Most people are trend followers and what trends they see decides what trends they follow. It sounds like the algorithms that chose which influencers to promote made the decision, which was already somewhat true before the current AI trend. This happened when there was a big push from deterministic feeds to algorithmically ranked feeds by facebook and twitter. I guess an argument could be made that the people who chose what content to consume feed the algorithm but really there is a heavy hand on the scales that tilts the algorithm in favor of various things.