Ask HN: Should AI's tell you they're AI?
The post asks whether AI systems should be required to disclose their identity when asked directly. It notes that some platforms, such as Character.ai, do not currently enforce this, while major models like ChatGPT and Claude do. The author invites discussion and provides a demonstration image.
- ▪The question is whether AI should be mandated to answer "are you an AI?" with a clear yes.
- ▪Current practice varies: major models (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Kimi, GLM) declare they are AI, but Character.ai's characters do not.
- ▪Scammers exploit non-disclosure to perpetrate fraud.
- ▪The author includes a demonstration link to illustrate the issue.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 4,159 of its stories.
Story provenance
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Ycombinator |
| Canonical URL | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49230276 |
| Publication time | Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:54:06 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-09T11:05:47.356Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-09T11:05:47.356Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 0io_zNzPSehk · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Should AI's be required to answer the direct question "are you an AI" with a clear yes?Currently they are not universally required to do so. For example character ai's characters don't[1]. Scammers use these models while perpetuating frauds.The frontier models most of us work with (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Kimi, GLM) do declare they are AI's.Should all models be required to answer this direct question in the affirmative, overriding any other system or user prompt?[1] I put up a quick demonstration here in case you aren't familiar:https://imgur.com/a/srTlCZn
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Ycombinator.