Comment by spoaceman7777
2 days ago
"Divided" is a bit of a strong word.
The true state of things is that the anti-AI folks are FAR more vocal about their opposition, meanwhile, the people who like AI are busy being productive and accomplishing a truly staggering amount of work.
The 84% stack overflow "currently use AI" number from a _year_ ago almost certainly still holds true today. Just look at the absurdly long and very incomplete list of "tainted by AI" projects that the list-making activists are maintaining over on Codeberg. Software is not "divided", it is simply being occupied by angry protesters.
Hacker news skews significantly older and whiter, and the blogs and such that circulate come primarily from the "established" English-speaking old-guard "white people" software days. Opposition to AI is highly concentrated among the white, first world, left-wing, established engineers.
This group punches far their weight in terms of the volume of their activism compared to the actual percentages of humans on earth.
That's all it is. Anti-AI hatred is just a noisy echo-chamber of those who are privileged enough to not need to modernize their skills.
I'd push back a bit on the assumptions here, partly because (as I just spent a rabbit hole's worth of time describing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48406174 has almost 1000 comments now, and by far most are positive.
You make a good point about the asymmetry in content: the negative ones are mostly just critical, and often denunciatory, while the positive ones are less likely to be generic, and more likely to be about specific work people are doing. That's not a new dynamic, though, and long pre-dates what today is called AI.
Right, of course it's those who had the most time to accumulate wealth in the wealthier nations and professions who are most opposed to one of the most expensive subscriptions in history taking over more and more professions.