Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI? • Hacker News Board

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

#741

Post by shortercode » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 12:58 PM UTC

As other people have said the community is divided. I try not to be too negative about AI frankly because a lot of people I know are excited about it and are using it. But it’s safe to say I have strong feelings.

For me HN became a lot less interesting when AI became popular. I don’t want to read about OpenAI’s incremental improvements, or see an AI generated landing page that fails to tell me what a project is about. Maybe the people who love the craft have also reduced the amount they are writing…

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

#742

Post by xnx » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 1:02 PM UTC

x1n13y84issmd42 wrote: post #730

bah9 wrote: post #720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Now I’m addicted to architectures But architecture creation can also be delegated to ai if you give agent enough context about functional/non-functional requirements, certain business side restrictions etc. Your work is to be feedback loop mechanism between people and llm, no? Please, give me encouraging examples of technical tasks that cant be delegated to ai with accurate prompting

I have a feeling that a prompt accurate enough to cover all the important stuff (functional/non-functional requirements, certain business side restrictions etc) would be close in its volume and complexity to the actual software code and configuration (given the proper tools, frameworks and infrastructure in place)...

You might be thinking too near-term. If a sufficiently advanced coding agent has read all the language specs, all the code, all the software engineering/architecture books, and all of human knowledge along with it, why would it need any longer prompt than "create complete video streaming infrastructure to compete with Netflix"?

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

#743

Post by vitally3643 » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 1:05 PM UTC

stolsvik wrote: post #740

HN was - and probably still is - very negative to Bitcoin. Which always puzzled me. But I’ve realized: To grasp such concepts, you can’t only be good at code.

Because cryptocurrencies are literally a ponzi scheme used almost exclusively to defraud regular people.

The only positive arguments are made from a lofty idealistic perspective utterly divorced from the reality of how these systems are used to engage in mass theft from people who have been conned into "investing"

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

#744

Post by daniel-alexande » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 1:31 PM UTC

Fear and resistance to change.

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

#745

Post by stasomatic » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 1:50 PM UTC

I use them daily but trust and verify. More convenient than a web search, they stole the index, they better be. But, they are the other, and we and their creators don't know how they work.

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

#746

Post by LogicFailsMe » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 2:02 PM UTC

hunterpayne wrote: post #577

LogicFailsMe wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think society is divided on AI because we've let the billionaire tech bro class rawdog power resources and AI deployments and I welcome the pushback on those 2 axes. The water nonsense OTOH saps my will to live. But also, the algorithms push enragement equals engagement and that favors pushing content to the product (us) that enrages the product to drive up their engagement numbers so they click on more ads. Meanwh…

The power and water requirements of AI DCs narrative is entirely nonsense. It doesn't hold up to even a cursory analysis on the back of an envelope. And medical advances of AI are from other ML algorithms, not LLMs. They use similar technology and can run in the same DCs, but they aren't the same and people don't really have the same opinions on them both.

IMO the power issue is legit: https://ieefa.org/resources/projected-data-center-growth-spu...

But sensing the free market pitchforks and torches, the pushback commenced shortly thereafter...

But you're right that this can be addressed in multiple ways such as pushing the locations to places where construction is cheap or building where it is made cheap to operate with on-site power generation.

What's your take on medical VLMs? That's pretty much an LLM with multiple classes of tokens. While nothing's FDA approved yet, Cognita CXR is listed as a breakthrough device and multiple companies providing conventional AI have both published research and signaled intent to submit for FDA approval.

https://mosaicclinical.ai/news/2026/03/mosaic-clinical-techn...

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

#747

Post by animuchan » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 2:04 PM UTC

Personally I'm (vaguely) anti-AI because I'm made to interface with it a lot.

Every time I open my editor, there's another colorful popup about some AI feature or other, and it's never what I want. Product people don't seem to understand that nobody wants ads in their editor, no matter how animated and HDR.

And I use all of the AI, to be clear, and surely it's a brilliant tool. But the fatigue is also real.

Which is why I want every big AI player to catastrophically fail -- not out of spite or anything, but because it will holistically improve on my current state of being. And the product people will need to learn some profession so probably will stop with the ads, too.

I want to think it's not an anti-AI stance really, but pro-user, in some real sense.

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

#748

Post by DeepSeaTortoise » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 2:15 PM UTC

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…

Right, of course it's those who had the most time to accumulate wealth in the wealthier nations and professions who are most opposed to one of the most expensive subscriptions in history taking over more and more professions.

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

#749

Post by thegrim33 » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 2:40 PM UTC

If you accept as premise that popular online forums such as HN are manipulated for geopolitical gain, then just think it through. Who benefits from spreading that narrative? Who benefits from trying to slow down AI development, stop data centers from being built, etc? Think it through.

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

#750

Post by adamtaylor_13 » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 2:52 PM UTC

tpdly wrote: post #684

adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument that LLMs are "feeding me back free and open internet" seems to skip the most useful aspect of the tool. I could never, as an individual read, let alone synthesize and make decisions with, the amount of information on the internet. The LLM takes that free and open information and feeds me back novel information based on that free information. It gives me ideas, opinions, and hard data based on that infor…

I think you undervalue the contribution of internet-scale data to foundation modeling, and because LLMs can obsolete the content they required, I think its fair to characterize it as theft. Obviously RL contributes a lot to capabilities, but the judgement that an LLM uses to 'synthesize information' is born from the training data. The scale of the data really is beyond intuition. books3, for example, would 230 yrs of…

Can you steal something that is free and openly available?

I just don't understand this argument. "Theft" feels like a nice, heavy, moral accusation to toss at those you're debating with, but the actual prerequisites for theft don't even exist in this situation.