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Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
671–680 of 812 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#672Nothing gives me less confidence that something is a genuine question than opening the question with the phrase "genuine question." :(
Did you really ask this hoping to reevaluate your perspectives from the answers, or did you only ask this in hope to make OTHERS reevaluate their perspective by making them ask themselves "why am I anti-AI?"
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#673Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah there was no system in place then to ensure those who were left without means to survive would be able to survive. Shouldn't be the case with the knowledge of that history and all this time we have to actually change things. We quite literally know that it's a matter of only a few years now before the vast amount of knowledge work (at least) is fully automated away; governments should be making changes to make t…
> governments should be making changes to make the economic transition more smooth. With what money. Knowledge work brings in taxes. Taxes are spent redistributing wealth so that the bottom percent are cared for. But all that money will be concentrated into the hands of the few (even more than it is now) and china. After all caring for the poor is socialism, and we can't have that.
Forget about "money", and the economy in general as you know it. All that's going out the window because it's rooted in wage labour aka jobs, which will ultimately disappear. Those who don't like the actually-effective-but-highly-disliked system... well things are just going to suck for them.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#674Earlier quoted context omitted.
The argument is dialectical. In other words both sides are right. 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, and what is the root cause of the weaknesses. Is it intrinsic to the models that LLM's use, or the way thy have been trained. In this knowledge is where the gold mine is for the next start up. For…
> 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…
We aren’t even being given a choice nor being consulted for our judgement.
Higher-ups are literally saying “This company WILL use AI, you are required to use AI, now go use it whether you want to or not”.
I wonder if this will change now with the model cost explosions that are happening.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#675Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I also worry about the debasement of value of human work. Looking at history, say of the weavers, it didn't work out to well for them when the powered loom came along. They eventually moved on to other things, because that was the only option. And the world is better with the power loom. It's scary but we still have to embrace that eventually pretty much all valuable labour will be automated, and by then our societ…
>They eventually moved on to other things, because that was the only option. Who is they? The majority of British textile workers experienced destitute conditions following industrialization. That's one of my two gripes with AI: 1) It's posed to take over knowledge work, and yet our societies have no safety nets for the millions of knowledge workers. 2) It promotes superficial understanding. It sounds so convincing a…
1) Yes, that's a serious issues that needs to be addressed, but many are too high on the status quo, because freedom and meritocracy and self-determination and all that. Rather watch the world burn than give up the ability to be able to earn and own more than the next person.
2) That's up to users. Those who only want superficial understanding will get that, and those who want deep understanding will question more and ask for citations so they can verify.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#676The LLM and diffusion model businesses stole the lunches of a huge chunk of commercial artists, digested it, and then shit it back in our laps, saying it was our fault.
I have zero problem with the technology as a technology. None. The vast majority of its output is garbage but that’s true of a lot of things. Towards the end of my coding career, I even found early copilot to be pretty useful.
However, I have a giant goddamned problem with the way the industry has conducted itself, and the way the most vocal industry boosters have not only been bereft of empathy, but overtly contemptful. That’s even before you get into the completely unapologetic ways these companies are shoving AI ‘features’ down creative throats trained on our own stolen work, and shoving data centers down the throats of lower-income people nationwide. Speaking frankly as a commercial artist, the entire commercial bloc the AI universe could be shot straight into the fucking sun and I’d throw a very well-attended celebratory party.
Societally, AI is deeply unpopular. If you don’t understand why, you might be in an algorithmic bubble. Try to deliberately go into non-tech-business-adjacent intellectual spheres and listen to what people are saying without getting defensive. You might realize that you’re making a lot of unfounded assumptions about the place of AI companies and tools in other people’s lives.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#677I call these AI tools "proprietary non-determenistic database of the free internet". They belong to american companies which can cut off your access if american government doesn't like your country's government. They fed from the free internet that many of us grew up in, store it in humans unreadable form and sell you access to it. If some day claude starts to spit out compiled binaries instead of code nobody will no…
> the free internet
It's so much worse than this, though. These companies have raped and pillaged every last store of human knowledge: art, transcripts of conversations, newspaper articles, etc., etc. Contrast that with what Aaron Schwartz did and wound up taking his life over. It's beyond shameful.
Despite how the first few trial balloon lawsuits have played out, I think there are still a few shoes left to drop. For example, try asking Gemini (very nicely) to output an image containing your favorite comic book or Disney character and it will eventually do it -- despite the response you'll probably get on the first try saying it's not legally allowed to. In what rational universe did the companies training these models not violate either the T&C of their access to the source material (e.g. streamed content) or aren't they violating copyright/trademark by generating content containing this IP?
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#678The LLM and diffusion model businesses stole the lunches of a huge chunk of commercial artists, digested it, and then shit it back in our laps, saying it was our fault. I have zero problem with the technology as a technology. None. The vast majority of its output is garbage but that’s true of a lot of things. Towards the end of my coding career, I even found early copilot to be pretty useful. However, I have a giant…
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Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#679Earlier quoted context omitted.
I haven't had the patience or mentality to really absorb "ok but how is this useful" until that thread and your highlighted references. Thank you for the curated highlights, however brief it may be, because it's very hard to find such diamonds without dedicating far too much time wading through the abstract gatekept comments on the topic, in most cases. Real world examples give me much hope!
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 always thought of myself as merely ADD, but your comment is so incredibly relatable across all dimensions that I find myself wondering how far along the autism spectrum I am. Although, in my personal opinion, neither term is especially helpful: it's not a sensory/executive processing disorder if it's clearly benefiting both yourself and the people around you. It might make being sociable difficult, but that's the tradeoff for being willing to engage your mind in ways that others filter out as "too much information."
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#680I use AI every day.
And I am absolutely sick of having to justify my job against people who feel they can now vibecode an application without understanding the code.
Kinda like how someone thinks they can build a house without understanding the different layers.
And it's made worse that the way these applications are now built: from the outside, with zero regards towards how it's actually put together.
I understand that execution speed matters over elegance of code. I'm not looking for elegance. I'm looking for code that is clear, well abstracted, well reasoned, so that it not only serves the business purpose, but is also technically sound, non-DRY, with clear indicators of where YAGNI was invoked etc.
I'm genuinely tired of having to defend my job. And the world is using the AI revolution to get rid of so many people. When you call 911 in my city you now talk to AI. You call the local dealer, you get AI.
So AI is presented as this 10x modifier, but I'm not working 1/10, I'm working the same if not harder to verify my PM's slop, because it's me who gets paged at 2PM, not my PM.
I'm tired boss.