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.
[–] paimapi 3 days ago
[–] user43928 3 days ago
By speaking of boosting, they add an implication that the opinion isn't as genuine as their own and is perhaps motivated by some sort of financial benefit.
Am I wrong?
[–] oblio 3 days ago
[–] user43928 3 days ago
X then took action and suspended creator's accounts that were posting about Kimi K3.1 without the paid sponsorship tag, allegedly hitting some accounts that weren't paid by Moonshot.
In any case, I do not think that people are typically being paid to promote AI generally, rather than specific products.
To imply so on comments from well established HN users, as if it was unlikely they simply find value in AI and have a genuinely positive opinion, often seems misguided.
[–] Aurornis 3 days ago
It’s all over this thread as a pejorative for anyone who doesn’t have a cynical view of AI.
[–] beepbooptheory 2 days ago
If everyone had the same opinions they do, but called it all "AI optimism", or whatever other term you prefer, would anything change for you?
This feeling you might have, where everyone is having a secret meeting without you, deciding on opinions and terms to operate against you, is understandable in this world, but you can't live forever in that solipsism. You need to be brave enough to have your own opinion against those that truly, passionately have their own. You need to argue and fight for what you believe in, not try to explain away or conspiratorialize your opponents. There is no one coordinated, arbitrary force you can point to that can explain why people don't share your worldview. You can just defend what you believe in, and always be ready to update your assumptions.
[–] paimapi 2 days ago
[–] dd8601fn 2 days ago
It’s what everyone uses… positive, negative, or neutral.
Until something else catches on, there’s no reason to explain, apologize, or duel over it.
[–] Aurornis 2 days ago
[–] pseudalopex 2 days ago
[–] user43928 2 days ago
I'm an enthusiast when it comes to using AI to my benefit. I could care less about what others do, as long as it does not concern my work.
I think it would be strange if someone were to label me an 'AI booster', but maybe that's just how I feel.
[–] Aurornis 3 days ago
It’s a shibboleth because it’s a highly specific phrase used by these people.
The fact that it’s self-explanatory doesn’t take away from that.
It’s a shibboleth in the way it’s used. I see the word “booster” applied more to AI than any other topic because it’s the shibboleth chosen to represent that specific set of ideologies about AI.
[–] 10111001 3 days ago
It's not a shibboleth because "AI booster" is a fairly straightforward label to describe a group of people with certain characteristic. Which is proven because as I wrote "AI booster" above, mentally I was trying coin a descriptive label rather than use a predefined stock term. Personally, I have no fixed label for that group, and could have just as easily written "AI enthusiast" or "AI promoter."
IIRC, a shibboleth is a characteristic word or pronunciation that gives you away, often without you even realizing it. Understanding that there are people who support AI and others who oppose AI, and trying to refer to those groups, is not that.
[–] Aurornis 3 days ago
AI booster is a common predefined term, not something you coined on the fly.
If you look higher up in this thread, the other arguments are that it’s a common predefined term with wide usage and understanding. You were repeating a phrase that you saw before and associated with a set of ideas.
[–] cassepipe 3 days ago
It just makes sense that the bigger the agora in which a debate takes place, the more nuances will fade away until you can roughly sort people into the "X bad" and "X good" buckets. Is it desirable ? I don't know. Is it some group's lobbying/conspiracy ? I don't think so
[–] foobiekr 3 days ago
See also “cryptocurrency booster” for another example.
[–] Aurornis 3 days ago
“AI booster” appears 100X more often than I ever saw “cryptocurrency booster” and the phrase is always associated with people who have a specific ideology about AI.
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...