alt Hacker NewsThe negative impacts of generative AI are most sharply being felt by "creatives" (artists, writers, musicians, etc), and the consumers in those markets. If the OP here is 1. a programmer 2. who works solely with other programmers and 3. who is "on the grind", mostly just consuming non-fiction blog-post content related to software development these days, rather than paying much attention to what's currently happening to the world of movies/music/literature/etc... then it'd be pretty easy for them to not be exposed very much to anti-LLM sentiment, since that sentiment is entirely occurring in these other fields that might have no relevance to their (professional or personal) life.
"Anti-LLM sentiment" within software development is nearly non-existent. The biggest kind of push-back to LLMs that we see on HN and elsewhere, is effectively just pragmatic skepticism around the effectiveness/utility/ROI of LLMs when employed for specific use-cases. Which isn't "anti-LLM sentiment" any more than skepticism around the ability of junior programmers to complete complex projects is "anti-junior-programmer sentiment."
The difference between the perspectives you find in the creative professions vs in software dev, don't come down to "not getting" or "not understanding"; they really are a question of relative exposure to these pro-LLM vs anti-LLM ideas. Software dev and the creative professions are acting as entirely separate filter-bubbles of conversation here. You can end up entirely on the outside of one or the other of them by accident, and so end up entirely without exposure to one or the other set of ideas/beliefs/memes.
(If you're curious, my own SO actually has this filter-bubble effect from the opposite end, so I can describe what that looks like. She only hears the negative sentiment coming from the creatives she follows, while also having to dodge endless AI slop flooding all the marketplaces and recommendation feeds she previously used to discover new media to consume. And her job is one you do with your hands and specialized domain knowledge; so none of her coworkers use AI for literally anything. [Industry magazines in her field say "AI is revolutionizing her industry" — but they mean ML, not generative AI.] She has no questions that ChatGPT could answer for her. She doesn't have any friends who are productively co-working with AI. She is 100% out-of-touch with pro-LLM sentiment.)
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> "Anti-LLM sentiment" within software development is nearly non-existent.
Strong disagree right there. I remember talking to a (developer) coworker a few months ago who seemed like the biggest AI proponent on our team. When we were one-on-one during a lunch though, he revealed that he really doesn't like AI that much at all, he's just afraid to speak up against it. I'm in a few Discord channels with a lot of highly skilled (senior and principal programmers) who mostly work in game development (or adjacent), and most of them either mock LLMs or have a lot of derision for it. Hacker News is kind of a weird pro-AI bubble, most other places are not nearly as keen on this stuff.
>"Anti-LLM sentiment" within software development is nearly non-existent
This is certainly untrue. I want to say "obviously", which means that maybe I am misunderstanding you. Below are some examples of negative sentiments programmers have - can you explain why you are not counting these?
NOTE: I am not presenting these as an "LLMs are bad" argument. My own feelings go both ways. There is a lot that's great about LLMs, and I don't necessarily agree with every word I've written below - some of it is just my paraphrasing of what other people say. I'm only listing examples of what drives existing anti-LLM sentiment in programmers.
1. Job loss, loss of income, or threat thereof
These two are exacerbated by the pace of change, since so many people already spent their lives and money establishing themselves in the career and can't realistically pivot without becoming miserable - this is the same story for every large, fast change - though arguably this one is very large and very fast even by those standards. Lots of tech leadership is focusing even more than they already were on cheap contractors, and/or pushing employees for unrealistic productivity increases. I.e. it's exacerbating the "fast > good" problem, and a lot of leadership is also overestimating how far it reduces the barrier to creating things, as opposed to mostly just speeding up a person's existing capabilities. Some leadership is also using the apparent loss of job security as leverage beyond salary suppression (even less proportion of remote work allowed, more surveillance, worse office conditions, etc).
2. Happiness loss (in regards to the job itself, not all the other stuff in this list)
This is regarding people who enjoy writing/designing programs but don't enjoy directing LLMs; or who don't enjoy debugging the types of mistakes LLMs tend to make, as opposed to the types of mistakes that human devs tend to make. For these people, it's like their job was forcibly changed to a different, almost unrelated job, which can be miserable depending on why you were good at - or why you enjoyed - the old job.
3. Uncertainty/skepticism
I'm pushing back on your dismissal of this one as "not anti-LLM sentiment" - the comparison doesn't make sense. If I was forced to only review junior dev code instead of ever writing my own code or reviewing experienced dev code, I would be unhappy. And I love teaching juniors! And even if we ignore the subset of cases where it doesn't do a good job or assume it will soon be senior-level for every use case, this still overlaps with the above problem: The mistakes it makes are not like the mistakes a human makes. For some people, it's more unnatural/stressful to keep your eyes peeled for the kinds of mistakes it makes. For these people, it's a shift away from objective, detail-oriented, controlled, concrete thinking; away from the feeling of making something with your hands; and toward a more wishy-washy creation experience that can create a feeling of lack of control.
4. Expertise loss
A lot of positive outcomes with LLMs come from being already experienced. Some argue this will be eroded - both for new devs and existing experienced devs.
5. The training data ownership/morality angle
I think this is an interesting point, my one area of disagreement is that there is no "anti-LLM sentiment" in the programming community. Sure, plenty of folks expressing skepticism or disagreement are doing so from a genuine place, but just in reading this site and a few email newsletters I get I can say that there is a non-trivial percent in the programming world who are adamantly opposed to LLMs/AI. When I see comments from people in that subset, it's quite clear that they aren't approaching it from a place of skepticism, where they could be convinced given appropriate evidence or experiences.