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

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

#161

Post by p4bl0 »

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…

Thanks for putting it this way. I have to admit I was really astonished by the question as I feel like HN is very much pro-AI at least in the sense that there is more AI promotion on HN than there is AI acceptance among people in the real world. It's been months if not years since most of the posts are about genAI, and in a largely favorable way. It's actually quite fascinating that for some people it feels like the opposite.

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

#162

Post by OlivOnTech »

oleg_antonyan wrote: post #148

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 no…

You forgot the push forward towards more destruction of the planet we depend on to live, and the centralization of wealth in addition to the one of power.

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

#163

Post by logicchains »

maplethorpe wrote: post #135

HN has been very pro-AI over the last several years. It's only swung back slightly the other way recently. I suspect this is due to tensions in the gulf causing some institutions to reallocate their investments, which results in reduced bot activity.

It's the opposite. There's documented evidence of China recently funding anti-AI bots in the west in an attempt to weaken the US's AI lead, I imagine that such bots also inhabit HN.

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

#164

Post by Ampersander »

This site is the gathering place of the biggest AI zealots there are. If someone posted that they have stopped talking and started communicating with the world solely through a camera pointed at their face and having claude interpret their facial expression, I would not know if they were joking. That is the caliber of AI fandom here.

AI anecdotes posted here are also clearly exaggerated. When someone tells, it's a story of extraordinary feats, something truly spectacular. But then when someone shows, it's always some below mediocre slop. It looks like shit and the program does not work etc.

This is not a recent development either. Ever since chatgpt came out there have been people here posting that they use it for things it can't do.

And I'm not even of the opinion that LLMs are useless technology. They clearly are good for many things. Recent security vulnerability findings have been impressive for example. Automatic spam and astroturfing is an obvious use case. And it's actually easy to come up with potential use cases. This technology is not bitcoin.

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

#166

Post by simianwords »

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.

The hype was totally justified for AI now that coding has been completely transformed for the most part.

Trying to “correct the hype” just looks like clowning in hindsight.

It’s like people in 1990s were trying to correct the internets hype: oh you know it won’t change anything and the tech bros want to create hype out of nothing!

So it’s not neutral to be anti hype for AI. It is just wrong.

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

#167

Post by Levitating »

oleg_antonyan wrote: post #148

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 no…

That would be a world where there is very little value in local models. I don't thinkt that will be the case.

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

#168

Post by raincole »

> there hasn’t been a single day where I’ve checked the HN Best RSS feed without seeing a post about how AI “writes bad code,” “introduces bugs,” “creates technical debt,” or something along those lines.

Confirmation bias. There has been pro-AI post every single day too but because you already decided that HN is anti-AI you didn't notice that.

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

#170

Post by logicchains »

There's a huge difference in outcomes depending on the skill of the operator. People who aren't good operators get poor results out of AI and so develop a negative opinion of it. Given operating AI well depends on having excellent written communication and specification skills, and engineers are notoriously reluctant to specify and communicate clearly, there's a significant number of engineers for whom AI produces much worse code than if they wrote it themselves.
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