Ask HN: Why are certain communities like Reddit so anti-AI?
I was surprised to get such a negative reaction in the programming subreddit when I made a comment about AI being a productivity boon for me. I went searching for some AI-related discussion in that subreddit and it’s strongly negative. Additionally, Reddit-wide the sentiment appears to be very negative. Is there some kind of phenomenon that results in communities like Reddit being unreceptive to AI whereas places like hacker news are more receptive (or at least open)?
There are people on here who are negative about AI as well.
I'm not negative about AI within the things it's currently useful for and the constraints of what LLM's can help with.
I'm pretty negative about the massive over-hyping of AI with wild assertions and completely underwhelmed by the current implementations of it - I also half suspect they are going to crash the financial markets when reality and hype catch up with each other.
Who knows, I might be wrong, they might discover machine intelligence and make AI actually be AI in the next 5-10 years which would be quite the achievement since we don't have a good grasp of what intelligence even is including our own.
It's not really anything new though, hot new technology gets early adoption, salespeople move in, becomes massively over hyped, will change everything turns out to not change everything but be useful for some things, gets used for those things and the world continues.
I'm even old enough to remember when OOP was spoken about as "The Next Big Thing That Will Change Everything".
Gartner even has a name for it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle
> OOP was spoken about as "The Next Big Thing That Will Change Everything"
OOP WAS a Big Thing that DID change everything :)
Indeed, see Plateau of Productivity on the linked Gartner Hype Cycle.
Nothing I said implied it didn't but also the hype was way out there mostly iirc on the back of Java but the hyperbole was very familiar to what we see now about LLM's.
I think most of the hate and resistance is due to the erosion of trust that comes with AI. We’re already at the point where you have to question the authenticity of A/V media you see on social media. Soon we may not be able to trust even news outlets.
Nobody* wants this to happen, yet it’s charging forward.
* yes of course there are some, but they’re already the ones with the power and money.
Yes there are negative people here as well, and also people like you who are skeptical about the hype parts. But I’ve just noticed on other social media it’s like 100 naysayers for every proponent
Have you considered that you might have it backwards? That most of society is anti-ai, with HN being an outlier in how favorable the overall view on AI is here?
Have you tried thinking about what LLMs have done and what it implies (and what the companies are explicitly shouting out loud tbh) outside of helping you write code?
I have, but that should mean there is consistent backlash against it but I don’t see that. Reddit programming communities, for example, appear far more averse
Reddit allows (encourages?) a lot more vitriol. And anyone can downvote so pro AI comments get downvoted to oblivion.
Here both pro and anti posts can and often share the same space. Unless it’s just very plainly vitriolic.
Also the mods there have different incentives than the mods here.
For every one person that uses AI correctly, there are 10,000 people using it incorrectly.
The problem with AI is that you have to already be an authority on the output to know whether it is right and usable or wrong.
Many people out there treat AI as the authority not even knowing whether the output is correct or not.
I know for me that AI has made programming easier for me, but at the same time made my job harder cleaning up other people’s “but the AI told me to do it” messes
Self hating bots:-)
maybe the real people on reddit hate ai because of all the bots on the platform? Also many of the subreddits are wildly biased and the mods will ban anyone who goes against the official groupthink. HN in fact is one of the few communities that actively encourage constructive communication, and even then it's an uphill battle.