I’m not going to defend the tone of the OP, and it is clearly wrong to assume that everyone who is pro AI is a shill or bot.
That being said, I’ve seen hard evidence that pro AI bots do exist on HN.
And at the very large tech company I work at there is a push for everyone to spend more on Claude Code regardless of output. The metric is literally how much you’re spending on Claude Code not how much you’re producing (and in my org we’ve seen no measurable increase in productivity). People are legitimately trying to figure out the easiest way to get it to blow through their allocated credits.
I use AI all the time, I find that Opus 4.6 is great for all kinds of tasks. I don’t think it’s all just hype, but there’s clearly some serious astroturfing going on here, and I understand the urge to be suspicious of everyone.
That's a better argument. That said, by definition, many distinct people with different affiliations and incentives can't astroturf, as what would be the point?
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, 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 money on Claude with productivity requirements. This is weird. I think the most likely explanation is an artificially inflated hype cycle.