Comment by DrewADesign
10 hours ago
It wasn’t even all that long ago. I noticed around the time ChatGPT 3.5 was released I saw a significant change in tone regarding LLMs and diffusion models. I think that’s when some serious astroturfing started.
I’m old enough that I worked my first IT summer job the same year slashdot was founded. I’ve seen a lot of tech tribalism form and dissipate, and this one didn’t feel organic. My gut says a lot of the us-vs-them tension originated in a deliberate campaign to cast AI boosters as the tech industry in-crowd, and ‘other’ the people not on-board. Who knows.
1000% astroturfing—and across social media. Too many posts of the same quality at the same time(s). These things ran in cycles, spinning up and dissipating just as suddenly.
E.g. the entire framing to combat complaints about shortcomings was, "It's not the tech. It's you. You're just not doing it right. Wrong setup, wrong workflow, add this to your .MD, use loops, etc". Every complaint was immediately met with this same treatment by a swarm of vague bro-bots that materialized from the ether. The core message? Always the human's fault.
And, don't get me started on the waves of newly minted expert AI creators, making recommendations without showing a single example of what they'd supposedly built.
I'm sure some bandwagon organic creators tried to cash in on the genre, but encouraging that was also part of the point.