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.
Spam of all sorts is the one category that ChatGPT can do with cheap, superhuman performance today.
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!
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.
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.
"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
You're the smarter one, because you're reflecting on who is the smarter one.
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.