is introduced to seemingly guard against new problems, but happens to be inadvertently targeting preexisting and common technology, I don't feel like it is "lawyering" it to want clarity on that line. For example, it could be argued this forbids all spellcheckers. I don't think that is the implied intent, but the spectrum is huge in the spellchecker space. From simple substitutions + rule-based grammar engines through to n-grams, edit-distance algorithms, statistical machine translation, and transformer-based NLP models.
altairprime 7mo ago
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.
- phs318u 7mo ago
  > 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. You forgot the /s ?
  - altairprime 7mo ago
    It’s not sarcasm. If you feel if I have misunderstood the intent of the guideline we’re discussing — “Don’t post generated/AI-edited comments”, as the title currently reads, then I’m happy to discuss further. (I often make logical negation errors that I miss in proofing, so it’s possible I slipped up, too!)
    - phs318u 7mo ago
      I thought it was sarcasm given you are asking people to “pay a proofreader”. This sounds ludicrous. Could you clarify wha you meant by that line if it’s not sarcasm? Because I’m having a hard time thinking that it’s meant to be taken at face value.
      - altairprime 7mo ago
        No worries. The post I replied to was asking if use of ‘grammar improvement services’ (my paraphrase) qualified as AI-assisted writing at HN. All such services cost something; Grammarly makes a lot of money charging businesses, AI consumes watts of power that someone pays for, and even Microsoft Word’s grammar checker spins up the CPU fans on an old Intel laptop with a long enough document. I took from that the generic point that one “pays” for machine-assisted proofreading by one means or another, whether it’s trading personal data for services (Google) or watts of power for services (MSWord et al.) or donating writing samples to a for-profit training corpus (Grammarly free tier) or paying for evaluations where your data is not retained for training (Grammarly paid enterprise tier with a carefully-redlined service contract) and generalized to “pay for machine proofreading”. Then, I considered whether HN would appreciate posts/comments by a human where they’d had a PR team or a hired editor come in and review/modify/distort their original words in order to make them more whatever. I think that this probably is most likely to have occurred on the HN jobs posts, and I’ve pointed out especially egregious instances to the mods over the years — but in general, the people who post on HN tend to do so from their own voice’s viewpoint, as reaffirmed by the no-AI-writing guideline above. So I decided instead to say “pay a proofreader” because, bluntly, if the community found out that someone was paying a wage to a worker to proofread their HN comments, the response would plausibly be the same mob of laughing mockery, disgusted outrage, and blatant dismissal that we see today towards AI writing here. “You hired someone to tone-edit your HN comments?!” is no different than “You used Grammarly to tone-edit your HN comments?!” to me, and so it passed the veracity test and I posted it.
unsignedint 7mo ago
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.
raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
There is no need to use any of it. Just use your own words.
czhu12 7mo ago
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
observationist 7mo ago
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.
dang 7mo ago
You're touching on an important point. More here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47342616 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 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.
- schappim 7mo ago
  Please rethink the “edited” bit on accessibility grounds. I have a kid with severe written language issues, and the utilisation of speech to text with a LLM-powered edit has unlocked a whole world that was previously inaccessible. I would hate to see a culture that discourages AI assistance.
  - BeetleB 7mo ago
    Oh wow. I did not anticipate that, which is embarrassing given that I wrote this just recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47326351 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47326351 Yes, please at least have a carveout for accessibility. I definitely have dictated HN comments in the past, and my flow uses LLMs to clean it up. It works, and is awesome when you're in pain.
  - pesfandiar 7mo ago
    Hear hear. And like many other aspects of accessibility, it will help a huge number of people who may not have any severe issues. e.g. non-native English speakers using LLM-powered edits.
  - happytoexplain 7mo ago
    Since it's mostly a good-faith rule to begin with, it seems easy to add something like, "unless you are using it as an assistive technology for accessibility reasons".
asadotzler 7mo ago
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.
ern 7mo ago
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.
RevEng 7mo ago
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?

happytoexplain 7mo ago

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

RevEng 7mo ago
How so and why? I know plenty of people whose writing naturally carries a tone that they don't intend. I often help them to change their wording to be less confrontational or seemingly sarcastic when it isn't meant to be. Would you say it is wrong for them to get assistance to get the tone they intend rather than the one they would tend to write?
- happytoexplain 7mo ago
  It's the difference between correctness and tone/character/semantics (tone and character do affect semantics). We need to do things we don't quite mean in subjective spaces, to learn. Developing yourself is wonderful, but presenting a writing style that does not yet represent your learned tone feels disingenuous to the reader and harms the tone of the whole conversation. Using LLMs to iterate might help you learn, but use that tool privately, or with friends/family/mentors. With others, simply make your mistakes. To be clear, I also think you shouldn't rely on auto-correction or LLMs for correctness (they are great for identifying your mistakes, but I think you should then fix the mistakes yourself, to develop your brain). It's just that "assisted" correctness isn't misleading/harmful in the way that "assisted" tone/character/semantics are.

jaysonelliot 7mo ago

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.

Aldipower 7mo ago
That's true, but on the flip side I regularly get downvoted because my English is not the best, so say it mildly. So, now I need to be really careful, to a) write in a good English or b) not to be recognised as an LLM corrected version of my English. Where is the line? I shouldn't be downvoted for my English I think, but that is the reality. Edit: I already got downvoted. :-) Sure, no one can tell exactly why. Maybe the combination of bad English _and_ talking sh*ce isn't ideal at all. :-D Anyways, I have enough karma, so I can last quite a while..
- ssl-3 7mo ago
  It goes both ways. The quality of my writing varies (based on my mood as much as anything else, I suppose), but when it is particularly good and error-free then I often get accused of being a bot. Which is absurd, since I don't use the bot for writing at all.
- colpabar 7mo ago
  > I shouldn't be downvoted for my English I think, but that is the reality. How do you know? Is it possible the downvoters just didn't like what you said?
  - phs318u 7mo ago
    It’s possible of course but reading all the comments from various non-native English speakers here it seems like a common story. It may indicate a subliminal bias in readers (most of whom are presumably American).

SecretDreams 7mo ago

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.

glitch13 7mo ago

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.

kazinator 7mo ago
Projects cannot allow AI generated code if they require everything to have a clear author, with a copyright notice and license. IDE code suggestions come from the database of information built about your code base, like what classes have what methods. Each such suggestion is a derived work of the thing being worked on.
- RevEng 7mo ago
  That is not correct because it hasn't been tested in court. In past decisions about who owns the output generated by a computer program the owner has been the operator of the program. You own your Word documents and Photoshopped images. There is good reason to believe that LLM output where you provided the prompt would also fit under that umbrella. We are still waiting for that to be tested in court.
  - kazinator 7mo ago
    OK, make that: many projects whose stewards understand copyright issues cannot accept code contributions whose copyright and licensing theory has not been tested in court.
sumeno 7mo ago
Nobody is actually confused about what AI generated code means in those cases, they're just trying to be argumentative because they don't like the rules

Mordisquitos 7mo ago

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

tsukikage 7mo ago

> 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.

thousand_nights 7mo ago

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

tempestn 7mo ago
I, on the other hand, find incorrect grammar mildly annoying, especially when it's due to laziness. It distracts from the thoughts being conveyed. I appreciate when people take the time to format comments as correctly as they're able. In fact, I'd argue that lazy commenting is the real problem, which has now been supercharged by LLMs.

skywhopper 7mo ago

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

jacquesm 7mo ago

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

Someone1234 7mo ago
That feels very uncharitable. When a policy is introduced to seemingly guard against new problems, but happens to be inadvertently targeting preexisting and common technology, I don't feel like it is "lawyering" it to want clarity on that line. For example, it could be argued this forbids all spellcheckers. I don't think that is the implied intent, but the spectrum is huge in the spellchecker space. From simple substitutions + rule-based grammar engines through to n-grams, edit-distance algorithms, statistical machine translation, and transformer-based NLP models.

altairprime 7mo ago

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.

phs318u 7mo ago
> 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. You forgot the /s ?
- altairprime 7mo ago
  It’s not sarcasm. If you feel if I have misunderstood the intent of the guideline we’re discussing — “Don’t post generated/AI-edited comments”, as the title currently reads, then I’m happy to discuss further. (I often make logical negation errors that I miss in proofing, so it’s possible I slipped up, too!)
  - phs318u 7mo ago
    I thought it was sarcasm given you are asking people to “pay a proofreader”. This sounds ludicrous. Could you clarify wha you meant by that line if it’s not sarcasm? Because I’m having a hard time thinking that it’s meant to be taken at face value.
    - altairprime 7mo ago
      No worries. The post I replied to was asking if use of ‘grammar improvement services’ (my paraphrase) qualified as AI-assisted writing at HN. All such services cost something; Grammarly makes a lot of money charging businesses, AI consumes watts of power that someone pays for, and even Microsoft Word’s grammar checker spins up the CPU fans on an old Intel laptop with a long enough document. I took from that the generic point that one “pays” for machine-assisted proofreading by one means or another, whether it’s trading personal data for services (Google) or watts of power for services (MSWord et al.) or donating writing samples to a for-profit training corpus (Grammarly free tier) or paying for evaluations where your data is not retained for training (Grammarly paid enterprise tier with a carefully-redlined service contract) and generalized to “pay for machine proofreading”. Then, I considered whether HN would appreciate posts/comments by a human where they’d had a PR team or a hired editor come in and review/modify/distort their original words in order to make them more whatever. I think that this probably is most likely to have occurred on the HN jobs posts, and I’ve pointed out especially egregious instances to the mods over the years — but in general, the people who post on HN tend to do so from their own voice’s viewpoint, as reaffirmed by the no-AI-writing guideline above. So I decided instead to say “pay a proofreader” because, bluntly, if the community found out that someone was paying a wage to a worker to proofread their HN comments, the response would plausibly be the same mob of laughing mockery, disgusted outrage, and blatant dismissal that we see today towards AI writing here. “You hired someone to tone-edit your HN comments?!” is no different than “You used Grammarly to tone-edit your HN comments?!” to me, and so it passed the veracity test and I posted it.

unsignedint 7mo ago

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.

raw_anon_1111 7mo ago

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

czhu12 7mo ago

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

observationist 7mo ago

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.

dang 7mo ago

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

schappim 7mo ago
Please rethink the “edited” bit on accessibility grounds. I have a kid with severe written language issues, and the utilisation of speech to text with a LLM-powered edit has unlocked a whole world that was previously inaccessible. I would hate to see a culture that discourages AI assistance.
- BeetleB 7mo ago
  Oh wow. I did not anticipate that, which is embarrassing given that I wrote this just recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47326351 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47326351 Yes, please at least have a carveout for accessibility. I definitely have dictated HN comments in the past, and my flow uses LLMs to clean it up. It works, and is awesome when you're in pain.
- pesfandiar 7mo ago
  Hear hear. And like many other aspects of accessibility, it will help a huge number of people who may not have any severe issues. e.g. non-native English speakers using LLM-powered edits.
- happytoexplain 7mo ago
  Since it's mostly a good-faith rule to begin with, it seems easy to add something like, "unless you are using it as an assistive technology for accessibility reasons".

asadotzler 7mo ago

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.

ern 7mo ago

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.

RevEng 7mo ago

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?