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

The genuine answer is that many people who hold a lot of power over me (the executive suite of my industry) intend to do me harm with it (put me out of a job).

I have realised that my own "anti-AI" position is little to do with AI itself, and a lot to do with the flatly appalling culture around it, and my reluctance is partly to do with what navigating it has meant for me and people I care about.

I am willing to accept that I must learn these tools, so I am learning the tools. (Essentially: open source, open weights, open culture: the true state of the art.)

Now that I am learning these tools at my own pace, I can evaluate them all as the future boring technology they will soon be.

It has helped me see what I am "anti-", with clarity:

- I am "anti-" the way that tech people have brazenly underestimated the complexity, values, culture, traditions, and principles of the creative industries they have gleefully and derisively fucked up (I have a foot in multiple camps here so I can see this easily)

— I am "anti-" the exhausting burden-shifting of it all. Everyone has new stuff to deal with; every creative community has to develop new rules to stop "fix my AI generated thing" crushes, PR slop, "I asked AI and it said..." spam etc.

- I am "anti-" the tethering of this technology to "e/acc", and the "in the near future we will destroy all your jobs, we're deadly serious about this, sorry, I guess you're fucked haha, maybe learn AI" mentality that it has been riddled with since the earliest point

- I am "anti-" the sort of new tech industry imperial default: hey you can just change your business so it is dependent on pouring money into one of two American cloud startups that have demonstrated little commitment to openness or behaving in a predictable manner, that have subsidised pricing that will one day blow up, and is like Uber did, YOLO-ripping through regulations, legal principles and foreign commercial cultures, and at the end of it will get the government to change the rules so it doesn't have to do anything little people have to do like make a profit, and will leave said litle people holding the bag while they yomp on towards the next thing to fuck up.

In short, I am "anti-" the brazen, entitled, trollish trend of devaluing all of human culture and denigrating anyone who is not in the tech industry as expendable, inferior, quaint, classist etc.; it is like what happens to any social group when the spoilt children of the local overgrown rich-kid come to dominate it.

The technology? A bit less world-shaking than people realise, but possibly worth it for code-generation.

(This is just what I think and I'm not going to argue with your dissent, not least because as a middle-aged British man I am always right)

I 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 notice, and we'll essentially get proprietary cloud-hosted compiler that most in the world depends on to build software. With built-in telemetry and backdoors and clause in license that allow full overtake of your business if provider wants it ofc. It's a great shift from the internet we all know and love towards the new subscription-based access to world's propriatary knowledge base. It's a perfect "mind control" tool as well - you don't need USAID, "free media" and stuff like that in other countries when all people there including politicians ask chatgpt everything from meaning of life to recipies of pancakes. Once you see these political and philosophical dimensions it's hard to unsee how claudecode running on my PC won't turn into a weapon some day. But in blissful ignorance it's fun to use, and companies love it for the promise of replacing people. Amen

Same experience. But that's simply because you think you're experienced but the OP knows that you're just deluding yourself. Just kidding.

More seriously, I think this is a true reflection of a cultural phenomena. All discussions have become more polarized. There is a more of a generational divide in perception and discussion. I would also say there is a loss of nuance.

To complicate this even further there is a real diversity of experiences depending on many factors.

I mean we had flame wars on USENET but somehow it feels to me that most discourse even on controversial topics was civil. When we had tabs vs. spaces flamewars (or whatever the fun topic of the day was) everyone knew they were in a flame war (and often acknowledged that). Or maybe I'm just being nostalgic/biased.

I see the anti-AI sentiments in my work place. I think people are genuinely worried/concerned and don't know how this is going to change our world or even where we are exactly. This is also spilling into adjacent areas where people have strong emotional responses to (the rich, the economy, job market, politics, environment etc.).