[rising-sky]

What I found insightful about this article was the framing of another article cited.

> " This pretty negative post topping Hacker News last month sparked these questions, and I decided to find some answers, of course, using AI"

The pretty negative post cited is https://tomrenner.com/posts/llm-inevitabilism/. I went ahead to read it, and found it, imo, fair. It's not making any direct pretty negative claims about AI, although it's clear the author has concerns. But the thrust is inviting the reader to not fall into the trap of the current framing by proponents of AI, rather questioning first if the future being peddled is actually what we want. Seems a fair question to ask if you're unsure?

I got concerned that this is framed as "pretty negative post", and it impacted my read of the rest of this author's article

[ryandrake]

Weird what counts as "negative" on HN. Question something politely? You're being negative. Criticize something? Negative. Describe it in a way someone might interpret badly? Negative. Sometimes it seems like anything that's not breathless, unconditional praise is considered being negative and curmudgeonly. It's turning into a "positive thoughts only" zone.

[throw10920]

Part of this is driven by people who have realized that they can undermine others' thinking skills by using the right emotional language.

For instance, in a lot of threads on some new technology or idea, one of the top comments is "I'm amazed by the negativity here on HN. This is a cool <thing> and even though it's not perfect we should appreciate the effort the author has put in" - where the other toplevel comments are legitimate technical criticism (usually in a polite manner, no less).

I've seen this same comment, in various flavors, at the top of dozens of HN thread in the past couple of years.

Some of these people are being genuine, but others are literally just engaging in amigdala-hijacking because they want to shut down criticism of something they like, and that contributes to the "everything that isn't gushing positivity is negative" effect that you're seeing.

[mrexroad]

“If you enjoyed the {service}, please rate me 5-Stars, anything less is considered negative poor service”

Not sure if part of a broader trend, or a simply reflection of it, but when mentoring/coaching middle and high school aged kids, I’m finding they struggle to accept feedback in anyway other than “I failed.” A few years back, the same age group was more likely to accept and view feedback as an opportunity so long as you led with praising strengths. Now it’s like threading a needle every time.

[duxup]

I find asking questions on the internet are increasingly seen as a negative, right out of the gate, no other questions asked.

I get it to some extent, a lot of people looking to inject doubt and their own ideas show up with some sort of Socratic method that really is meant to drive the conversation to a specific point, not honest.

But it also means actually honest questions are often voted or shouted down.

It seems like the methodology of discussion on the internet now only allows for everyone to show up with very concrete opinions and your opinion will then be judged. No opinion or honest questions... citizens of the internet assume the worst if you're anything but in lock step with them.

[phyzix5761]

This is such a good comment. I have nothing but positive things to say about it. It's amazing!

[camillomiller]

There is a relevant number of power users that also flag everything that is critical of big tech and won’t fit their frame as well, sending it into oblivion, regardless of the community rules and clear support from other voting members. But also calling that out is seen as negative and not constructive, and there goes any attempt at a discussion.

[zahlman]

Whenever there's a submission about something unpleasant or undesirable happening in the real world, the comment section fills with people trying to connect those things to their preferred political hobby-horses, so that their outgroups can take the blame as the ultimate cause of all that's wrong with the world. Contrarily, stories about human achievement won't simply draw a crowd of admirers in my experience, but instead there's quite a bit of complaint about outgroup members supposedly seeking to interfere with future successes (by following their own values, as understood from outside rather than inside).

And most people here seem to think that's fine; but it's not in line with what I understood when I read the guidelines, and it absolutely strikes me as negativity.

[everdrive]

HN is a great site, but (at least currently) the comments section is primarily populated by people. I agree with what you've said, and it applies far wider than HN.

[popalchemist]

Most people do not realize it, but the tech industry is largely predicated on a cult which many people belong to without ever realizing it, which is the cult of "scientism", or in the case of pro-AI types, a subset of that, which is accelerationism. Nietzsche and Jung jointly had the insight that in the wake of the enlightenment, God had been dethroned, yet humans remained in need of a God. For many, that God is simply material power - namely money. But for tech bros, it is power in the form of technology, and AI is the avatar of that.

So the emotional process which results in the knee-jerk reactions to even the slightest and most valid critiques of AI (and the value structure underpinning Silicon Valley's pursuit of AGI) comes from the same place that religous nuts come from when they perceive an infringement upon their own agenda (Christianity, Islam, pick your flavor -- the reactivity is the same).

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

It's ok to be negative sometimes. Not just ok, but a necessary mechanism for course-correction. So even if sometimes comments might be negative, that is fine.

Now of course I'm not including aggressive or rude posts, because they are a different category.

[Dylan16807]

I would generally file questioning and criticism under "negative". Are you interpreting "negative" as a synonym for bad or something?

[TylerE]

Always has been. It's a VC chumbox.

[EGreg]

Hey, why so negative man?

[perching_aix]

Are you saying this based on the dataset shared? Like you inspected some randomized subset of the sentiment analysis and this is what you found?

[joshdavham]

I felt the same. I also definitely don't see the cited article as a "pretty negative post".

[benreesman]

I think OP just means that in the sentiment analysis parlance, not in the critical of the post sense.

Though it does sort of show the Overton window that a pretty bland argument against always believing some rich dudes buckets as negative even in the sentiment analysis sense.

I think a lot of people have like half their net worth in NVIDIA stock right now.

[epolanski]

I've always found HN's take on AI healthily skeptical.

The only subset where HN gets overly negative is coding, way more than they should.

[rising-sky]

I tend to agree with this. I just the "pretty negative" adjective jarring in this case and wanted to get a sense of what some in the community here think. Seems mostly in line with your sentiment

[srcreigh]

> rather questioning first if the future being peddled is actually what we want

The author (tom) tricked you. His article is flame bait. AI is a tool that we can use and discuss about. It's not just a "future being peddled." The article manages to say nothing about AI, casts generic doubt on AI as a whole, and pits people against each other. It's a giant turd for any discussion about AI, a sure-fire curiosity destruction tool.

[sensanaty]

If it were just any regular tool people (speaking for myself here mostly, but I see similar sentiments on HN) would be less annoyed and argumentative about it.

Instead it's being shoved down our throats at every turn and is being marketed at the world as the Return of Christ. Whenever anyone says anything even slightly negative the evangelists crawl out of the woodwork to tell you how you're using the wrong model, or not prompting good enough, or long enough, or short enough, or "Well I've become a 9000000x developer using 76 agents in parallel!" type of posts.

[sumeno]

It's a tool that we can use and discuss, but it's baffling to claim there aren't also a bunch of charlatans trying to peddle an AI future that is varying degrees of unrealistic and dystopian.

Any number of Sam Altman quotes display this: "A child born today will never be smarter than an AI" "We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence" "ChatGPT is already more powerful than any human who has ever lived" "AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there'll be great companies."

Every bit of this is nonsense being peddled by the guy selling an AI future because it would make him one of the richest people alive if he can convince enough people that it will come true (or, much much much less likely, it does come true).

That's just from 10 minutes of looking at statements by a single one of these charlatans.

[redbell]

That pretty negative post cited was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44567857

[johnfn]

Maybe negative isn’t exactly the right word here. But I also didn’t enjoy the cited post. One reason is that the article really says nothing at all. You could take the article and replace “LLMs”, mad-lib style, with almost any other hyped piece of technology, and the article would still read cohesively. Bitcoin. Rust. Docker. Whatever. That this particular formulation managed to skyrocket to the top of HN says, in my opinion, that people were substituting in their own assumptions into an article which itself makes no hard claims. That this post was somewhat more of a rorsarch test for the zeitgeist.

It’s certainly not the worst article I’ve read here. But that’s why I didn’t really like it.

[rising-sky]

I think that's the point, the author isn't trying to get into the weeds of the debate itself, just the way the debates are usually framed and how most people might not realize it. It is a "meta" article in that sense and yes you're right, you can apply it in many other contexts where novel and advanced technology is being debated

[xelxebar]

Honestly, I read this a just a case of somewhat sloppy terminology choice:

- Positive → AI Boomerist

- Negative → AI Doomerist

Still not great, IMHO, but at the very least the referenced article is certainly not AI Boomerist, so by process of elimination... probably more ambivalent? How does one quickly characterize "not boomerist and not really doomerist either, but somewhat ambivalent on that axis but definitely pushing against boomerism" without belaboring the point? Seems reasonable read that as some degree of negative pressure.