Open any HN thread on the topic of AI and you'll find plenty of anti-AI comments.

> Witness any HN comment thread with "pro-AI" vibes (which is almost all of them

I feel like we’re reading two different versions of HN. Any thread about AI gets filled up with so many useless anti-AI comments from people who haven’t read the article that it’s hard to even discuss the topic here. I don’t even bother trying to get good AI or LLM related information out of HN right now because it’s such an openly hostile forum where cheap anti-AI comments will get upvoted more than actual discussion about articles.

I'm not aware of any doubt or questioning of AI being silenced on HN. Almost every thread about AI seems to be pretty loud with voices saying "bubble", "hype", "stochastic parrot".

Being impressed with the capabilities of an emerging technology doesn't make the person a religious zealot, and dismissing every proponent of LLMs and AI generally that way is weak and tribal.

I really don't understand how this topic has become such a badge of identity.

The way I see it, the identity that, dare I say most people so engaged with the debate here, is that of our programming ability, and naturally, we mostly believe that we're above average at it. Some people have found AI to be useful, others have not. In calling LLMs mere stoichastic parrots, the implication is that someone who could possibly find them as useful is an idiot, and a bad programmer. Conversely, people see the people who call them soichastic parrots as bad programmers who are full of themselves and are too stupid to know a useful tool because they're too blinded by... whatever. When you have two tribes trying to exchange comments with that underlying implication from both sides, there's not really room for productive discussion

There's a their group of people who see these things as tools, and want to learn about them. How to use them well; their shortcomings, but as usual, the reasonable voices get drowned out by loud rants and diatribes.

Just look at this submission. It's highly critical of AI and made it algorithmically to the HN front page, but was censored within minutes by our HN moderators and downranked into oblivion. This happens regularly with articles that are highly critical of AI. The moderators have the final say here. HN is not a fully egalitarian platform.

And now "flagged", because apparently, an informed interview with a 19-years veteran who worked on AI is problematic (whereas Sam Altman's or Elon Musk's PR and bullshitting never is).