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

jjcbritton about 6 hours ago 62 commentsRead Article on localscribe.co

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

52% Positive

Analyzed from 2143 words in the discussion.

Discussion (62 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

lizknope•about 4 hours ago

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.

gruez•about 4 hours ago

>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.

That hasn't really played out in reality. The correlation between datacenter capacity growth and electricity price growth is poor.

https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20251101_USC...

xnx•about 4 hours ago

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.

NewsaHackO•about 4 hours ago

Yea, this is what almost everyone feels about AI, I feel. Talk to graphic designers, they say AI cannot do design but will happily use it to do programming work. Talk to game programmers, they say AI can't program/make games, yet use it to help make art assets. This hypocrisy is why it is always difficult to take AI criticism online seriously, especially when it seems that AI companies have a large number of subscribers that doesn't align with what everyone purported view is on AI.

ronsor•about 4 hours ago

> I want to use AI to do your job.

> I don't want someone else to use AI to do my job.

This is just hypocrisy quite honestly.

Hnrobert42•about 4 hours ago

No more so than the athlete who wants to use hard work to win and doesn't want competitors to use hard work to win.

xnx•about 4 hours ago

Yes. This is part of the reason you hear so many people saying they are against AI but use continues to accelerate.

WarmWash•about 4 hours ago

That's the point.

noosphr•about 4 hours ago

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.

furyofantares•about 4 hours ago

The usual left/right haven't managed to pick a side and consume this. Maybe they still will. I don't know who would get which side though.

A cynical part of me says it's something everybody can hate. I can see both sides taking that. I can't see either side embracing it as part of the left or right identity.

Maybe more it's a conflict between those with power and those without. Like return to office, or open offices, or cubicles before that, and probably many other things back to the luddites and earlier.

tw04•about 4 hours ago

The right is desperately trying to figure out how to get their commoners onboard but the only narrative they’ve got so far is: this will help us kill “terrorists. That story is ringing pretty hollow when the orange one campaigned on no new wars and they’re trying to blame AI for their decision to bomb an Iranian school.

ang_cire•about 4 hours ago

As a millennial, I will be the first to run my brain on my toilet homelab servers.

pseudalopex•about 1 hour ago

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

userbinator•about 4 hours ago

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.

WastedCucumber•about 4 hours ago

I think these studies aren't meaningless at all, but the fact that "AI" is a loosely used term means that many people might view even more simple ML methods with skepticism, as opposed to just, say, chat-like LLM tools.

userbinator•about 4 hours ago

There's also a difference between using AI as a tool for creation, and as an oracle for truth.

moron4hire•about 4 hours ago

You can't regress to the mean and call it creation. LLMs don't make novel content. This is why all the people using AI-summarizers to understand their boss's AI-expanded micromanaging emails aren't getting anything new done. Anti-compression is going to accelerate climate change.

moron4hire•about 4 hours ago

I'm still waiting for the last ML movement to revolutionize business intelligence. Back when regression models were going to give us all forecasting. Turns out garbage in still equals garbage out and there still aren't any silver bullets. The organizations that couldn't get their act together to collect good data about their businesses for traditional analysis methods to work are shock-faced that model-overfitting writ large isn't saving them from their doofus C-suites.

ordersofmag•about 4 hours ago

I think we have lots of evidence that the single binary question "is this something people like 'us' support or not" is the only deciding factor in a lot of political decisions people make. They don't consider the facts of the particular issue and how it might impact them. They abdicate that role to whomever they believe defines what 'people like us' believe.

gedy•about 4 hours ago

There is almost no messaging about how AI will benefit non-business owners/managers. It's not: "it will make your job or life easier", it's "you can be more productive so we'll ask you to do more and hire less". When computers were becoming common, the messaging was more positive and hopeful.

Big companies are diving straight into the mustache-twirling benefits "for the business" and of course people will push back.

chrisjj•about 4 hours ago

Does the fact there are so nany things called fruit these days make "Who likes fruit" a meaningless question?

userbinator•about 2 hours ago

Yes. If you asked me that question my response would be "what type of fruit?"

JoshTriplett•about 4 hours ago

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

enraged_camel•about 4 hours ago

It is AI-generated, which is why it got killed.

JoshTriplett•about 3 hours ago

Hmmm. I see some possible signs of that.

I think the sentiment is still a valid one, and I think it's an accurate assessment.

sltkr•about 3 hours ago

How have you determined that? Are you basing it solely on the em-dash (which is trivial to avoid if you want to generate AI comments)?

eudamoniac•about 3 hours ago

Nah, AI always has its em dashes with no spaces around them.

gondar•about 4 hours ago

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

blululu•about 4 hours ago

>> 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.

klik99•about 4 hours ago

The company whos blog it is is "AI-assisted clinical documentation" - I feel this is an attempt to explain anti-AI sentiment as an unreasonable aversion to AI rather than the real reasons for anti-AI sentiment. There's a weird trend in the AI industry to pathologize people who don't like AI.

JoshTriplett•about 4 hours ago

It's not "weird", it's hostile marketing. "How do we overcome the negative sentiment we see as an obstacle in order to sell to people who don't want it, or people who will be around people who don't want it?" It's an entirely natural, commonplace, awful thing. See also "how do we market cigarettes" and "how do we maximize social media engagement" (the latter being one reason outrage gets amplified).

klik99•about 4 hours ago

I find it weird because I've seen traces of it before in people who believed in the singularity 20 years ago, people who really believed that anti-AI was pathological. Back then the stakes didn't seem as real and immediate as now, and now you can see it on pro-AI reddit subs. But I agree that language and attitude is co-opted for marketing purposes, for example last year when there was a lot of talk about doomerism.

chrisjj•about 4 hours ago

> I feel this is an attempt to explain anti-AI sentiment as an unreasonable aversion to AI rather than the real reasons for anti-AI sentiment

Disagreed. It in an attempt to paint the real reasons for anti-"AI" sentiment as unreasonable, period.

rolph•about 4 hours ago

its ok, you can say gaslighting, but its not only AI industry. the trend is a spread

jmathai•about 4 hours ago

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.

TurdF3rguson•about 4 hours ago

I've been thinking the opposite. It sucks to be in the generation of workers that are displaced by AI. It's going to be great to be in the generation where work just isn't something that humans are expected to do.

recursivecaveat•about 3 hours ago

I really wouldn't want to be in the post-mass-employment era as part of the class with no economic or military power, totally dependent on handouts.

TurdF3rguson•about 2 hours ago

Yes because you think of it as a handout. But the generation born into it will think of it as entitlements.

Aerroon•about 4 hours ago

That's what the whole UBI thing was about though. People did see this coming and wanted to preempt it. I'm not sure whether it would've worked, but people did try to come up with solutions for this transition period.

TurdF3rguson•about 3 hours ago

There's still plenty of time to figure it out. You're making it sound like it's already too late.

moron4hire•about 4 hours ago

We are never going to live in a society that doesn't expect people to work. There may not be enough work for half the population, but people will still be expected to work to live. We already live in a society that could feed every last poor person and we still choose not to, cuz "but muh tax dollars!"

TurdF3rguson•about 4 hours ago

I mean, assuming we don't hit some limit with AI, we're going to get to the point where the best way humans can affect productivity is to just get out of the way.

chrisjj•about 4 hours ago

> Both things can be true.

Sure but that has nothing to do with long/short term.

Everything to do with have/have not.

Let's read again.

> 76% of AI experts said AI would benefit them personally, while only 24% of the U.S. public said the same.

Think 76% of financial experts said higher tax on low earners would benefit them, whilst only 24% of the public said the same.

yellow_postit•about 4 hours ago

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...

SpicyLemonZest•about 4 hours ago

I don't think this link supports your claim. All English speaking countries in the "Opinions about AI by country" chart have 60%+ people who are nervous, in every country but Japan at least 40% of people are nervous, and there's no obvious correlation with the "trust in government regulation" data further down.

zarzavat•about 4 hours ago

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.

vjvjvjvjghv•about 4 hours ago

That has been the case since industrialization. It's not exactly new that capitalists want to replace workers with machines. The question is whether there will be new and different jobs for people or if AI and robots will take over everything this time. If that's the case, capitalism will break (nobody can afford to buy the products anymore) and a new economic system will emerge. This could be a great system for everybody or a dystopian one. My bet is on dystopian until there will possibly be a violent revolution by the peasants.

zarzavat•about 3 hours ago

Replacing workers in specific industries is one thing. AI is trying to replace people in general. Expecting new jobs to pop up is misunderstanding the goal of this technology which is to eliminate jobs.

forgetfreeman•about 4 hours ago

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.

SpicyLemonZest•about 4 hours ago

If you're looking at the same comment I am, I suspect it just tripped AI-generated-comment heuristics, perhaps people's personal ones and perhaps the site's. It's an unfortunate world for people who like em dashes and have some genuine reason to be creating a new account.

Forgeties79•about 4 hours ago

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.

gdulli•about 4 hours ago

Everyone wants to use AI to create work and no one wants to consume or be downstream of AI created work.

Forgeties79•about 4 hours ago

Bingo

ronsor•about 4 hours ago

There was always content that wastes people's time because people have always confused length and complexity with comprehensiveness and depth.

These were always poor proxy metrics for "good content," but in a lot of environments, especially professional ones, they were how work was evaluated. Naturally others used LLM to generate content that satisfies these metrics.

The slop epidemic is a consequence of what people erroneously valued for so long. Now they have it, and it's meaningless, and even if most of it was always meaningless, they can't easily tell the difference between "fluff with something meaningful" and "fluff with only fluff" anymore.

moron4hire•about 4 hours ago

But now we're "democratizing" wasting people's time. If the AI-boosters have their way, we won't even be able to have good conversations about something as simple as the movies we saw over the weekend. It will all be "bespoke, AI-generated content." The conversations will be the equivalent of telling a story about a weird dream you had last night.

ronsor•28 minutes ago

The solution was always not to view wasting people's time as proof of effort. But we did, and now AI is replicating it, and the result is this dysfunction.

If we properly valued conciseness over complexity and didn't insist on 5 paragraphs of polite fluff in business communications, it wouldn't be nearly as bad.

Forgeties79•about 4 hours ago

That is my point. It doesn’t matter what they’re built for or the ideal use is. People are using them to waste other people’s time.

chrisjj•about 4 hours ago

I vote that the second biggest problem with LLMs.

#1? They run on an unlimited power source. Human gullibility.

zephen•about 4 hours ago

And the effect is often multiplicative.

Impersonal corporation which has been improving their capability to make you give up in disgust for decades jumping on the AI bandwagon? Check.

Voice recognition system that doesn't? Check.

Dunning-Kruger level responses once you finally get your voice recognized? Check.

shmerl•about 4 hours ago

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