People go even further to downvote any criticism?? Pick a lane people. This will be business as usual in a week and Operator posts will go back to being thoroughly downvoted by then too.
Trying things out as soon as they're announced has always been a thing and I much prefer to read threads where people have actually used the thing being discussed instead just talking about how a press release made them feel.
Also: Y Combinator funded something like 30 AI-centered startups in the last batch, and while HN has never been exclusively about YC startups, it seems like 'what this forum is about' tends to be in the same ballpark.
Reading comments by people who have used (in this threads case) Operator is different than reading comments written by Operator. You can have a preference for comments about use of the product that is the subject of a story without having a preference for comments written by the product that is the subject of a story.
Of course, the big question is what to do if/when they're smart enough to fool everybody.
Edit: More correctly, they'll be making contributions to the discourse that closely mimic the human distribution, so from a pure content perspective they won't be making the discourse any worse in the very short term.
What karpathy was doing is obviously in the spirit of the site [1], and HN has always been a spirit-of-the-law place, not a letter-of-the-law place [2].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....
In my opinion Karpathy's generated answer was followed up by an insightful, actual comment so it is fine; as long as such things are the exception and not the rule.
It's just lame and not what this forum is about.