About whether HN should ban comments generated by ChatGPT.
Has this happened?
Yes 50 (38%)Not sure 38 (29%)No 42 (32%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About whether HN should ban comments generated by ChatGPT.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Sure it might produce convincing examples of human speech, but it fundamentally lacks an internal point of view that it can express, which places limits on how well it can argue something.
It is of course possible that it might (eventually) be convincing enough that no human can tell, which would be problematic because it would suggest human speech is indistinguishable from a knee jerk response that doesn't require that you communicate any useful information.
Things would be quite different if an AI could interpret new information and form opinions, but even if GPT could be extended to do so, right now it doesn't seem to have the capability to form opinions or ingest new information (beyond a limited short term memory that it can use to have a coherent conversation).