Mainly because noisy people are most visible. Both pro-AI and anti-AI (so to speak) crowds have them.
Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
21–30 of 812 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#22AFAICT hacker news is only slightly less positive on AI than the average tech industry gathering, which is still like two standard deviations more positive than any average gathering of random people in a city. I think the culture of silicon valley reads anything less than gushing hype as negativity right now, which is a weirdly polarized place to be, but the discourse around this technology is bizarre in general, being an absolute gamechanger that nonetheless still somehow feels quite oversold by its most ardent boosters, who are themselves a minority, but one with rather disproportionate voice and reach
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#23You have no obligation to agree with them, but after all this time I don't know how someone on either side could be ignorant of what the other side's main arguments are.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#24A 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.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#25Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#26The root cause if of course AI's role in loss of power on compensation (coding as a skill is no longer as valuable), and loss of power in labor vs capital.
It's hard to face this, specially for the one oasis in the job market that pays well.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#27It'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…
As an aside, the variety of examples in that other thread is impressive. Here are some that I noticed:
Fixing my furnace: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417845
New software for a retro keyboard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418158
Customizing my camper van: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417379
Porting my astronomy app from an old Nokia phone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48419242
Fixing my kid’s science fair project: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48419364
Unborking the family printer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48419480
Learning to draw anatomy (!): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418716
Lowering my electrical bill: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417949
Making classic guitar pedals programmable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418006
Avocado armchair guy victory lap: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417658 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418274)
Putting an overlay on enemies in a video game: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48420635
It just goes on and on. I was a little nervous when I saw that post originally, but it's amazing what happens when a title is somehow just right.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#28> They care that the product works
This reminds me of Anthropic's post where they say they ship 8x as much code as they used to.
And I stopped to consider how many times I've used an app and thought, "You know what this needs? More code!"
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#29Because AI use correlates with sloppiness, and due to the fundamental attribution fallacy us engineers don't like sloppiness.
This is a lot of it for me. "All users care about is that they can drive a car across the bridge. They don't care if an AI built it."
I want a solid, proud, well-engineered bridge, goddammit!
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#30wth are you talking about
Isn't the mere fact that every HN frontpage is filled with AI-related articles not indicative enough of how much it holds interest here?
> post about how AI “writes bad code,” “introduces bugs,” “creates technical debt,” or something along those lines.
Many people here are engineers and are interested in solving problems. First step to solving problems is to identify them.