What's Actually Annoying
What annoys the author isn't AI itself, but its byproduct: forums, Q&A sections, and mailing lists flooded with AI-generated answers—neatly structured, smoothly worded, seemingly comprehensive, yet with no first-hand experience whatsoever, and wrong in an earnest, official way. The asker has to spend extra effort discerning which reply has a real person behind it, a cost that didn't exist before. The trouble with bad money isn't its quantity, but that it increasingly resembles good money.
The Community Has No Good Fix
The remedies offered in the comments are all pessimistic. Banning relies on detection, and detection is unreliable; requiring a declaration relies on conscience, and conscience can't be counted on; Stack Overflow's precedent of banning AI answers back in the day already proved how hard enforcement is. The real change happening now is that trust is shifting: people increasingly favor small circles, real-name communities, and authors with long-term reputations, and default to skepticism toward answers in the big open square. AI meant to make knowledge more accessible, but first it made "trustworthy knowledge" more expensive.
via: Hacker News