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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?

#561

Post by hunterpayne »

trumpdong wrote: post #462
saltcured wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a really important question that is been lost between the anti and pro AI camps which is really answering what AI is good at and what AI is bad at, ... I think some of this pro/anti AI discussion is really a proxy for something else though. There is another unstated, societal disagreement about personal responsibility and the behaviors of the AI tool users. It isn't entirely new, as people have always been…

I don't know if that's specific to AI. It seems accountability levels are in hell right now. Consider anything the president has done and how that would have gone if any other president ever did it. Or anything AI companies do. Or anything Tesla does. Or X.

Don't bring politics into it. We can literally see the software being produced getting worse very quickly since the introduction of LLMs for coding. I expect a wave of data breaches to come soon when the hackers realize how many new holes have been created lately and adjust their tactics.

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

#562

Post by downrightmike »

api wrote: post #502
downrightmike wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They basically undo all the reduce renew recycle efforts we've been doing since the 90's

Reduce will never happen unless population falls. Not in a big way. It should be: reuse, recycle, renewable. First try to reuse and make things more reusable. Then try to recycle. Last, substitute renewable for non renewable sources for things like energy.

And not even then with private planes being just as bad

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

#563

Post by hunterpayne »

michaelhoney wrote: post #291
TylerE wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lemme give another. I was formerly quite anti-AI but bought a cheap Claude plan just to play around with it a bit. First thing I built with it was this - https://github.com/tylereaves/onscreen-piano , in about an hour and maybe 10 prompt cycles. It replaced, for my specific use case, the 10% of the functionality of an increasingly-unreliable commercial app. That's including building the website, setting up actions fo…

I am very optimistic about people using LLMs to explore their medical issues. Human bodies are complex and doctors are time- and intelligence- limited. An LLM can be a really useful partner.

Dear god no. ML is useful for medicine and has been for some time. LLMs in medicine are 100% malpractice and should be treated as such. LLMs << ML

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

#564

Post by sanderjd »

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…

I am sympathetic to this point of view. But also: I love reading books. But I'm aware that nobody will pay me to read books.

In much the same way, like you, I love writing code. And there was a time when "writing code" was a close enough approximation to what people wanted to pay me for that I could get paid for doing this thing that I love.

Unfortunately, this is no longer true. This thing that I love is now no longer the thing that people pay me for. It never really was. People paid me for solving problems using software. It's just that the thing I liked to do, the act of writing code, was the only way to accomplish that.

But now it just isn't. Now I can create useful software more quickly and better without actually writing much code. And that does suck, I do experience it as a loss. But I also experience it as a great opportunity.

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

#566

Post by hunterpayne »

FabHK wrote: post #401
trumpdong wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto also obviously does something at all. If anyone was saying it didn't, they were just as delusional as people saying that AI does nothing at all.

Crypto has no technological merit compared to earlier solutions, except "permissonlessness", which enables the circumvention of rules and regulations (at huge expense). But, sure, enabling crime is "doing something".

It solves a CS problem called the Byzantine Generals problem. That problem was thought to have no solution before blockchains were created. The lack of CS knowledge on this board is pretty staggering sometimes.

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

#567

Post by spoaceman7777 »

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…

"Divided" is a bit of a strong word.

The true state of things is that the anti-AI folks are FAR more vocal about their opposition, meanwhile, the people who like AI are busy being productive and accomplishing a truly staggering amount of work.

The 84% stack overflow "currently use AI" number from a _year_ ago almost certainly still holds true today. Just look at the absurdly long and very incomplete list of "tainted by AI" projects that the list-making activists are maintaining over on Codeberg. Software is not "divided", it is simply being occupied by angry protesters.

Hacker news skews significantly older and whiter, and the blogs and such that circulate come primarily from the "established" English-speaking old-guard "white people" software days. Opposition to AI is highly concentrated among the white, first world, left-wing, established engineers.

This group punches far their weight in terms of the volume of their activism compared to the actual percentages of humans on earth.

That's all it is. Anti-AI hatred is just a noisy echo-chamber of those who are privileged enough to not need to modernize their skills.

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

#568

Post by [deleted] »

FabHK wrote: post #401
trumpdong wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto also obviously does something at all. If anyone was saying it didn't, they were just as delusional as people saying that AI does nothing at all.

Crypto has no technological merit compared to earlier solutions, except "permissonlessness", which enables the circumvention of rules and regulations (at huge expense). But, sure, enabling crime is "doing something".

[deleted]

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

#569

Post by dang »

spoaceman7777 wrote: post #567
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…

"Divided" is a bit of a strong word. The true state of things is that the anti-AI folks are FAR more vocal about their opposition, meanwhile, the people who like AI are busy being productive and accomplishing a truly staggering amount of work. The 84% stack overflow "currently use AI" number from a _year_ ago almost certainly still holds true today. Just look at the absurdly long and very incomplete list of "tainted…

I'd push back a bit on the assumptions here, partly because (as I just spent a rabbit hole's worth of time describing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48427800), such perceptions are strongly conditioned by one's pre-existing feelings, but more because (to my view at least) HN obviously is divided on AI. That is, HN gets plenty of comments criticizing AI for various reasons, and plenty of comments expressing positive views too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48406174 has almost 1000 comments now, and by far most are positive.

You make a good point about the asymmetry in content: the negative ones are mostly just critical, and often denunciatory, while the positive ones are less likely to be generic, and more likely to be about specific work people are doing. That's not a new dynamic, though, and long pre-dates what today is called AI.

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

#570

Post by KaiserPro »

customguy wrote: post #473
KaiserPro wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think thats really it. For me personally I am vaguely indifferent to programmers using LLMs to make more shitty code. My worry is the second and third order effects For work currently, as an SRE, I'm being asked to maintain and look after slop as if its properly built and instrumented. Our platform has clear rules and conventions, and AI isn't following those. For the wider world, I fucking hate that image/vi…

This is the opposite of a loom. With a loom you can very easily see that what it makes is exactly like cloth made by hand, except it's more uniform and faster. There also wasn't this weird drive to drive out the heretics so the AI messiah may dwell among us, this desire to put all eggs in one basket, instead of welcoming competition and a control group.

I would suggest that you are looking at the product, not the effect on the workers.

The powered loom produced more uniform, much cheaper fabric. It wasn't colourful or particularly flamboyant. It took a lot more work to get patterns (its where punch card come from)

But thats not the point. Powered looms meant that cottage industry that employed people close to sources of production (ie cotton/calico in india and wool in england) were thrown out on their arses. The majority lived on rented land/housing. Couldn't pay the rent and were kicked out into the loving arms of the poor laws. Lots of people had to re-train, the rest went begging. Combine that with agricultural reform, meant that Lots of people moved into slums in the towns, where they worked much longer, unsafer hours.

The rest dispersed into the wider world.

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