Why are certain communities like Reddit so anti-AI?

Question

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&rsquo;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)?

noir_lord · Accepted Answer

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

ares623 · Answer

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?

codingdave · Answer

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?

ratg13 · Answer

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

FridayoLeary · Answer

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.