No, anti-vax is comparatively much older with a spike during the pandemic, but even the more recent global populist phenomenon preceded the salience of AI.

Software hiring rate has rebounded this year. Even those most impacted aren't looking very "obsolete" yet. But leaving the uncertain future aside, this idea that being economically unproductive means the wealthy would want to "purge" you is for the birds, it doesn't make sense. Especially in a post-scarcity situation, keeping people alive is cheap.

Consumers is how rich people get rich in the first place, if no one's buying then they're in stasis as though everything is zero-sum (incidentally, how populists think) and innovation no longer matters. They already don't have to work, they already could just idly sit on a pile of cash, but human nature is such that we still care about status signalling and making impacts, which depends on other people being around.

If "thinning down the population" was the intent, shouldn't the US reverse their anti-abortion bullshit laws?

They'll probably still need a steady supply of meat-based consumers

The anti vaccination movement was strong before AI. I would correlate it more with rise of social networks than AI. It'd be interesting if there was a data based graph but I wonder what the source data would look like - antivax is externally imposed label, most people in the community will describe themselves as vaccine skeptical or hesitant, for a while they even used the term woke (entirely different meaning than Conservatives call people with functioning empathy glands).

While most consumer LLMs are supportive and syncopatic, their default trained behaviour is relatively scientific based. Of course a few prompts and settings will "fix" that but I don't think AI is required for the echo chamber and incubator - I think tiktok and Facebook etc provided that breeding ground.

(I also don't subscribe to radical theories on planned depopulation but willing to hear thoughts on contrary :)

I think they are unrelated, but yes, the tech billionaire class is openly hoping for future where large numbers of people are obsolete and without hope or future.