Bots from a single company can amplify (retweet, upvote, comment in support of) comments and stories from many different individuals to steer the conversation to some extent.

I know that pro LLM bots exist. Here’s an example https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dirtytoken7

If you look at the timestamps you’ll see instances of it posting faster than a human could.

I know that there are numerous companies with hundreds of billions of valuation predicated on AI being better than just a useful addition to the programmers toolbox.

There are even more companies making millions off of the current hype.

People in these companies now have access to tools that can generate spam that’s nearly indistinguishable from ham. Of course some of them are using that capability.

Of course existence of astroturfing by itself doesn’t imply that that astroturfing is effective.

For that I’d point to other evidence. My personal experience with LLMs doesn’t match the hype. The experience of every single close programmer friend whose technical ability I trust, doesn’t match the hype. The output of my organization doesn’t match the hype. I can’t find any publicly verifiable numbers that match the hype. No new operating systems, no new browsers, no vibe coded hit games, the number of games released on Steam hasn’t gone up drastically, the number of apps on the Apple App Store has, but not if you filter out apps that are just wrappers for LLM APIs. Multiple studies show no impact on GDP, publicly traded software companies are showing large impacts to their bottom line etc…

Then you have things like my company pushing people to spend hundreds of thousands (per person) on Claude with zero productivity requirements. This is weird. I think the most likely explanation is an artificially inflated hype cycle.