The A.I. business influencer guys must be stopped | Hacker News Reader

The A.I. business influencer guys must be stopped

maxread.substack.com

108 pointsweston76 comments

Sometimes I am jealous of these people. They arent doing the corporate grind, and they arent even really doing the startup grind. They are shilling stuff on the internet and avoiding spending their lives working. I know a few, they live great, though frugal lives. I go to my job at prestigious big Co and often wonder who the smart one is, me or them

It's not dumb to sell shovels during a gold rush. And the thing is, almost anybody can do it.

but some would rather harp on and hate on it on hackernews instead.

Most people ought to be afraid of the AI salesman. They're equally as harmful as the cryptobro, selling some nebulous tech that the layman will always misinterpret. Their profitability layer is being able to confuse and obfuscate the components that go into their business, as well as being able to outwit their customers.

I'll proudly hate and harp on those folks anywhere I go. I won't go as far as to claim they "must be stopped", but internally I'd wager most people are waiting for these guys to shut up already.

These guys aren't so much selling shovels as selling advice on which shovel to buy despite the fact they've never dug a hole before.

Exactly what I was about to say. They know the shovel saying and said to themselves "shit I can't make or sell a shovel, but you know what I can do? Talk!! A lot!"

Sounds like my e-book: "How to Create a Dropshipping video course". Buy now! /s

Don't be fooled by the glamorous facade of such "influencers". It's as tough a grind as any corporate job. There is 24x7 demand for new content. You have to compete with a million others in the space, and it is next to impossible to set yourself apart. Only the top 0.1% have any real viewership and are making money. For the rest, the "living frugally" part you mention is likely not by choice.

And whilst churning out bad takes about AI on Twitter is about the lowest hanging fruit out there for LLMs, it's a fair bet none of these 'experts' on 'AI disruption' have outsourced their tweets to one yet...

I would put good money on the bet that there's at least one influencer primarily using ChatGPT to generate their content.

Spam of all sorts is the one category that ChatGPT can do with cheap, superhuman performance today.

Oh I'm 100% sure ChatGPT can do it brilliantly, I just suspect that most of the people trying to be 'AI influencers' (i) actually enjoy coming up with middlebrow takes on AI, reading others' middlebrow takes on AI and monitoring their timeline for retweets and (ii) lack the tech skills to set the ChatGPT API up to tweet on their behalf...

Just think, you could make months of blog posts about your journey to get ChatGPT to generate pro-AI tweets for you.

And then you can follow that up with your journey to get ChatGPT to give you the code for a system that hits CharGPT and then posts the tweet automatically.

And then you go silent and the money keeps rolling in because ChatGPT is grifting your viewers on your behalf now!

When you put it like that, it sounds almost tempting.

If it were easy, everybody would be doing it.

That's not completely true. Information asymmetry is a thing after all

I wouldn't, no matter how easy it is. I'd rather do work that at least has some value and meaning.

Yes, for anything with essentially zero barrier to entry you better believe you will be competing against everyone on the planet.

Yeah, but they're taking a major risk that there will be a continuous audience willing to spend money on their placebo products. When money becomes tight they'll have to pivot hard to avoid going under, or go back to a "real" job but with little experience to command a higher salary.

It's the difference between investing and day trading. Day traders may get lucky and post massive, envy-inducing gains, but boring long term investors keep building during the downturns that wipe out the day traders, and so win in the long run.

Besides, being forced to live frugally doesn't sound that great to me. You aren't free, you're just constrained by money instead of people. Guess for some people it's worth it, but to me they're just two sides of the same coin. There are many meaningful experiences in life that cannot be had below a certain level of prosperity.

The genius of all such people, I noticed at the start of my career in the 2000s, is that they take an idea that--for most folk--warrants maybe 3-5 mins of passing conversation at most (in the case of AI, maybe a few minutes more) and somehow twist, wring and hydraulically frack _years_ of blog posts, Twitter threads, speaking tours, books, podcasts, etc. out of it.

Their real brilliance is in identifying worthwhile candidates for prolonged shysterism and sophistic schmoozing, and, like an exceptionally gifted oil and gas industry geologist, to extract that stored potential hype energy to a degree no normal person would think possible.

This happened with Agile, with TDD, with pretty much any technocratic crapola that was laundered through the ostensible prestige of TED, and by god, did it ever happen with "blockchain", NFTs, and anything crypto-related.

Outside our particular sociocultural nexus, you most often see it with sundry species of MLM grifters, in the tradition pioneered by Quixtar-Amway and widely emulated, well, everywhere that lower middle-class consumer eyeballs go.

> I go to my job at prestigious big Co and often wonder who the smart one is, me or them

You're the smarter one, because you're reflecting on who is the smarter one.

I wonder where their revenue comes from, affiliate links, consulting, some eventual hiring at prestigious big Co?

you. definitely you.

Have you heard of "non-sponsored influencers"? They're your average person who starts creating videos shilling brands, for free, in the hope that they'll get picked up for a real endorsement deal.

You may know one of the ones that made it for real, but I see a lot of delusional hopefuls simply copying what the others are doing and hoping to strike it rich.

I'm not jealous. People with the exact same skills are landing jobs at McKinsey selling this bullshit to the C-suite. These guys are at best scraping the bottom of the barrel (Twitter impressions) to sell a course.

I'd love to see an analysis of people who were shilling crypto a few months ago and moved to AI, I'd imagine it's almost a perfect circle. These types just move to the newest hot tech trend and use FOMO to drive engagement

"If you don't learn about every single GPT frontend tool made this week in my twitter thread you will be poor!"

times like these you need to think about the Lindey effect(LLMs, general AI advances) and not the flavor of the month stuff. Similar to software engineering, don't obsess with every new frontend framework, learn fundamentals that will always be useful to know

"One of the handful of things Twitter still has going for it is that it’s the main place people are talking about A.I"

This is a really strange way to start an article, because I can tell you that here in small town middle of nowhere America, even the old guys down at the VFW hall are talking about AI. I can't get through a full day without someone at random (at Rotary, in the grocery checkout line...) talking about it. Which tells me there's probably as much "get rich quick" and other "gold rush" type BS happening here as there is good computer science.

I can keep track of what grifts have made it to the main stream purely by my boss asking me if I'd heard/made money on X yet. As if I'd be here if I made bank off of crypto/nfts/etc. He's in his 70s now and keeps asking for ideas on making it big because the timeshares he bought of some man made island resort didn't play out.

> Underrated aspect of paid checks and longer tweets with amplification is that Twitter 2.0 has basically recreated LinkedIn broetry.

https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/1650265151227174912

Linkedin Broetry is such a great phrase!

The phrase was coined years ago partially by the same writer: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/why-are-these-p...

LinkedIn discourse hasn't changed since.

I'm one of those people who keeps learning neologisms from 2017 and thinking they're new -- I guess that's what it means to be pushing 40 -- but I'm not ashamed to say that "broetry" is my new word of 2023.

I don't care if everyone else has moved on, I'm bringing it back, complete with the wide-eyed wonder and innocent delight of a child discovering a new kind of play for the first time. This is brilliant. Thank you giving vocabulary to a concept hitherto ineffable, or at least unwieldy and difficult to bracket within my existing verbal facility.

Broetry!

I hadn't realised this had a name (I'd always just called it LinkedIn-spam), and "broem" is perfect.

As an Alliterations Anonymous associate, LinkedIn Lunatics [1] also has its appeal.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/LinkedInLunatics

I think these examples might actually be worse than LinkedIn broerty!

This is so funny. I've noticed these lame influencers shilling AI strategies on twitter even though I don't follow them. But the algorithm sees engagement from others so it thinks I'll like it too.

There's a pattern developing on twitter (and other socials).

Life coach types, just shill the next big thing.

It was Crypto, then NFTs, now AI.

Wonder what will be next?

It will be whatever trendy business topic comes up. The "hustle" people have been doing this forever and they are just clinging on to keywords that get traffic. It has little to do with the topics themselves.

The funny thing the biggest export of these hustle guys is teaching other people how to jump on keywords for attention.

EMPs to kill the AI.

(I kid. (mostly))

The Blue Check payola is making it worse too, there's always been these influencer folks (sometimes doing paid ads just to do their shtick) but now that a blue check gives you a substantial algorithm boost, and just about every influencer pays for one, that group is taking up more and more space.

It was actually kind of AI before, too. Everyone seems to have determinedly forgotten about it now, but there was a brief period a few years back when chatbots were going to take over the world (remember Microsoft Tay), and a lot of VCs lost a lot of money. Then everyone agreed never to talk about it again, seemingly.

This post spends a lot of time criticizing the "pointless line breaks" but not a lot of time on why this is a problem or "must be stopped". Block or mute the people that annoy you and move on; problem solved.

It's contributing to the massive signal-to-noise decline on tech related topics on Twitter lately.

As an open-source AI developer myself I'm discouraged because anything I'd release would be drowned out by hypebros.

Along with this, this type of hype conditions people to view the subject as a scam. The rampant comparisons to crypto are an example of it. People making those comparisons are largely talking about the people who talk about the technology rather than the technology itself.

Twitter has always been something that requires constant vigilance to curate your feeds. Of course searching generic keywords for extremely trendy topics like "A.I." will be full of low quality tweets.

Maybe this is new because your interest/hobby tech is now associated with the "hustle" trend jumpers but it's always been that with with startups so I'm used to it.

Otherwise whining about how low budget social media users "Must be stopped" instead of just blocking/unfollowing and moving on is a waste of life because they aren't going away.

I have never had success with Twitter’s algorithm or expecting their search to surface good results for topics I care about. A much more effective way is to find experts in that field and follow them directly. Your feed will have a much higher signal to noise ratio.

"must be stopped" is a meme which means "is annoying"

It’s the opposite of “must be protected” which means “is something I like”

1. If you're still on bird-app, I feel it's important to ignore the "For you" tab and strictly look at the "Following" view, and follow only people whose posts you consistently appreciate. The noise ratio is so high now, and not just about AI.

> What they share across platforms and fields is less any particular insight and more a deep and abiding faith in the accuracy and power of a still-developing technology about which not much is known (and where what little is known is often kept secret by the private companies developing it).

2. I think specifically _because_ most people won't understand it at a deep level, and it is still a bit inchoate but with potentially wide scope, it _invites_ influencers who don't know or don't care to know what they're talking about in the same way as crypto, the web, DNA sequencing, or nuclear fission. We were promised nuclear cars and planes, medical care tailored to our personal genetics, a global computer that democratizes access to all human knowledge, and useful and ubiquitous digital currencies. Even when the tech is really transformative, the early pundits aren't going to have an accurate view of what the transformation will look like. And it doesn't help that we didn't hold the line on saying "ML" instead of "AI".

...For as long as Musk allows people to ignore those who have paid him to shove their words in front of as many eyeballs as possible. I really don't expect the "Following" view to remain safe from this for long.

Changes like that will hasten Twitter's loss of relevance, though; there's a bit of a balance there. If you literally can't use Twitter without getting the blue-check brigade in your face, more people will leave.

Why do we need to stop them? I despise these chumps too, but I also control the content I consume. Non-technical business types have always made lofty promises online, you can avoid them by not using for-profit soapbox platforms like Twitter, Substack and Medium.

Why do we need to cure cancer?

Cancer, the 2nd leading cause of death worldwide, is maybe a histrionic metaphor.

I'd guess the actions of Gary Vaynerchuk wanna-be's are probably not in the top 10.

The term "AI" is only ~60 years old and less in the public awareness. There's a chance of it's public connotations being overloaded by the success of scammers transitioning from "crypto". It's yet another hot market selling things that most people don't and won't understand so the same tricks apply. When people hear about "crypto" now they think of the highly public scams (effective pre-mines, nft, "stable" coins, etc) instead bitcoin.

I'm not really concerned.

More likely, we are currently experiencing a calibration phase for a new technology, during which individuals are attempting to gauge others' understanding and interest in it.

Right now, everybody is shouting "You have to look at this awesome thing!!", while in fact others are already aware of it, or even tired of it. Hence the complaints. This will pass quickly.

The issue isn't that they're shilling AI. It's that the algorithm rewards these low-value hustlers because they create "engagement" with their spammy threads that pollute the feed.

I have seen this exact pattern with other things like "front-end development", "stocks and investing" and many other topics where there's money to be made by selling something to somebody. It gives the whole of Twitter a cynical, soullessness that's growing by the day.

Not to be dismissive but it seems like a skill issue to me. I have the thread emoji muted, that does 90% of the work. I had to click “don’t show me this guy” (not “don’t show me this topic”) on maybe half a dozen that slipped through, and then it seems like the algorithm got the message. Just curate better and the problem goes away.

> Just curate better and the problem goes away.

This need to constantly curate is what made me leave Twitter years ago (well before Musk bought it). It's just too much work too little reward.

There are hundreds if not thousands of people doing this exact hustle. You'll be spending a lot of time trying to decapitate that hydra.

Whatever algorithm they’re using is a capable assistant, I only had to decapitate a few heads and it learned to slay that hydra for me.

"It’s obviously not the only place--there’s lots of activity on the homepage of the rationalist-terrorism cell LessWrong"

This made me curious what the general consensus of LessWrong is outside of LessWrong.

Stopped by whom? I'm not sure how "stop paying attention to the contents if you don't like them" can't work for us.

The Committee of A.I. Tweeters should sanction them or take away their license to post low quality tweets

Stuff like this is why people want to block Blue badges.

But hucksters on Twitter have been around since well before the acquisition. AI is just the latest snake oil they're selling. Previously it was NFTs, blockchain, dropshipping, 101-level coding 'tips'.

Social media algorithms have always embraced bullshittery. There's a reason why "influencer" is a 4 letter word.

To me, this is an issue with the recommendation system. Twitter having fired so many of their engineers is barely functional as it is and is hardly in a position to devote engineering talent to improving feed quality when the kitchen sink is on fire.

I just assume everyone on Twitter is a bot. Saves me the hassle of dealing with the platform.

AI hype is the successor to crypto hype, which in 2022 flamed out. I think at least AI has more practical applications compared to crypto and is not nearly as scammy. Many investors lost huge money with crypto; I do not see the same for AI.

Yes, LLMs have practical applications. But the crypto-style hype that is happening is bringing a reek to the space that it doesn't deserve. There's a real risk that AI will end up being viewed through the same lens cryptocurrency is viewed with now, regardless of practical applications.

> Many investors lost huge money with crypto; I do not see the same for AI.

Oh I absolutely do see this coming. The difference between this and cryptocurrency is that the amount and scope of the damage won't be as wide-ranging.

Hype train goes forward. Where are NFT influencers now?

Rebranding into AI influencers.

lol. glad you associated that jason guy with these rats

If you don't like reading Twitter, maybe quit reading Twitter?

Why does everyone dislike them?

Typically because their content is low value and high noise.

In the best case it's low value: some of the AI hustles lately are actively misleading or harmful. (e.g. the "generate high quality food" example in this post)

Agreed. Negative value plop next to little to no value, all below the threshold of "worth spending time on."

AI bro grifters on Twitter?

News at 6 PM.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com