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

some part of that hate is getting mis-directed into datacenters and others, but most if not all people dislike AI.

> Let’s face it: by the time I manually ship version 1.0 of a product, the AI-assisted version could have been deployed 10x faster. By then, enough real-world feedback would have surfaced to identify the major issues, and tools like Claude Code would make it possible to fix and ship version 2.0 at an incredible pace.

And so can your competitors if they wanted to make something that you make and why wouldn't the people themselves use AI to custom-tailor their own solutions Why pay a middleman like you?

Also because you are deploying things faster, you are also dropping them faster. For some people (& ideas) that is considered a plus but I find it grating or missing the point if I create software that I have not written and then leave it asap.

And this has also made a race to the bottom for the attention of people with 20x the products so you have to compete 20x more for eye-balls.

There are also aspects of job insecurity within the normal public regarding AI.

Prototyping as a use-case is something that I have recommended multiple times but with all of this in mind, I must say that the situation looks murky.

This is why we are anti-AI because imo AI as a tech isn't bad but the way society is handling it is really really bad.

A shoe brand adding AI into their company name shouldn't logically change anything but the market is so down bad that it increased its price 4 times iirc and oh btw the shoe brand had sold its brand and everything to someone else before hand so people just bought an empty thing!

We need better societal discourse on the norms of using AI, when to use AI and when not to use AI and to create a social structure to help people from completely and solely relying on such technology and forms of psychosis.

Suppose one proved that a sizable mass of people don't care whether they eat dog food.

There are people who won't feed them dog food even so.

There are people who will see ways to extract more profits.

> just a means to an end?

Indeed.

Which means?

Which end?

There are as many unthinking raving fans as there are unthinking raging haters. The reality is that the decision-making power-wielding bunch will make dumb, uncaring, probably some form of "evil", people-harming decisions via AI. Because that is what they do. Almost invariably, until forced to do something else.

So, again, which means? Which end?

This weird "my perspective is universal" thing is among the worst features of humanity in general.

So ahy are so many on HN anti-AI? Because automation has finally come for them. Now it's personal. While it wasn't personal, you could pretend that people who had their livelihood taken away was a result of personal moral failure. You would see that 10 or 20 years ago when people would quite callously say "you should've done computer science" and that was that.

There are a lot of reasons to hate AI, not least of which is the externalities. It's essentially profiting off intellectual property as well as user-generated content for no compensation. Software people can actually identify with that in a way they just didn't when it was music, art or literature.

The data centers themselves nobody wants. They get massive tax and electricity breaks. Everyone pays for the upgrades and gets to live with the water pollution ,noise and higher utility bills. And because the data center is powering labor displacement, unlike, say, an auto plant, it produces negative jobs.

This all comes at a time when society is at the breaking point. Unaffordability is a massive problem (only getting worse) while we rapidly approaching minting our first trillionaire. Wealth inequality is reaching levels that historically have resulted in violent revolution.

AI in particular and automation in general could be a good thing for society. In another version of society it would allow people overall to work less and more menial jobs could be automated away. We don't live in that society. We live in the society that will make 99% of people poor so a handful of people can have $500 billion instead of $400 billion. All while the world seems to be getting ever more violent and cruel and major issues like climate change are going to start biting real hard.

But the AI hypebeasts are incapable of differentiating that from an anti-AI stance.