alt Hacker NewsI’m asking where it came from.
I know you can find it if you Google it, but that’s my point: It’s the shibboleth that these people use to signal their alignment with an ideology, and it’s all the same thing.
I could have told you what those articles would have said before I began reading them because “AI booster” is a phrase associated with a very specific worldview. It gets dressed up prose about superiority and condescension for the “boosters” but it’s always the same thing.
It’s like many of the academic phrases that develop to signal alignment with an ideology and separate the insiders from the outsiders.
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It’s a common phrasing in English and has nothing to do with any ideology. Booster replaced “cheerleader” for this purpose some time in the mid 2000s.
See also “cryptocurrency booster” for another example.
it's applying the existing idea of "boosterism" to AI proponents. the word wasn't coined for this.
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This is pedantic but that's not proper usage of 'shibboleth.' The basic conceit of an 'AI booster' is easily defined by the word 'booster' itself - it's someone who 'boosts' AI, likely without much actual subject matter expertise on the matter and the word 'booster' has a long etymology applied to various ideas: https://www.etymonline.com/word/booster
When most theorists talk about shibboleths and impenetrable academic writing, it's in reference to terms like 'deterritorialization' or 'intertextuality' which are not immediately evident to most lay people who aren't armed with an etymological background or who once stumbled into an advanced course on literary theory in pursuit of a creative writing degree
You could probably say that there's cultural capital associated with it but that's true of nearly any term describing an ideology or opinion. The very same AI boosters are guilty of coining things like 'orthogonality' or 'instrumentally convergent subgoals' which lean more towards being unnecessarily bombastic than descriptive (I guess 'intelligent but amoral' and 'self-preservation' aren't fancy enough for adoption) which loses the strongest argument for academic jargon like the one advanced by Butler: https://web.archive.org/web/20240630040227/https://www.nytim...