Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

591–600 of 812 posts

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

#591

Post by niuzeta »

I can only speak for myself here.

In the end it's an emotional response. I am "anti-AI" because it has caused a net negative experience for me, so I feel bad towards it. Confirmation bias makes it easier for me up-vote or voice concerns for "anti-AI" posts and stay silent for "pro-AI" posts.

When I first started working with claude at work, I had a mixed bag of emotions. On one hand, it was awesome, surreal experience that lets me go 10x overnight. Then the negative experiences started hitting me.

My team who has fully embraced AI now generate slop. They're 2-5x more "productive" and churn out code for me to "review". I point out things that don't make any sense, and their AI agent enthusiastically agrees with me, "You're right to push back, great suggestion! You're right that this didn't make any sense". I feel dismissed and it has contributed to my dissatisfaction at work significantly.

A lot of my work is seeping through the AI slob because I can't get away from it. AI PR descriptions like a novel and it's so _verbose_. It's tiring. It allows juniors who are being so extra with the new tool and give bad ideas with bad implementation. Shooting that down nicely doesn't work and because other people in the team who have embraced AI accepts it.

I enjoyed writing code and reading code. I used to take pride in writing a clean, maintainable code and writing a good documentation. AI has made bad developers think they're right, and very confident. It's tiring to talk to. So I don't like AI, because that's the source of all this frustration.

Yes, I am definitely more productive with AI. But the net result for me is decidedly negative.

I'm being completely honest about it. Hopefully this helps someone understand why some engineers dislike AI.

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

#592

Post by josephg »

_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…

Yes, I’m in this camp. I’ve been pushing forward some personal projects lately using LLMs. At first, I was delighted at how productive I was, prompting. But over time a lot of cracks have started to show. Claude is good at programming “in the small”. It’s good at getting self contained, well scoped tasks done. But it’s bad at large scale system thinking. Over time, every project I’ve gotten Claude to write has become riddled with poor design choices layered on top of one another until even Claude struggles to make forward progress. And at that point, what do you do? You’ve gotta read all its code. Something I’ve learned I should just do from the start to save myself a lot of time later on.

It’s also strangely bad at correctness. You can ask it to write unit tests for a project. Unless you’re careful with your prompting, it will only write the unit tests that it knows will pass.

Generally, these models are amazing tools. But they cannot be trusted to make correct, maintainable software. At least not yet. Maybe in another year or two.

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

#594

Post by [deleted] »

trumpdong wrote: post #480
pj_mukh wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To OP's point, I am curious why a tech forward crowd would consider AI-training/inference anywhere close to a significant contributor of greenhouse gasses? Datacenters are like a tiny blip on emissions plots [1] I think AI is a convenient foil to get people whipped up and out to vote, but I know HN is not the forum for that. The technical data clearly says that closed-loop water coolers don't use that much water and…

Are currently, but at the scale AI corps are trying to deploy at they'll be the largest user of electricity.

[deleted]

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

#595

Post by polalavik »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #555
polalavik wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same boat, although the soul sucking, I find, comes from the fact that AI can iterate on ideas so much faster than I could even begin to pull out a pen and paper that I find myself in an existential crisis when I use it too often. What is the point of my work, especially when I must ship for a paycheck, if I offload all my thinking and understanding to a machine. I can certainly dig deep and understand all the code t…

Wouldn’t you rather they say AI told them than claim it’s their own idea?

both are aggravating. i think you can use AI, say you use AI, and then demonstrate your understanding of what it created through documentation or other means. Hiding it or blatantly turning off your brain and saying "AI told me" are both bad practice.

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

#596

Post by sanderjd »

niuzeta wrote: post #591

I can only speak for myself here. In the end it's an emotional response. I am "anti-AI" because it has caused a net negative experience for me, so I feel bad towards it. Confirmation bias makes it easier for me up-vote or voice concerns for "anti-AI" posts and stay silent for "pro-AI" posts. When I first started working with claude at work, I had a mixed bag of emotions. On one hand, it was awesome, surreal experienc…

Absolutely. I'm a heavy embracer of AI and very appreciative of the opportunities it is opening up to do more with the same amount of time and team. But I 100% share all these frustrations.

The upshot is that I have both very positive and very negative feelings about it.

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

#597

Post by hunterpayne »

oleg_antonyan wrote: post #202
simianwords wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully, this looks like coping with the fact that a fundamentally new technology is discovered but people can’t cope with the immensity of it so they end up throwing in shallow and spread out criticisms spanning sovereignty, USA bad, replacing people bad etc. It’s my personal opinion and it looks extremely incurious analysis of what’s going on. Even if a person doesn’t like AI, I would expect a curious person t…

Pure tech dimensions of AI are out of scope. The internet is full of tech critiques and praises, what's the point of yet another opinion on it. Can't open linkedin without seeing only AI-generated posts about AI replacing people next to AI dumb. But the political dimension seems completly abscent from the public discussion

It seems to be the opposite to me. There are mostly relatively fact free discussion of AI which are highly political. And rarely you can find some technical discussions. And even then politics will invade those discussions but ego and naive optimism tends to be more driving those discussions. Even on technical matters. NNs are still very much a black box afterall and people tend to project what they want on what they think is happening inside.

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

#598

Post by pokstad »

Because this group likes to go against the status quo. The status quo currently is to AI-ify everything. Some of us think there is a hype-reality-distortion-field-bubble occurring which goes contrary to conventional knowledge. It’s good to have healthy critical opinions instead of group think.

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

#599

Post by hunterpayne »

specproc wrote: post #216
thin_carapace wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the grandparent commentor described potential future paths of unfettered ai usage. it's not clear why arises the expectation that a discussion of future possibilities must adhere to a contemporary argumentative format (mainly because concrete evidence of future events does not exist). it's your right to interpret this discussion as 'USA bad', personally I think it's very likely that the USA will continue to exercise…

The USA is terrifying from a non-US perspective now, and it's never been great. We're furious at the states and sick of being dependent on its enshittified technology. Anti-AI sentiment absolutely and correctly has a "USA bad" steak.

You are your own worse enemy. I really hope you never have to live to see you get what you want. I suspect you wouldn't like it very much.

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

#600

Post by pyuser583 »

The hype is exceeding the actual day to day impact.

Much of the hype is focused on functional limitations, where the real payoff is speed.

We can now do some basic - and increasingly more advanced - things much much faster.

For experienced programmers, this isn’t new. It’s a cycle that began with compilers and most recently hit with containerization and cloud computing.

But the public discourse isn’t based around the reality, it’s based around a projected future.

For those with experience, the projected future is a combination of sci-fi and back of the envelope estimates.

Post reply on HN