When Did AI Take Over Hacker News?

AI-related posts on Hacker News are at their highest level since 2019, and the first major jump came with GPT-4's release in Q1 2023 rather than ChatGPT in Q3 2022. Using GPT-5-mini, the analysis classified 24,910 top 10 stories from January 1, 2019 to August 15, 2025, finding 2,816 AI-related posts, of which 52.13% were positive, 31.46% negative and 16.41% neutral. Sentiment turned largely negative in Q3 2021, amid backlash to Apple's on-device CSAM scanning called NeuralHash and clips of GitHub Copilot reproducing licensed code, and has stayed mostly stable since, with recent quarters only slightly more negative.