Putting aside the particular accusation that I have raised for a moment, I am curious to understand whether Hacker News (HN) has established any formal, informal, or otherwise broadly accepted community guidelines, rules, policies, or best practices regarding the usage of comments generated with the assistance of artificial intelligence, specifically through ChatGPT or similar AI-driven language models.
My inquiry is motivated by the observation that AI-generated text has become increasingly prevalent in online discourse, and different platforms have adopted varying stances on whether such content is acceptable, encouraged, discouraged, or outright prohibited. Some online communities prefer organic, human-generated discussions to preserve authenticity, while others are more permissive, provided that AI-generated responses align with the spirit and intent of meaningful discourse.
Thus, within the context of HN’s commenting system, does the platform have an explicit policy, a tacit expectation, or any historical precedent regarding whether AI-assisted comments are permissible? If so, are there any specific constraints, recommendations, or guiding principles that users should adhere to when leveraging AI for participation in discussions? Furthermore, if such a policy exists, is it officially documented within HN’s guidelines, or is it more of an unwritten cultural norm that has evolved over time through community moderation and feedback?
I would appreciate any insights on whether this matter has been formally addressed or discussed in past threads, as well as any pointers to relevant resources that shed light on HN’s stance regarding AI-assisted participation.
If you (or anyone) take a look at those and the links they point to, and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
If you know more than others, it would be great to share some of what you know, so the rest of us can learn. Comments that only declare how much you know, without sharing any of it, are less useful, and ultimately off-topic.
Could you please stop taking HN threads on these offtopic tangents? Once in a while is ok, but when it's your primary use of the site, that's not ok, especially when it's this repetitive.
I think that's unfortunate: the article still has that title, and knowing it wants to lead to such an absolute conclusion can tell a prospective reader if they are interested to be led down that path or not.
That approach to baity titles doesn't generalize, I'm afraid—neither to users nor to titles. In general, baity titles cause threads to fill up with responses to the provocation in the title, making for shallow and ultimately off-topic discussion.
It's standard practice on HN to replace these with titles that are more accurate and neutral, but we always try to do this using representative language from the article itself. Usually that's a subtitle, or the HTML doc title, sometimes it can be the URL slug, or even a photo caption.
Often there's a sentence at the start of an article that walks back the title and says what the article is 'really' about. It's as if the title 'takes' too much and then the article 'confesses' and gives most of it back. These walkback sentences often make good HN titles because they represent the article more accurately. That's what I used in this case.
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