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Comment by aleph_minus_one | Hacker News Reader

While I am more on the AI-hater side, I don't consider this to be a good idea:

"any content submitted that is clearly labelled as LLM-generated (including issues, merge requests, and merge request descriptions) will be immediately closed"

For example:

- What if a non-native English speaker uses the help of an AI model in the formulation of some issue/task?

- What about having a plugin in your IDE that rather gives syntax and small code fragment suggestions ("autocomplete on steroids")? Does this policy mean that the programmers are also restricted on the IDE and plugins that they are allowed to have installed if they want to contribute?

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> What if a non-native English speaker uses the help of an AI model in the formulation of some issue/task?

Unfortunately, when I have seen this in the context of the Rust project, the result has still been the typical verbose word salad that is typical of chat style LLMs. It is better to use a dedicated translation tool, and post the original along with the translation.

> What about having a plugin in your IDE that rather gives syntax and small code fragment suggestions ("autocomplete on steroids")?

Very good question, I myself consider this sort of AI usage benign (unlike agent style usage), and is the only style of AI I use myself (since I have RSI it helps having to type less). You could turn the feature off for just this project though.

> Does this policy mean that the programmers are also restricted on the IDE and plugins that they are allowed to have installed if they want to contribute?

I don't think that follows, but what features you have active in the current project would definitely be affected. From what I have seen all IDEs allow turning AI features on and off as needed.

> and post the original along with the translation

this so many times - it's so incredibly handy to have the original message from the author, for one I may speak or understand parts of that language and so have an easier time understanding the intent of the translated text. For another I can cut and translate specific parts using whatever tools I want, again giving me more context about what is trying to be communicated.

> What if a non-native English speaker uses the help of an AI model in the formulation of some issue

I've seen this excuse before but in practice the output they copy/paste is extremely verbose and long winded (with the bullet point and heading soup etc.)

Surely non-native speakers can see that structure and tell the LLM to match their natural style instead? No one wants to read a massive wall of text.

> What if a non-native English speaker uses the help of an AI model in the formulation of some issue/task?

How can you be sure the AI translation is accurately convening what was written by the speaker? The reality is you can't accommodate every hypothetical scenario.

> What about having a plugin in your IDE that rather gives syntax and small code fragment suggestions ("autocomplete on steroids")? Does this policy mean that the programmers are also restricted on the IDE and plugins that they are allowed to have installed if they want to contribute?

Nobody is talking about advanced autocomplete when they want to ban AI code. It's prompt generated code.

>What if a non-native English speaker uses the help of an AI model in the formulation of some issue/task?

Firefox has direct translation built in. One can self-host libretranslate. There are many free sites to paste in language input and get a direct translation sans filler and AI "interpretation". Just write in your native language or your imperfect English.

Translation software does not solve the problem that the tone that you have to use in English is often very different from the tone in your native language. What I would write in German would sometimes not be socially acceptable for English speakers.

If the native language is very different from English, this problem gets much worse.

This is a problem that LLM claim to partially mitigate (and is one reason why non-native speakers could be tempted to use them), but hardly any classical translation tool can.

I'd be interested to see examples of this where the translated text is not editorializing and behaves like other machine translators, just better. I expect there to be some missed nuance when translating languages, but I also expect LLMs to clobber it.

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