It wasn't a generated comment at all! Read the comment, and then what the author wrote elsewhere saying they spoke it into their phone.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49948614
"To reiterate, those were legit questions. I used voice dictation to my phone, with an app that transcribed and formatted my message."
harassing a user for doing that is just unncessary and I dont't think it violates the site's guidelines. Further, the comment itself was high quality, and contributed to the discussion.
I used voice dictation to transcribe my rambling thoughts on the article, which was thereafter re-arranged into a still verbose but somewhat more coherent reply. I should have taken the time to reword it properly - my laziness is on me.
I was not aware the rule against AI-assited text at the time, and will be more careful next time. Nonetheless, I find it unfortunate that we've spend more time talking about AI usage in a comment, than the blog which prompted it.
It's not a hill I want to die on either, ultimately the moderators run the site and make the rules and we comply with them at their pleasure.
dang believes that the "transcription and formatting" adds a signature. I entered into Gemini Pro (at the highest level of reasoning) and it calls it human written text and provides a far more detailed description of why:
"If an LLM was used here, it was likely just used as a grammar checker or "polisher" rather than a generator. If we had to flag anything, it would be this section:... .his reads like a standard, high-quality comment from a technical forum like Hacker News or Reddit's r/analog. If the user utilized an LLM, they likely wrote the entire comment themselves and merely passed it through a tool like Grammarly or ChatGPT with a prompt like "Fix my typos" without letting it change their voice or vocabulary."
I tried ChatGPT and Claude (all the most recent models I have access to) and they all agree: human text, slightly modified to be more readable.
Looking at Pangram's output, it only mentioned the last sentence as AI generated:
"Would you recommend it, and roughly what did you pay? Have you tried camera scanning? I’ve been considering automating film advance and capture on my setup, but consistent color conversion is the part I’m least confident about."
That's absolutely a sentence a human expert might write. Even if it wasn't, the content contributes to the discussion. Seriously, why would grammar checkers for voice dictation even be remotely an issue?
It wasn't a generated comment at all! Read the comment, and then what the author wrote elsewhere saying they spoke it into their phone. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49948614
"To reiterate, those were legit questions. I used voice dictation to my phone, with an app that transcribed and formatted my message."
harassing a user for doing that is just unncessary and I dont't think it violates the site's guidelines. Further, the comment itself was high quality, and contributed to the discussion.
This is not a hill I'm interested dying on but I don't understand how voice dictation and transcription is setting off Pangram like that.
I used voice dictation to transcribe my rambling thoughts on the article, which was thereafter re-arranged into a still verbose but somewhat more coherent reply. I should have taken the time to reword it properly - my laziness is on me.
I was not aware the rule against AI-assited text at the time, and will be more careful next time. Nonetheless, I find it unfortunate that we've spend more time talking about AI usage in a comment, than the blog which prompted it.
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It's not a hill I want to die on either, ultimately the moderators run the site and make the rules and we comply with them at their pleasure.
dang believes that the "transcription and formatting" adds a signature. I entered into Gemini Pro (at the highest level of reasoning) and it calls it human written text and provides a far more detailed description of why: "If an LLM was used here, it was likely just used as a grammar checker or "polisher" rather than a generator. If we had to flag anything, it would be this section:... .his reads like a standard, high-quality comment from a technical forum like Hacker News or Reddit's r/analog. If the user utilized an LLM, they likely wrote the entire comment themselves and merely passed it through a tool like Grammarly or ChatGPT with a prompt like "Fix my typos" without letting it change their voice or vocabulary."
I tried ChatGPT and Claude (all the most recent models I have access to) and they all agree: human text, slightly modified to be more readable.
Looking at Pangram's output, it only mentioned the last sentence as AI generated:
"Would you recommend it, and roughly what did you pay? Have you tried camera scanning? I’ve been considering automating film advance and capture on my setup, but consistent color conversion is the part I’m least confident about."
That's absolutely a sentence a human expert might write. Even if it wasn't, the content contributes to the discussion. Seriously, why would grammar checkers for voice dictation even be remotely an issue?
It seems most plausible if “formatted” is doing some heavy lifting in that sentence.