Hacker News Reader

Comment by overgard | Hacker News Reader

I'm like 99% convinced that most of the AI conversation upvotes at this point is astroturfing. I just don't see the correlation with the sentiment I get from talking to people in the real world (mostly negative AI sentiment) vs what I see here

View on HN

I'm convinced that the majority of people hyping up AI don't actually interact with many people in real life, let alone people that aren't software engineers.

To those of us on the cutting edge, the opinion of the average person when it comes to these things is totally irrelevant. I see the benefit and possibilities with my own eyes, I don't need the confirmation or denial of the average person.

All that said, I've already set up a few of my non tech close friends with Cowork and they are huge fans of it now. It's somewhat shocking how much menial repetitive work the average white collar job entails.

The average person dislikes AI not because it isn't useful. Anyway, we're more or less all on the cutting edge together

I think some companies are just behind the curve, so this sentiment seems bizarre to some.

At my big tech, AI is every conversation with everyone, every day. Becoming AI native is a huge deal for us. Literally everyone is making AI usage a core part of their job and it's been a big productivity accelerator.

Perhaps it's different where you work, so you don't see the sentiment.

> AI is every conversation with everyone

Wow that sounds horrible.

Yes it is.

As someone working somewhere very much like this, the "everyone" mentioned is actually a few people who are under the mistaken impression that the rest, keeping their head down, are equally interested and on board.

Your post was written almost verbatim by my coworker last week, who has no idea that I and half the team are not doing any of this stuff.

"AI native". I don't know if you intend it but you sound like a linked in lunatic, nobody talks like that

There's definitely some people working overtime to overhype AI on here. like 50% of the comments on this are from simianwords who only posts when people say negative AI sentiments.

Not necessarily. Personally, I'm both in love with AI (likely to upvote a convo) and scared about the short/medium term societal changes its job displacement will bring.

Honestly, I think there's a big divide, and those of us who are using AI intensively might just be increasingly "going dark" & distancing ourselves from those "real world" people. It's becoming detrimental being around people who are so actively negative about AI. It feels like being around people who still insist the sun orbits the earth. Those people are actually happier believing what they believe, so why spend any more time trying to convince them they're wrong?

I spent 2024 on Mastodon and I absorbed their groupthink that AI was useless... I wish I could get that year of my life back. I wish I had that extra year headstart on AI compared to where I am now. So much of my coding frustrations that year that might have been solved from using AI. I am reluctantly back on X - I hate what has been done to Twitter, but that's where so much of the useful information on using AI is being shared.

Well, back to it. Claude has been building another local MCP server tool for me in the background.

> It feels like being around people who still insist the sun orbits the earth.

100% feeling this divide as well.

People that deny the benefit of AI in 2026... I can't even engage with them anymore. I just move on with my life. These people are simply not living in reality, it will catch up to them eventually (unfortunately.)

at which point they will learn to write markdown files too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com