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

131–140 of 812 posts

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

#131

Post by onion2k »

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.

This isn't really related to AI because it relates to manually coded things just as much, but on this point specifically this is only true for your very early I-gave-it-to-a-bunch-of-interested-people-to-try customers. It's much less true for your first paying customers, especially if the 'major issues' make their pain worse (e.g. data loss, time wasted, etc). You lose those ones for good, or until there's a critical mass of social proof to tell them the early problems are solved.

'I can dash out an early prototype with AI and then fix it later' is a dangerous mindset. If you're working in a small market with a limited number of customers you might piss off enough people that you won't be able to recover. There still has to be some level of quality. But it is a balance.

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

#133

Post by lovich »

Because no one has shown profitability, only made claims that are unproven so far. This combined with being one of the largest investments of capital since the rail system, and being backed by known conmen like Musk, make a subset of the population(myself included) sceptical.

If you are blind to or don't care about those caveats then AI looks amazing because it can legitimately produce novel results. Its just that for the subset that I am part of, it looks like they are doing so by burning a dollar to make 50 cents in revenue and that is not sustainable.

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

#134

Post by ares623 »

dag100 wrote: post #88
thenoblesunfish wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are going to be asked to do your job, faster, and you are going to have a massive headache managing a bunch of machines mostly doing your job.

That is the status quo now . If LLMs get better and better, managers will simply direct them, well, directly. That's what the parent comment means by the machine learning to do your job. It completely , not mostly , replaces you.

To all the managers reading this and thinking "phew. so long suckers!", I'd be willing do what you do for 50% of the pay. Surely it is _I_ that will be irreplaceable!

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

#136

Post by blooalien »

mkl wrote: post #24

A lot of people on HN are anti- overhyping , which comes across as being opposed to the thing being overhyped. It was similar when cryptocurrency overhyping was popular.

^^^ Yes, exactly this! ^^^

I'm personally amazed by what "A.I." is actually capable of, but I have a fairly solid understanding of what's going on "under the hood" of it, and therefore have somewhat realistic expectations of it. Then I see folks go overhyping it's capabilities because they've drunk themselves stupid on the lies they've been told about what it is and what it's capable of (and it's simply not capable of what the liars at the top of the A.I. corporations are telling everyone). Just try to temper their enthusiasm with a bit of reality and you're instantly "anti-AI" or "doomer" or some other just completely wrong characterization. At this point I'm convinced that for a lotta folks, A.I. is just another literal cult just like politics these days, or crypto-coins not that long ago... Drink that kool-aid, I guess... ~shrug~

I also don't think that many of the so-called "anti-AI" folks are so much against AI itself, as they're against the unethical ways that certain folks "at the top" are using it to do massive harm in an attempt to try to satisfy their bottomless greed and lust for power, and against the ways that some other folks are using it to basically escape the need to think at all, even when their job requires actual thinking.

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

#137

Post by GolfPopper »

At my workplace, we outsource a great deal. Of all the companies we outsource to, the employees of two are very upfront that they use LLM "assistance". Their output has been getting worse and worse since that started, about a year ago. Firmware produced with LLM assistance results in hardware that does not work reliably. Tools created or maintained with LLM-assistance do not function reliably. In short, LLM-created product doesn't work in my direct experience.

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

#138

Post by lodovic »

dag100 wrote: post #88
thenoblesunfish wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are going to be asked to do your job, faster, and you are going to have a massive headache managing a bunch of machines mostly doing your job.

That is the status quo now . If LLMs get better and better, managers will simply direct them, well, directly. That's what the parent comment means by the machine learning to do your job. It completely , not mostly , replaces you.

I don't think they'll let the chain of managers above you handle the llm directly. That is just too much risk of incompetence. Instead, there will be micro teams (1 dev, 1 sre, 1 product owner) that are meta manageed by a LLM. And their llm reports directly to a higher up's llm. And software will diversify to prevent all these supply chain attacks we've seen lately.

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

#139

Post by rpcope1 »

johnfn wrote: post #109
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…

While I agree that it's "divided", I wouldn't say "simply". Mentioning AI brings out a sharply negative side of HN that I had not seen before 2023. It is the only subject where, when I have shared that I built something with it, I have gotten derogatory comments claiming I am inexperienced, unintelligent, and that the thing I built (a hobby project) is unimpressive or embarrassing. This has never happened in the deca…

There's probably a lot to say about it's merits or problems, but given the demographics (or my perception of them) is largely "software people" can you really be that surprised or angry given that this could snuff out a _lot_ of people's livelihoods like nothing we've probably seen in our lifetimes?

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

#140

Post by kentich »

jhbadger wrote: post #102
kentich wrote: post #85

They called it AI instead of calling it neural networks and therefore provoked unrealistic expectations for this technology. Criticism will never end because of the fraudulent naming of this technology.

The field has been named "Artificial Intelligence" since the 1950s, It has nothing to do with neural nets per se. It just is about systems that do what was previously thought to be only something people could do. Traditionally the big names in the field like Minsky actually despised neural nets -- Minsky even wrote a book called Perceptrons (1969) which trashed the early version of neural nets and discouraged most re…

What field? They brought back up that old sci-fi term AI specifically for neural networks to create a false impression among people that this is a technology that can "think."
Post reply on HN