Q3 2025 was the most negative quarter towards AI on Hacker News

Back in August I wrote about how one in three top 10 Hacker News posts that month were about AI and argued that the big usage spike really started when GPT-4 arrived, not when ChatGPT first showed up. At the time, sentiment toward AI looked surprisingly stable compared to the fireworks around Apple's NeuralHash (when researchers managed to produce collisions) and the Copilot preview in 2021. I ended that post by saying I'd be excited to rerun the analysis in a couple of months. This is that follow-up.

I'm zooming the chart in on the post-ChatGPT era, when most AI discourse has been centered around LLMs. Q3 2025, the last completed quarter, was the most negative quarter toward AI since ChatGPT's launch. I've also labelled some notable OpenAI launches for reference.

Since Q3 2022, the share of AI-related posts classified as negative has typically ranged from the high twenties to low thirties as a percentage of all AI posts in a given quarter. There are small bumps—Q4 2022 around the ChatGPT release, Q1 2023 around GPT-4, and Q2 2025 nudging a little higher—but they all fall within roughly the same band. (Kinda feels like the more notable the release, the slightly more negative people get.) In the most recent run, Q3 2025 comes in at about 36.8% negative, slightly above every other quarter in the post-ChatGPT window. Q4 2025 is tracking close behind so far, but since the quarter is only half over, I'm treating that bar as an estimate rather than a final number.

I think it's also important to stress that Q4 so far is not continuing this trend: in the graph below, we're actually projected to have fewer top 10 Hacker News posts than in Q3.

To be honest, not much has changed overall. The main update is that Q3 is now officially the most negative quarter toward AI since we got advanced LLMs. Q4 doesn't seem to be continuing this trend, but based on historical trends I'd be willing to bet that the next big AI model release (if truly big) will push Hacker News negative sentiment to new highs.

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