I Am An AI Hater

It's interesting to see the trend of the attitude towards GenAI in Hacker News through out the years. This is totally vibe based and I don't have numbers to back it up, but back in 2022-2023, the site was dominantly people who mostly treat GenAI as a curious technology without too much attachment, and some non-trivial amount of folks who are very skeptical of the tech. More recently I see a lot more people who see themselves as evangelists and try very hard to boost/advocate the technology (see all the "LLM coding changes my life" posts). It seems that the tide has turned back a little bit again since we now see this kind of posts surfacing.

For me, I kind of wish this site to go back to the good old days where people just share their nerdy niche hacker things and not filling the first page with the same arguments we see on the other parts of the internet over and over again. ; ) But granted I was attracted by the clickbait title too, so I can't blame others.

Curious technology? People were foaming at the mouth about "license concerns" when GitHub Copilot was first announced, saying they're going to boycott Microsoft. But just like all things, over time people realize they're not as good or bad as initially thought. I noticed this too with media generation, people on Twitter were very mad about it and now many of them use Photoshop's AI features.

I don't pay much attention to the submission themselves, but I do care what the fellow HN-ers think, and my own "vibe-based" perspective is that the voices have been predominantly negative for many years now, and only grow even more so.

HN is usually negative, cynical, skeptical, eyerolling, regardless of topic.

Just the other day someone posted the ImageNet 2012 thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4611830), which was basically the threshold moment that kickstarted deep learning for computer vision. Commenters claimed it doesn't prove anything, it's sensational, it's just one challenge with a few teams, etc. Then there is the famous comment when Dropbox was created that it could be replaced by a few shell scripts and an ftp server.

The whole endless debate about "stochastic parrots" and "singularity" was already actively ongoing in threads here in 2022, for example. I remember when GPT-4 just dropped and was everywhere in the comments, and all those things you describe were already there.

If anything, it reminds me of crypto - lots of investment seemed to attract a lot of users to HN that I highly suspect had some sort of...let's just call it motivated reasoning.

Thanks for linking that thread. Really puts things in perspective.

This does not feel anything like crypto to me.

Crypto always had hard to understand and abstract use cases. It became popular because the value was going up.

LLMs are different. There are an endless amount of use cases that people can easily understand. Now, just how well it does things is debatable but there is a very clear value gain.

Hell, I got it give me a list of recipes for the week based on my preferences and dietary needs then created a grocery list in 2 minutes. Did I need an LLM for this? No, but it made it so much faster and this is what I am finding with a lot of tasks.

Are you sure they're the same people?

My general rule is thumb now is that if HN takes the time to deride it then there's probably something to it, if it gets completely ignored then there's probably not.

> More recently I see a lot more people who see themselves as evangelists and try very hard to boost/advocate the technology (see all the "LLM coding changes my life" posts).

It feels very much like the crypto bubble a few years back (the second, larger one, when we were informed that soon everything would be an NFT). This is actually one thing that puts me off AI; on top of a certain amount of scepticism about whether it is actually useful, the whole space feels very, very, _very_ grifter-y. In some cases it is literally the same people who were pushing NFTs a while back.

> Hell, I got it give me a list of recipes for the week based on my preferences and dietary needs then created a grocery list in 2 minutes.

I mean, er, yeah, but that's not a multi-trillion dollar industry, is the thing. "People find ChatGPT mildly useful" is not going to cut it, not at current levels of investment.

They asked about general trends so it doesn't matter if it's the same people or not as long as the average sentiment has changed.

This reminds me of the Louis C.K skit where he talks about people complaining on a plane, completely forgetting how incredible it is to be flying.

Not so long ago, the example I gave about recipes was something you would only see in sci-fi.

Maybe you’re right there is too much investment, but that’s the same whenever there is a new technology that has completely unlocked new possibilities.

How have you measured the average?

I haven't, although I'm sure there exists a way to do. The point is that if one were on HN and reading the threads on AI in 2021, they'll see dissent as being nothing new.