[fdgsdfogijq]

Sometimes I am jealous of these people. They arent doing the corporate grind, and they arent even really doing the startup grind. They are shilling stuff on the internet and avoiding spending their lives working. I know a few, they live great, though frugal lives. I go to my job at prestigious big Co and often wonder who the smart one is, me or them

[abalashov]

The genius of all such people, I noticed at the start of my career in the 2000s, is that they take an idea that--for most folk--warrants maybe 3-5 mins of passing conversation at most (in the case of AI, maybe a few minutes more) and somehow twist, wring and hydraulically frack _years_ of blog posts, Twitter threads, speaking tours, books, podcasts, etc. out of it.

Their real brilliance is in identifying worthwhile candidates for prolonged shysterism and sophistic schmoozing, and, like an exceptionally gifted oil and gas industry geologist, to extract that stored potential hype energy to a degree no normal person would think possible.

This happened with Agile, with TDD, with pretty much any technocratic crapola that was laundered through the ostensible prestige of TED, and by god, did it ever happen with "blockchain", NFTs, and anything crypto-related.

Outside our particular sociocultural nexus, you most often see it with sundry species of MLM grifters, in the tradition pioneered by Quixtar-Amway and widely emulated, well, everywhere that lower middle-class consumer eyeballs go.

[paxys]

Don't be fooled by the glamorous facade of such "influencers". It's as tough a grind as any corporate job. There is 24x7 demand for new content. You have to compete with a million others in the space, and it is next to impossible to set yourself apart. Only the top 0.1% have any real viewership and are making money. For the rest, the "living frugally" part you mention is likely not by choice.

[janalsncm]

Yes, for anything with essentially zero barrier to entry you better believe you will be competing against everyone on the planet.

[notahacker]

And whilst churning out bad takes about AI on Twitter is about the lowest hanging fruit out there for LLMs, it's a fair bet none of these 'experts' on 'AI disruption' have outsourced their tweets to one yet...

[scarmig]

I would put good money on the bet that there's at least one influencer primarily using ChatGPT to generate their content.

Spam of all sorts is the one category that ChatGPT can do with cheap, superhuman performance today.

[notahacker]

Oh I'm 100% sure ChatGPT can do it brilliantly, I just suspect that most of the people trying to be 'AI influencers' (i) actually enjoy coming up with middlebrow takes on AI, reading others' middlebrow takes on AI and monitoring their timeline for retweets and (ii) lack the tech skills to set the ChatGPT API up to tweet on their behalf...

[bluefirebrand]

Just think, you could make months of blog posts about your journey to get ChatGPT to generate pro-AI tweets for you.

And then you can follow that up with your journey to get ChatGPT to give you the code for a system that hits CharGPT and then posts the tweet automatically.

And then you go silent and the money keeps rolling in because ChatGPT is grifting your viewers on your behalf now!

[notahacker]

When you put it like that, it sounds almost tempting.

[stametseater]

If it were easy, everybody would be doing it.

[maxilevi]

That's not completely true. Information asymmetry is a thing after all

[JohnFen]

I wouldn't, no matter how easy it is. I'd rather do work that at least has some value and meaning.

[scottLobster]

Yeah, but they're taking a major risk that there will be a continuous audience willing to spend money on their placebo products. When money becomes tight they'll have to pivot hard to avoid going under, or go back to a "real" job but with little experience to command a higher salary.

It's the difference between investing and day trading. Day traders may get lucky and post massive, envy-inducing gains, but boring long term investors keep building during the downturns that wipe out the day traders, and so win in the long run.

Besides, being forced to live frugally doesn't sound that great to me. You aren't free, you're just constrained by money instead of people. Guess for some people it's worth it, but to me they're just two sides of the same coin. There are many meaningful experiences in life that cannot be had below a certain level of prosperity.

[CharlesW]

It's not dumb to sell shovels during a gold rush. And the thing is, almost anybody can do it.

[nluken]

These guys aren't so much selling shovels as selling advice on which shovel to buy despite the fact they've never dug a hole before.

[rockemsockem]

Exactly what I was about to say. They know the shovel saying and said to themselves "shit I can't make or sell a shovel, but you know what I can do? Talk!! A lot!"

[rchaud]

Sounds like my e-book: "How to Create a Dropshipping video course". Buy now! /s

[rambojohnson]

but some would rather harp on and hate on it on hackernews instead.

[smoldesu]

Most people ought to be afraid of the AI salesman. They're equally as harmful as the cryptobro, selling some nebulous tech that the layman will always misinterpret. Their profitability layer is being able to confuse and obfuscate the components that go into their business, as well as being able to outwit their customers.

I'll proudly hate and harp on those folks anywhere I go. I won't go as far as to claim they "must be stopped", but internally I'd wager most people are waiting for these guys to shut up already.

[ren_engineer]

I'd love to see an analysis of people who were shilling crypto a few months ago and moved to AI, I'd imagine it's almost a perfect circle. These types just move to the newest hot tech trend and use FOMO to drive engagement

"If you don't learn about every single GPT frontend tool made this week in my twitter thread you will be poor!"

times like these you need to think about the Lindey effect(LLMs, general AI advances) and not the flavor of the month stuff. Similar to software engineering, don't obsess with every new frontend framework, learn fundamentals that will always be useful to know

[jjtheblunt]

> I go to my job at prestigious big Co and often wonder who the smart one is, me or them

You're the smarter one, because you're reflecting on who is the smarter one.

[rchaud]

Have you heard of "non-sponsored influencers"? They're your average person who starts creating videos shilling brands, for free, in the hope that they'll get picked up for a real endorsement deal.

You may know one of the ones that made it for real, but I see a lot of delusional hopefuls simply copying what the others are doing and hoping to strike it rich.

[thaw13579]

I wonder where their revenue comes from, affiliate links, consulting, some eventual hiring at prestigious big Co?

[rchaud]

I'm not jealous. People with the exact same skills are landing jobs at McKinsey selling this bullshit to the C-suite. These guys are at best scraping the bottom of the barrel (Twitter impressions) to sell a course.

[marstall]

you. definitely you.