Honest question: Where does the “AI booster” phrase come from? I only ever see it in online comment sections where certain people use it as a pejorative like this and everyone who uses it puts forth very similar ideas. Is this catchphrase something that comes out of a certain online community, political circle, or influencer?

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paimapi an hour ago | parent [-]

It's fairly widespread and has been normalized for years. A very quick internet search turned up this:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/13/business/dealbook/ai-prod...

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/newe.12400

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/12/23/1130393/how-soci...

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Aurornis an hour ago | parent [-]

I’m asking where it came from.

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.

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paimapi 32 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

This is pedantic but that's not proper usage of 'shibboleth.' The basic conceit of an 'AI booster' is easily defined by the word 'booster' itself - it's someone who 'boosts' AI, likely without much actual subject matter expertise on the matter and the word 'booster' has a long etymology applied to various ideas: https://www.etymonline.com/word/booster

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...

	▲	user43928 21 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		To me it seems like a term that users pessimistic about AI and the future apply to those with an optimistic opinion. 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?
	▲	Aurornis 18 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> This is pedantic but that's not proper usage of 'shibboleth.' The basic conceit of an 'AI booster' is easily defined by the word 'booster' itself - it's someone who 'boosts' AI, 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.

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foobiekr 29 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s a common phrasing in English and has nothing to do with any ideology. Booster replaced “cheerleader” for this purpose some time in the mid 2000s.

See also “cryptocurrency booster” for another example.

	▲	Aurornis 16 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I understand what it means. That’s not what I’m asking. “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.