Astroturfing Suspicions

Multiple commenters suspect pro-AI posts are marketing campaigns or astroturfing given the billions invested in AI, with some noting suspicious voting patterns and repetitive promotional content

Many commenters express deep skepticism toward the "overwhelming" surge of pro-AI content online, arguing that the billions of dollars at stake have turned platforms like Hacker News into breeding grounds for sophisticated corporate astroturfing. They point to suspicious voting patterns and repetitive, hype-driven narratives as evidence of a coordinated "grift" designed to manufacture a sense of inevitable progress, even when the technology fails to meet practical developer needs. A particularly cynical observation shared by many is the irony that AI itself provides the perfect, scalable engine for this manipulation, allowing companies to use LLMs to generate the very promotional "slop" that inflates their market value. Ultimately, these critics see a widening gulf between the glowing "mass psychosis" of marketing stunts and the grounded reality of seasoned engineers who find the current tools far less revolutionary than the propaganda suggests.

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There's got to be some quantity of astroturfing going on, given the players and the dollar amounts at stake.

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Some ? I'd be shocked if it's less than 70% of everything AI-related in here.

For example a lot of pro-OpenAI astroturfing really wanted you to know that 5.3 scored better than opus on terminal-bench 2.0 this week, and a lot of Anthropic astroturfing likes to claim that all your issues with it will simply go away as soon as you switch to a $200/month plan (like you can't try Opus in the cheaper one and realise it's definitely not 10x better).

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"some", where "some" is scaled to match the overwhelmingly unprecedented amount of money being thrown behind all this. plus all of this is about a literal astroturfing machine , capable of unprecedented scale and ability to hide, which it's extremely clearly being used for at scale elsewhere / by others.

so yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if it was well over most. I don't actually claim that it is over half here, I've run across quite a few of these kinds of people in real life as well. but it wouldn't surprise me.

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Pretty much every software engineer I've talked to sees it more or less like you do, with some amount of variance on exactly where you draw the line of "this is where the value prop of an LLM falls off". I think we're just awash in corporate propaganda and the output of social networks, and "it's good for certain things, mixed for others" is just not very memetic.

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I think unpopularly there's some fake comments in the discourse led by financial incentives, and also a mix of some fear-based "wanting to feel like things are OK" or dissonance-avoiding belief around this thats leading to the opinions we hear.

It also kinda feels gaslightish and as I've said in some controversial replies in other posts, its sort of eerily mass "psychosis" vibes just like during COVID.

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Everyone claiming AI is great is trying to make money by being on the leading edge.

All AI-IS-WONDERFUL stories are garbage-trash written by garbage people.

Fuck AI. Fuck HN AI promoters. Hopefully you all lose your jobs and fail in life.

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Hold up. This is a funny comment but thinking should be free. It’s when they are trying to sell you something (looking at you “all the AI CEOs”) that unsubstantiated claims are problematic.

Then again the problem is that the public has learned nothing from the theranos and WeWorks and even more of a problem is that the vc funding works out for most of these hype trains even if they never develop a real business.

The incentives are fucked up. I’d not blame tech enthusiasts for being too enthusiastic

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It's not the public, the general public would like to see tech ceo heads on spikes (first politician to jail Zuckerberg will win re-election for the rest of their short lives) but the general attitude in DC is to capitulate because they believe the lies + the election slush fund money doesn't hurt.

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Grifters gotta grift.
There is so much money on the line and everyone is trying to be an influencer/“thought leader” in the area.

Nobody is actually using AI for anything useful or THEY WOULDNT BE TALKING ABOUT IT. They’d be disrupting everything and making billions of dollars.

Instead this whole AI grift reads like “how to be a millionaire in 10 days” grifts by people that aren’t, in fact, millionaires.

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Add to that worry the suspicion that half this push is just marketing stunts by AI companies.

(Not necessarily this specific post).

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Exactly. Posts that say "I got great results" are just advertisements. Tell me what you're doing that's working good for you. What is your workflow, tooling, what kind of projects have you made.

>Over the past year, I’ve been actively using Claude Code for development. Many people believed AI could already assist with programming—seemingly replacing programmers—but I never felt it brought any revolutionary change to the way I work.

Funny, because just last month, HN was drowning in blog posts saying Claude Code is what enables them to step away from the desk, is definitely going to replace programmers, and lets people code "all through chatting on [their] phone" (being able to code from your phone while sitting on the bus seems to be the magic threshold that makes all the datacenters worth it).

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These days it feels like there is a ton of pro anthropic astroturfing on this site. Probably it is mostly genuine enthusiasm from sincere people. But nevertheless there are a ton of articles from or about anthropic and within the comments of these you are sure to find, often at the top, someone staunchly defending the superiority of engineering everything via agentic use of the in fashion Claude model. If they are truly right than I don't see the need for proselytizing like they do. The proof is in the pudding. That is, if your choices are truly the best and fastest way to produce software inevitably the market and industry will reflect this. But it feels like they don't want to let results speak for themselves they need to hype up their claims continually and forcibly shove this down people's throats

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I’ve also been a little suspicious of the vote counts these days. Pro AI stuff regular hitting like 800 votes. The codex announcement hit like 1500? Like what’s goin on here

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Something sus about these posts that promote OpenClaw specifically, even on X when ClawdBot was first popping up - an unusual number of people were promoting it all without specific information on why it was useful. All the usual suspects were also promoting it (the 'dev influencer' accounts). Is this a new(?) tactic on hyping up a github repo for engagement?

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- Dear OP, how much did you get paid in crypto to write this post?

- Because the seasoned developers have something entirely different to say https://www.xda-developers.com/please-stop-using-openclaw/

- Also please stop spamming HN with this stuff

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There seem to be a lot of posts like this as of late. I truly can't decide if the authors actually believe what they've written or if it's some preposition of themselves to be included in the hype cycle of AI FOMO or what. It feels very cringe as I read it. As if to say OpenClaw has somehow been such a pivotal change in their life, so monumental, that it's an epiphany that has changed them forever. Maybe it's just the fact that I've been surrounded by automation for many years and also using it with agents or LLMs for the past couple that I just don't feel like this is a true sentiment of what actually exists. It feels placed, it feels targeted and it feels like a huge lie. I guess you could also call it low effort marketing.

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Not people, that post is from OpenClaw... 100% ;-)

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what was the instruction to write and promote this post?

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On that thought you got to ask yourself why almost every thread has 200+, some even 500+ comments now. Definitely wasn't like this a few months ago

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Someone should analyze this and share results. The data should be there

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Exactly, I'm not going to waste my time reading this AI generating post that's basically promoting itself.

What I really wonder, is who the heck is upvoting this slop on hackernews?

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It only has 11 points. It just got caught in the algorithm. That's all.

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But I see these kinds of post every day on HN with hundreds of upvotes. And it's a thousand times worse on Reddit.

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The hundreds of billions of dollars in investment probably have something to do with it. Many wealthy/powerful people are playing for hegemonic control of a decent chunk of the US economy. The entire GDP increase for the US last year was due to AI and by extension data centers. So not only the AI execs, but every single capitalist in the US whose wealth depends on line going every up year. Which is, like, all of them. In the wealthiest country on the planet.

So many wealthy players invested the outcome, and the technology for astroturfing (LLMs) can ironically be used to boost itself and further its own development

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I was thinking the exact same thing earlier today. I think you're right. They have so much at stake, infinite money and the perfect technology to do it.

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Another good example, from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46860845

Articles like these should be flagged, and typically would be, but they sometimes appear mysteriously flag-proof.

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The marketing of OpenClaw is amazing. They had a one-liner install that didn't work, started the hype-train days before they changed the name of the product and have everyone from nerd influencers to CNBC raving about it.

I'm waiting for the grift!

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PsyOp or AIslop

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Ads Pff..

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