Broken English is better than AI slop. Generated or AI-edited comments are officially no longer tolerated on Hacker News, a social news site run by Y Combinator, a startup incubator that itself bankrolled some of the largest AI companies.
Hacker News (HN) has updated its guidelines and banned AI content on the site.
“Don’t post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans,” the updated HN’s main rulebook reads.
Moderator Daniel Gackle, who posts under the username dang, announced that the rule already existed as “case law” but is now being promoted to the guidelines.
More changes are also coming. Dang acknowledged that users will be able to flag suspected AI content.
“We’re going to add that. I’ve resisted adding reasons-for-flagging for years, but even I can change my mind every decade or so,” said Dang in a response to a user suggesting a “Flag as AI” feature.
The move received overwhelming support from forum members, with the post reaching over 3,000 points in less than 12 hours. Points are the main metric for how often members upvote content, rarely breaking 1,000 for the main news.
The community highlighted the irony that the company and forum are “simultaneously trying to fund countless companies that are responsible for ruining the internet as we speak.”
Dang assured that they’re not asking people not to use AI.
“What we're asking is not to post AI-generated comments to Hacker News,” the moderator said.
“We just don’t want it to interfere with the human conversation and connection that this site has always been for.”
Essentially, the HN forum always had two main rules, prohibiting posting or upvoting “crap links” and being “rude or dumb in comment threads.” Dang shared examples of users being blocked from bulk posting or copy-pasting in threads.
Grammar mistakes are fine
Some debate occurred over where spell-checking ends and the AI-editing begins. Some non-native English speakers expressed concerns that without AI proofreading, they wouldn’t be able to express their thoughts effectively.
Dang expressed a completely opposite opinion.
“We included it to protect users who don’t realize how much damage they’re doing to their reception here when they think, ‘I’ll just run this through ChatGPT to fix my grammar and spelling.’ I’ve seen many cases of people getting flamed for this, and I don’t want more vulnerable users – e.g., people worried about their English – to get punished for trying to improve their contributions,” the moderator notes.
And many agreed that they’d rather tolerate some mistakes than AI-generated content.
“I much prefer to hear someone’s true voice even if there are a few inaccuracies, so much of a person’s personality is conveyed through their quirks and mistakes,” a forum user explained.
“We’d much rather hear you in your own voice, and the cost of a few mistakes is far less than the cost of losing that,” Dang also noted.
“Voice is everything. Don’t relinquish the best part of yourself,” another forum member agreed.
One forum member even compared AI to the “heat death of thought” – a parallel to the scientific “heat death of the universe” hypothesis that entropy will ultimately exhaust all energy and leave the universe dead cold.
“I’ve been feeling more and more that generative AI represents the average of all human knowledge, “the user said.
“A future in which all thought and creativity is averaged away is a bleak one. It’s the heat death of thought.”
The “no AI rule” will be flexible for users with severe language issues. Some forum members noted that AI unlocked “a whole world” to kids with dyslexia, and Dang agreed that some AI use cases are “totally legit.”
“These rules are always fuzzy, and there’s always a long tail of exceptions,” Dang said.
Many platforms, from Reddit to Wikipedia, are struggling with LLM content influx, introducing rules that limit, require labeling, or outright ban it altogether.
Public pushback against AI also appears to be growing on multiple fronts, from users revolting against quietly bundled AI features in web browsers or operating systems, to a petition in the UK calling on Parliament to ban AI-generated images, video, and audio, which has nearly 13,000 signatures.
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