Comment by dang
3 days ago
We aren't asking people to not use AI. (We use it ourselves.) What we're asking is not to post AI-generated comments to Hacker News. (We don't do that ourselves.)
By all means make good use of LLMs and other AI. What counts as good use? The world is figuring that out, it will take years, and HN is no exception (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). We just don't want it to interfere with the human conversation and connection that this site has always been for.
For example, it has always been a bad idea and against HN's rules when users post things that they didn't write themselves, or do bulk copy-pasting into the threads, or write bots to post things.
As I mentioned, the HN mods (who are also the HN devs) use AI extensively and will be doing so a lot more. The limits on that are not technical; they have to do with (1) how much work we still do manually—the classic "no time to do things that would make the things that take all our time take less of it"; and (2) the amount of psychic rewiring that's required—there's a limit to the RoA (rate of astonishment) that any human can absorb. (It's fascinating how technical people are suffering the most from that this time. Less technical people have longer experience being hit by disorienting changes, so for them the current moment is somewhat less skull-cracking.)
Getting this right doesn't mean replacing human-to-human interaction, it means we should have more time for that, and do a better job of supporting HN users generally, as well as YC founders who want to launch on HN, and so on. The goal is to enhance human relatedness, not diminish it.
I'm not quite sure what the correct term is for this scenario, in which LLMs are being forced upon people in many places that previously had human-to-human interaction, some of it coming from YC backed companies, while HN tries to insist that it's discussions should continue be human-to-human.
Having your cake and eating it too? NIMBYism?
If anything it reeks of privilege. It says that it's okay to spread slop on the world at large, just so long as it doesn't soil the precious orange website.
What's worse about all of this is dang is going to be in the middle of a religious war between the AI accusers and defenders on who is using AI to post. People that speak well because they sound like AI will be pissed. AI will just keep sounding more human. And the self-righteous that feel good when they call out a comment are going to be annoying as hell.
You're painting this as some sort of hypocrisy but I don't think that's the case. AI has infinite legitimate uses outside of creating slop. Lots of tools are used in the creation and distribution of slop - do we criticize all those other tools too? Do you like slop? Do you want it on the platforms you visit? Personally, I would prefer for AI companies to take the attitude that YCombinator has here and do their best to remove slop from their platforms. It's not hypocrisy - it's ethical business practice.
> Having your cake and eating it too? NIMBYism?
Hypocrisy.
Thanks for the context! I hope HN will stay a place for knowledge sharing and deep conversations
1. There’s nothing human about hacker news. Since the telegraph, we lost human to human communication. We’ve gained a lot. But it’s naive to claim that HN is any semblance of human-to-human communication. 2. YC helped unleash the war that you’re now losing. This pleading screams too little too late. 3. Just because something “should” happen doesn’t mean it will. HMW Go build that future. HMW Replace HN with human verification and trust signals over AI slop algorithms that AI can’t produce. Pleading for change about it is not building. It’s the lawyers defense, not the engineers. I have only the utmost respect in YC and HN—but have heard this same argument for LI or any social media change. The networks’ defenses are crumbling and AI accelerated it.
Might be time to increase the value of trust signals over content.
Having worked for 12 years to keep this place as human as possible, I can't really agree that there's "nothing human about hacker news".