You can engage with an AI-written document! Simply paste the document into the AI (same or different as the AI that wrote it) and ask questions. You can get an answer in seconds compared to an hour (if it's a blog post by an HN reader), days (if it's a professional blogger), or never (if it's by a journalist).
Perhaps AI-written articles should include the prompt as hidden text on the page. Or include a link with the prompt embedded, that causes the AI to spit out the same article that you could then ask questions about.
I can indeed use AI to do research on topics I learn about on HN. That’s a different activity than what I come to HN for, or when I’m reviewing a proposal for something at work, or if I’m interested in an article and want to learn more about some of the details that didn’t make the final draft from either the author or from other people with experience in the area.
“Why didn’t the author consider [this thing that seems similar]” is almost never something you can ask an llm, especially for articles where the author is putting in so little of their own effort that they don’t edit out obvious AI tells.