It may have started earlier. This study came out a year ago, showing consumers overwhelmingly were turned off by companies slapping "AI" on products.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19368623.2024.2...

| Adverse impacts of revealing the presence of “Artificial Intelligence (AI)” technology in product and service descriptions on purchase intentions: the mediating role of emotional trust and the moderating role of perceived risk

Witness how quickly we went from being awed by Dall-E and Midjourney to saying "looks like AI" as an insult.

I can only speak to my social circle but initially LLMs were a lot of fun. Like my kids playing with Photo Booth filters on a new device.

I don’t think the social reaction was there the whole time. It feels more like we have been playing around with them for two years and are finally realizing they won’t change our lives as positively as we thought

And seeing what the CEO class is doing with them makes it even worse

It has nothing to do with that.

In a hype cycle, at the beginning, it is easy to harvest attention just by talking about the hype. But as more people do this, eventually the influence market is saturated.

After this point, you then will get a better ROI on attention by taking the opposite position and discussing the anti-hype. This is where we currently are with AI, the contrarians are now in style.

Are they running out of funds to drown out the protesters with their own marketing?