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Comment by ddtaylor | Hacker News Reader

Attacking the source of the message instead of the merits.

Ad-HomineLLM

AI writing is worse on the merits: it is lower quality and has concerning externalities associated with its production.

It's also reasonably effective proxy to determine whether somebody is actually passionate about the topic they're writing about. If you've got a very strong interest in a specific niche you're typically able to pour pages and pages of ink down talking about it. If you can't be bothered to take the necessary time to distill your thoughts, it signals to me that your thoughts on the topic aren't as worthwhile as someone who's deeply invested in it.

Of course this proxy isn't perfect, I understand many people use AI to make their writing more comprehensible when English isn't their first language.

Often the commentor wants to take a shortcut and just say it's AI written and hand wave it away.

A comment should argue the merit of the work not attack the source or medium.

The medium is the message. I feel like this should be more obvious in 2026 than at any other time in history.

If the author does not care to take the time to craft their message, why should I care to take the time to read it?

If you used AI, and I cannot tell, I don't care that you used AI. But when it's clear and present almost immediately, I feel as though the author does not respect their audience (of which I am a member).

As every composition teacher would say: "use your own words."

The attention economics are bad more than anything else. LLM articles ask us to put more time into reading it than the LLM put into writing it. Actually committing time to production is the minimum bar which suggests something is worth our time in a world where so much is already vying for our attention.

If a truly amazing thing was released tomorrow that had massive utility you wouldn't care how long it took to create and would just use it.

I get the attention economy is messed up right now, but using it as a justification for being curmudgeonly or abandoning principles is lame.

Yeah but we're not talking about utility, we're talking about content and in this particular case content which basically just boils down to someone's slightly quirky taste in something.

I think utility is a big component of that. I think there's a reason we're discussing these types of things instead of just cat pictures and memes.

Who would want to read about the thoughts of an AI?

All it knows about your thoughts are from what text you already fed it with, and it will end up adding things you don't intend or agree with. Even just telling it to fix grammar it can subtly do this.

I think a lot of people are really interested in what an LLM or something that can pass the Turing test "thinks" or generates as output.

Obviously it's for entertainment, but there are many channels where content creators post questions that have asked LLMs [1]

I also think many people are prompting image generators to see what they produce. I can remember a time when many images that involved asking ChatGPT to make someone aggressive would make the people in the image black, whereas using neutral terms would have them generate as white.

I also remember asking early GPT 4 LLMs to explain something to me like a 5 year old from X location and basically seeing the network produce varied responses as it was clear it had an idea of some 5 year olds from one city being inherently smarter than others. Then you can change it to say a 5 year old girl or a 5 year old boy and it would dumb things down a lot more for the boy.

[1]: https://youtube.com/@fatherphi

an article written by an AI about fonts, when the AI fundamentally does not look at rendered text, is inherently without merit

Those are good arguments to be made regardless of who wrote them. I'm all for actual arguments against the work instead of hand waving it away as AI and being too lazy to say what is wrong with the work.

Can the same argument be made about a writer that is blind? If a blind person submitted work about fonts would we be equally as dismissive?

It reads like a dog wrote it. Whether the writer is terrible or LLM being terrible, get this shit out of here

A dog writing sounds like an interesting story.

We need an update to the HN posting guidelines that addresses this. We already have:

    Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

I'm not welcome to complain that the website is a tiny vertical strip down my screen with 6 inches of whitespace on each side, so we should also not welcome the boring, common "The article is written by AI" criticism, which is going to apply to 99% of articles by the end of 2026. It's already too common to be interesting criticism.

You are wrong in this regard. If you complain about "6 inches of whitespace on each side", you should read this on a proper device (i.e. a desktop computer) or just inject some CSS to fix the site (this is HN, after all).

But knowing that the article is AI generated is useful, because that tells me to not to read it.

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