FRESH

Hacker News

Home

The Uncanny Valley and the Rising Power of Anti-AI Sentiment

38 points by jcbritton

by lizknope

3 subcomments

Every PC gamer / hardware tech review forum is full of anti-AI hatred.
People want to buy a new GPU, add RAM, a new SSD, or hard drive. All of these have doubled or quadrupled in price in just a few months.
Then there are reddit threads every day where I think 30% of the original posts and comments are AI generated spam. If I see a post with emdashes or anything that ends by asking for "thoughts?" I just down vote and report as spam. I want to interact with actual humans not AI bots.
Then we see posts about AI data centers and electricity use which will lead to higher electric bills for ordinary people if demand is higher than supply.
This is ignoring all the stuff about people losing jobs.
So why should the video game playing population or even the general population be in support of AI? Of course it has uses but there are so many negatives right now it is easy for me to understand why people are already sick of it.

by xnx

2 subcomments

I want to use AI to do my job.
I want to use AI to do your job.
I don't want someone else to use AI to do my job.
I don't want to spend my attention on AI content that takes more time to consume than create.

by pseudalopex

0 subcomment

Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.[1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

by noosphr

2 subcomments

I wasn't expecting the next culture war to be about AI.
In 20 years the thanksgiving dinner fights over AI equality are going to be wild.
>I'm not a bigot I support trans rights. But clankers aren't welcome in our share house.
>> OK Millennial. I'm a cyborg with 95% of my brain running in a private server.

by userbinator

4 subcomments

The public was much more likely to say AI would harm them than benefit them.
There are so many things called "AI" these days, that studies like this are basically meaningless. I think (hope) most people's views can't be reduced to a single binary question.

by JoshTriplett

1 subcomments

There is a dead comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47829571 that deserves to be not-dead, and read and understood.

by gondar

0 subcomment

AI is useful
A small group of people are going to acquire immerse wealth and power from this new technology
80% of everyone else will be facing possibility of losing jobs or reduced income, if they still have job
This will be another rust belt decades, but for white collar jobs and costal states

by blululu

1 subcomments

>> Public hostility toward AI now looks stronger than ordinary skepticism toward a new technology. People have reasons for that response, including fraud, misinformation, privacy invasion, concentration of power, and job displacement. Job displacement carries its own emotional weight because it threatens status, livelihood, and social usefulness, which gives the fear an existential edge. >>This essay explores why anti-AI sentiment may be gaining force.
The article lists off all the obvious and credible reasons why people are opposed to AI in the intro paragraph. It then spends the next 25 paragraphs advancing a very clever pet theory derived psychology about what might be going on here. While interesting in its own right, the article misses the obvious concerns that it raised in the intro paragraph.

by jmathai

2 subcomments

Both things can be true.
AI can help you in the near term and harm you in the long term.
I think the more people use AI the more their view shifts from the former to the latter.

by yellow_postit

1 subcomments

This is a very US centric view in part because of the low confidence in the American government to be able to effectively regulate negative impacts.
https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-ai-index-report/publi...

by zarzavat

1 subcomments

AI is a technology with the explicit end-goal of substituting energy for people. It's not intended to benefit the common man, it's intended to benefit the capital owning classes.

by forgetfreeman

1 subcomments

I find it offensive that comments that appear to be legitimate additions to the conversation are downvoted into oblivion and then flagged without even a single response to suggest where the author of the comment in question was in error. This is definitely not what I would expect to see on an ostensibly neutral platform that claims to be dedicated to technical discussion of issues on their merits.

by Forgeties79

4 subcomments

Any discussion about AI/LLM’s/etc is incredibly complicated. I could go on and on elaborating on this, but I’m just going to leave my preface at that.
There is one thing I found to be true over and over again no matter what the anchor point is for the conversation, no matter the context, no matter someone’s sentiment, etc: nobody likes to have their time wasted.
LLM’s are incredibly useful for cutting corners. It makes it very easy to waste people’s time. No matter how useful they are, no matter the use case you have found, no matter the integration, people keep encountering bad search results and people sending them clearly LLM-generated work that wastes their time.
Unless somebody comes up with a cure for that, there will always be a significant portion of the population that is hostile to LLM’s - and rightfully so! No promise of productivity will overcome that.
TL;DR: the biggest problem with LLM’s is that it enables people to waste other people’s time.

by shmerl

0 subcomment

Add to it the disgusting level of forcing it on people by those who want to profit from it. Surely people will like it.

by notsoendbfb

0 subcomment

[dead]