> There are paid (micro) influencer campaigns going on and what not.
Extremely important to keep in mind when you read about LLMs, agents and what not both here, on reddit and elsewhere.
Just the other day I got offered 200 USD if I posted about some new version of a "agentic coding platform" on HN, which obviously is too little for me to compromise my ethics and morals, but makes it very clear how much of this must be going on, if me, some random user, gets offered money to just post about their platform. If I was offered that 15-20 years ago when I was broke and cleaning hotels, I'd probably take them up on their offer.
Hah, after submitting my comment, I actually though about it because I knew someone would eventually ask :)
I'm fortunate enough to live a very comfortable life after working myself to death, so I think for 20,000,000 USD I'd do it, happily so. 2,000,000 would be too little. So probably between those sit the real price to purchase my morals and ethics :)
It wasn't a shot at you personally but the point of this was that AI companies are flush with money and desperate to show any kind of growth and willing to spend money to do that. I'm sure they are finding people that have some social following and will happily pocket couple extra green bills to present AI products in a positive light with little to no actual proof.
> they are finding people that have some social following and will happily pocket couple extra green bills to present AI products in a positive light with little to no actual proof.
No doubt about it, I don't think people realize how pervasive this really is though, people still sometimes tell me they trusted something on HN/reddit just because it was the most upvoted answer, or that they chose a product based on what was mentioned the most etc.
I can definitely be bought for much much less. But only because I'm pretty sure I could rave about some AI platform while still being honest about it. Why do you draw such a hard ethical line? I agree with your sentiment, AI is currently a net negative on the world that I care about. But I also believe people when they say it helps them. Despite their inability to articulate anything useful to me, or that I can understand.
This is true about everything you see advertised to you.
When I went to opensource conference (or whatever it was called) in San Diego ~8y ago, there were so many Kubernetes people. When you talked with them nobody was actually using k8s in production and were clearly devrel/paid people.
Now it seems to be everywhere... so be careful with what you ignore too
As a very silly example, my father in law has a school in Mexico and he is now using chatgtp to generate all of their visual materials that they used to pay someone to do in the past.
They also used to pay someone to take school pictures for the books to look professional, now they use AI to make it look good/professional.
My father in law has no knowledge in technology, he uses chatgtp daily to do professional work for his school. That's already 2 jobs gone.
People must be hiding under a rock if they don't think this will have big consequences to society
Extremely important to keep in mind when you read about LLMs, agents and what not both here, on reddit and elsewhere.
Just the other day I got offered 200 USD if I posted about some new version of a "agentic coding platform" on HN, which obviously is too little for me to compromise my ethics and morals, but makes it very clear how much of this must be going on, if me, some random user, gets offered money to just post about their platform. If I was offered that 15-20 years ago when I was broke and cleaning hotels, I'd probably take them up on their offer.