Unless you live under a rock, you must have heard the statement a thousand times over. OpenAI, performed the “crazy stunt” of putting out ChatGPT to the public, and gave rise to many well-meaning as well as annoying “influencers”, who out of nowhere, nudge you into believing that you are falling behind. 

Social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn are filled with “cringe” content around AI. This is because people are just riding this train of AI-powered tools, and calling ChatGPT the news of yesterday. Some even call themselves “ChatGPT experts”, if that means anything. Looking at some of these posts may send you scurrying under the said rock, though.

The Rise of “tech influencers”

While most are busy telling you that you’re inadequate, others suggest that you should “learn the art of prompting to get ahead of others”. The truth is that almost every single one of these influencers is just minting money through ChatGPT and some are even making a fool of themselves in the process. 

A lot of these influencers claim that ChatGPT and Bard cannot do a lot of the stuff that some other tools can and end up suggesting softwares and apps that utilise ChatGPT’s API. Bravo! This looks like nothing but a shady attempt at staying relevant and positioning themselves as experts in the field to their naive followers. 

It is true though that a lot of tools can boost productivity. But when everyone starts suggesting the same thing, the field gets overrun and instead of standing out, everyone just joins the herd created by these “influencers” and “experts”.

Moreover, the content creators are harming the actual AI creators in more ways than one. More than trying to build something out of this generative AI marvel, these influencers are here only to gain an audience and in the end negatively impact the researchers and creators who could have built, or are trying to build something.

Worse, these “experts” have not always been AI experts. When NFT and blockchain was all the hype, these same bunch of people were telling the world how to get ahead with the technology. Funnily enough, all of them have now shifted to generative AI. Soon, these would shift to being AR/VR experts with Apple’s Vision Pro announcements.

There is no limit to this. In India, it is only getting worse. “Did you know that OpenAI has an API” type of tweets are getting promoted on Twitter. Instead of building something foundational out of India, the tech world is just building out of OpenAI’s technology, which in the end is what the influencers criticise. What is the point?

“I have stopped using ChatGPT completely”

While it is true that a lot of people have started believing that AI is all about generative AI, ChatGPT is indeed the tip of the iceberg. But earning fame out of making the best tool in the market look bad does not make sense. People have already started muting a lot of these words as it is literally what fills up their feed. 

AI Advisor Vin Vashistha had the perfect analogy for these influencers of AI — the snake oil sellers of AI. On the flip side, the hallucinatory nature of these LLM models have actually rendered them useless for a lot of people. Some have even gone back to using the good-old Google Search for their work. 

The only bright side to this constant bombardment of AI tools is the increased awareness on AI. Regular people have now started adopting different tools. The truth is that most of them initially only head towards ChatGPT before trying anything else, and are content with it. These influencers might be making the adoption of AI easier, but a lot of them are also just instilling the fear of being left out. 

The Goodfellas 

In all honesty, enjoying cringe content is not wrong. Some of these influencers even announce that they are intentionally making the content cringey because that is what sells. Fair enough, we have all scrolled through Instagram and TikTok’s cringe content after a hectic day and passed it off as entertainment.

On Instagram and TikTok, influencers like Tanmay Bhatt or Varun Mayya, who some would say are hopping onto the bandwagon of AI influencers, are indeed providing informative content along with making it entertaining. Separating the wheat from the chaff are real experts like Andrew Ng, who understand the importance of learning these skills and are providing free courses on prompt engineering and other introductory courses for AI. You just have to pick the right experts to follow and not get influenced by the AI hypers.