Comment by crazygringo
19 hours ago
Nothing about it reads as AI to me. I'm not even the commenter and I take offense when people suggest that knowledgeable, helpful HN comments are AI.
19 hours ago
Nothing about it reads as AI to me. I'm not even the commenter and I take offense when people suggest that knowledgeable, helpful HN comments are AI.
I see now that it probably wasn't, but "nothing" is an overstatement.
And knowledgeable and helpful responses can be AI, so there might be a fallacy somewhere in your offence-taking. Are you offended when people do that in general, or only when they are wrong?
I do appreciate the effort put into writing a good comment.
> it probably wasn't, but "nothing" is an overstatement.
No, "nothing" seems perfectly accurate to me. I don't see even a single indication in tone, phrasing or punctuation that is a classic LLM giveaway.
It's offensive to standards of decency to question the authenticity of someone's speech, and it doesn't matter if you phrase it as a question or preface it with "excuse me if not". Unless there is really a strong reason to suspect something, which is absolutely not the case here. It's offensive when it's not warranted.
> but "nothing" is an overstatement
Absolutely not. There was genuinely nothing in their thoughtful and informative reply that seemed AI generated to me. Have you never seen people on HN write detailed, articulate answers? This was one of them.
Asking a question, getting a helpful response, and then implying it was written by AI is quite rude. Saying, "Excuse me if not, $SOMETHING_VERY_OFFENSIVE" does not make "$SOMETHING_VERY_OFFENSIVE" any less offensive! It's disheartening to see someone take the time to write a great answer only to be met with such a rude question. Please don't do that here. It's frustrating and discourages genuine contributors.
> to me
If it's absolute, then why add that? Mine "to me" gave me a different impression, but it being a "to me", I questioned, not accused.
You perhaps recognize t0mas88 after all these years on HN. I don't. I'm relatively a new and infrequent user.
So I hope that I would be criticised just as passionately if that'd be a random user whose comments indeed turned out to be AI. Because no matter what is the fact, the question is rude, nay, very offensive.
Using AI isn't a tabu. It is fully debatable wether generating, reviewing and pasting helpful information on an informal forum is wrong, I just implied my own frustration with what I often experience.
Of course I could've phrased it much better, and I suspect you guys wouldn't bat an eye.
> Have you never seen people on HN write detailed, articulate answers?
> It's frustrating and discourages genuine contributors.
These are good points.