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Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

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Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

#641

Post by happytoexplain »

peteforde wrote: post #264
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say that HN was at least as sharply negative during the cryptocurrency craze. I recall various submissions asking "Why is HN so anti-crypto?" as well.

The false equivalency in this explanation is off the scale. It wasn't just that crypto was an obvious grift; it was that you didn't need to be an experienced developer to confirm that 99% of the "web 3.0" nonsense that what was being thrown around literally made no technical sense. You might reject LLMs on principle, or find that they don't work for you. But I think we're well past any debate of whether they do anyth…

Consider that the GP said,

>Mentioning AI brings out a sharply negative side of HN that I had not seen before 2023

And the parent said,

>I would say that HN was at least as sharply negative during the cryptocurrency craze

And your response was,

>The false equivalency in this explanation is off the scale.

The parent in fact said a very straightforward, non-controversial thing, and you responded in anger, as if they said something like "AI is the same as crypto".

Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

#644

Post by rewgs »

vbezhenar wrote: post #512

Because I enjoy writing code. I enjoy being paid for writing code. And I don't enjoy writing prompts for AI. Code is not just a means to an end. Code is a means to my happiness. Users might not care, but I do care. I love good code. I feel great when I can write good code. I won't say that I don't care about users. I do. But I care about me, first and foremost. And AI threatens to remove my lifestyle and workstyle. T…

Right there with you. I regularly use Claude for all sorts of tasks, but I am extremely against letting it write loads of code _for_ me. And like you, I find prompting to be a pretty unenjoyable activity, regardless of the task at hand.

AI is _certainly_ not useless and definitely not bad, far from it, but if I could snap my fingers and make it disappear, I'd do so in a heartbeat.

Writing code is my favorite thing to do. Digging into a problem and getting into the flow is my favorite thing ever, and it seems that the world is completely hell-bent on taking this away from me.

I can already hear all the usual responses: "but you can still write code in your spare time," "you were never paid to type anyway," etc etc etc. That's all true, but it doesn't change the fact that writing code in your spare time and being paid to write code for the plurality or even majority of your waking hours are two completely different ways of life. And yeah, there's a lot more to being a software developer than just typing, but the quality of the time spent has completely and utterly changed. It's quickly becoming unrecognizable compare to even just a few short years ago.

I am of the belief that how you spend your days is how you spend your life, and given that so many of our days are now spent doing completely different activities, with a completely different, much "louder" quality to them (I find prompting to be almost _socially_ exhausting, and hate that it more or less completely destroys the ability for oneself to enter a flow state), I think it's completely fair to say that AI has radically changed, or perhaps even ruined, our lives, or at least our livelihoods.

And in my specific case, I already completely changed careers once. Long story short, I was a lifelong musician and well on my way to becoming a successful film/TV/video game composer before I developed hyperacusis. Going through that was horrific. I consider myself extremely lucky to have found a vocation and avocation in programming that, against all odds, I love even _more_ than making music. And once again, I feel that I might just have to change careers. Again.

So yeah. I'm not naive enough to think that it's going to go away. But my life and work were 100% better before it, no question.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

#645

Post by rewgs »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #620
vbezhenar wrote: post #512

Because I enjoy writing code. I enjoy being paid for writing code. And I don't enjoy writing prompts for AI. Code is not just a means to an end. Code is a means to my happiness. Users might not care, but I do care. I love good code. I feel great when I can write good code. I won't say that I don't care about users. I do. But I care about me, first and foremost. And AI threatens to remove my lifestyle and workstyle. T…

Imagine if AI actually delivers utopia and you get to code all you want because your every need is taken care of.

Considering we can't even get corporations and the ultra wealthy to pay even _close_ to their fair share of taxes, forgive me if I'm a little skeptical of the idea that a utopia, should it come to pass, will be evenly distributed.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

#646

Post by 444a »

darepublic wrote: post #633

If you believe AI is so incredibly useful.. then actually you should be happy to reap the advantages of it whilst the "anti" crowd buried their heads in the sand. I have seen people on this forum unironically ask what AI can't do. As if they have genuinely tried yet failed to plumb the depths of its ability. If I had a genie in a bottle then I would simply make wishes and not worry about correcting the record. Wherea…

Because the 'masterpiece' requires imagination.

Writing more lines of code at a higher rate does not make any contribution toward improving imagination. maybe you can have more attempts in life and something may land? maybe. but you'll always get beaten by someone with imagination eventually - given technology compresses life cycles your app may no longer have any demand within 12 months of being shipped.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

#647

Post by johnfn »

dang wrote: post #458
johnfn wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree that it's "divided", I wouldn't say "simply". Mentioning AI brings out a sharply negative side of HN that I had not seen before 2023. It is the only subject where, when I have shared that I built something with it, I have gotten derogatory comments claiming I am inexperienced, unintelligent, and that the thing I built (a hobby project) is unimpressive or embarrassing. This has never happened in the deca…

I say "simply" because, as I mentioned, it's an invariant—possibly the most consistent phenomenon we've observed on HN [1]. But if it's so consistent, how can it go unnoticed for long (as you've reported) and/or get perceived as one-sided ("HN is so anti-A") when in fact it is usually two-sided ("HN users are divided on A")? The answer is that what you notice depends on how you feel [2]. If you like A, or (more preci…

Thank you for the very long and thoughtful comment. It's an fun and interesting idea to think about, and I certainly don't mind reading long tangents :) But I want to push back on it a tad: I think it misses my point a little bit. I completely am fine with HN being a negative place - I wouldn't have been here so long if this bothered me! But I don't think all divisiveness is made equal. And in particular, I think the divisiveness on HN about AI feels different than previous divisiveness. I think your argument hinges on how if you are pro-A you are much more likely to notice anti-A sentiment. This is true, but I think the quality of anti-A sentiment differs in this case from the past.

When TypeScript came out and for the first couple of years, I was the biggest TypeScript zealot on the planet. I loved it! There was a point when I typed T that the autosuggestions on iPhone would suggest "Typescript" :-) This all to say: when anti-Typescript sentiment popped up, I definitely noticed it, and it definitely annoyed me. (I still think back on jashkenas saying that he didn't see any point in TS because any good engineer wouldn't make the errors it catches and I just want to throttle him! But I digress...) And there definitely was a lot of it.

But there was a difference in quality between the anti-TS sentiment and the anti-AI sentiment. No one ever attacked my abilities as an engineer for saying I liked TS; no one ever said the things I built with TS were embarrassing or intern-quality like they have with AI. It never devolved into personal attacks the way that anti-AI commentariat pull out when they run out of other arguments.

I'd make a humble suggestion. I would like to suggest that when comments get that derisive, that those comments are removed faster and those users are banned faster. I genuinely think it brings down the quality of discourse site-wide. (FWIW, I think the same about pro-AI incendiary content - very low-quality comments about how people are going to lose their jobs / become obsolete without AI should equally well be flagged, removed and banned.)

I know the HN moderator team is incredibly busy and I am very thankful for all you do!

Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

#648

Post by happytoexplain »

SyneRyder wrote: post #285
arjie wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is just a few people. Any time people are unpleasant to others or post in an uninteresting way I add them to a personal list that filters out their comments. Rapidly the site becomes more usable. The negativity is from a few highly polarized individuals. I know others also do this - though often they are kind enough to auto-fold.

> ... I add them to a personal list that filters out their comments. I think this would be a very useful feature to add to HN itself. I nearly emailed dang a few weeks ago to suggest it myself rather than roll my own browser extension to do it, though maybe it's my own responsibility to roll my own software too. The Gearspace forums (vBulletin based?) have an "Ignore User" feature that helps make that forum vastly mo…

I think it's probably not palatable because it reduces the friction too much on removing large amounts of content for yourself - it's too easy to "delete" a person forever based on one or two things they said, or just based on not liking their opinion, and thereby reducing your exposure to differing thoughts, which is one of the tenants of HN.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

#649

Post by torben-friis »

dang wrote: post #585
torben-friis wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, "AI good" and "AI bad" are very silly camps to describe a topic. You might have seen some comments by me receiving votes lately that some might classify as anti-AI. I'm not for banning it, I use it at work and at home, I learn about it. Here a few positions I hold, for example: - There is a fundamental deviation between what we should be seeing if we were surrounded by 100x enabled engineers and reality. We're…

Yes, the binary comments are more predictable and therefore less interesting. Mixey ones, like what you've posted here, are much better. (That probably applies to any divisive topic, of course.) Your comment reminds me of another important variable: time. We're still at the beginning of figuring out what these tools even are, let alone how best to use them.

>We're still at the beginning of figuring out what these tools even are, let alone how best to use them.

That's a fair point, and I imagine it's going to take a long while for the dust to clear.

People are operating on semi-dark private implementations, where the approach that works today breaks tomorrow. It's like SEO, where people operate on assumptions of google's algorithm that are not provable or guaranteed to hold, so everything gets cargo culty.

Openai, anthropic et all are not fully to blame for this, I think. even if they wanted to be more transparent, it's hard to imagine what kind of determinism they could provide users with, since the product is a probabilistic emergent property more than purposeful design.

Then there's a flood of marketing and astroturfing that seeps into technical discussions, in a way that the engineering world is not really used to (other than the crypto space, that was relatively contained).

It's a really hard, multifaceted and interesting problem to solve. I just wish I saw more cold headed attempts to approach these issues scientifically.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

#650

Post by wlonkly »

_0ffh wrote: post #465
dang wrote: post #14

It's simply divided. With every such division A vs. B, the A team thinks HN is anti-A and the B team thinks it's anti-B. This is an invariant. You can see from the following megathread, currently on the front page, that HN is by no means anti-AI: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48406174 . Sometimes it just takes the right initial condition (e.g. title) to brin…

Thoughtful comment, and I'd like to add another angle: However meaningful it is to say the community is divided, I also think that individuals are "divided" on the question as well. I can speak from myself as an example (although n=1): I am incredibly open to machine learning and the advances it brings. On the other hand I am extremely conscious of the fact that the current LLMs do often write bad code, which becomes…

I read an article not long ago which I cannot find for the life of me now, but the thing in it that stuck with me was the idea that people (in the context, career software developers) were not either AI-pilled or anti-AI, but rather that people are both excited and afraid at the same time.
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