I don't know if I'm misinterpreting the word "influence", but low-effort internet memes have a lot more cultural impact than a lot of high-effort art. Also there's botnets, which influence political voting behaviour.

> low-effort internet memes have a lot more cultural impact than a lot of high-effort art.

Memes only have impact in aggregate due to emergent properties in a Mcluhanian sense. An individual meme has little to no impact compared to (some) works of art.

said works of art dont on their own really have that impact either.

its the hype oyher people make for them, fairly typically after the artist has died that makes the impact.

stealing the mona lisa is what gave it its impact, rather than than brush strokes

I see what you're getting at, but I think a better framing would be: there's an implicit understand amongst humans that, in the case of things ostensibly human-created, a human found it worth creating. If someone put in the effort to write something, it's because they believed it worth reading. It's part of the social contract that makes it seem worth reading a book or listening to a lecture even if you don't receive any value from the first word.

LLMs and AI art flip this around because potentially very little effort went into making things that potentially take lots of effort to experience and digest. That doesn't inherently mean they're not valuable, but it does mean there's no guarantee that at least one other person out there found it valuable. Even pre-AI it wasn't an iron-clad guarantee of course -- copy-writing, blogspam, and astroturfing existed long before LLMs. But everyone hates those because they prey on the same social contract that LLMs do, except in a smaller scale, and with a lower effort-in:effort-out ratio.

IMO though, while AI enables malicious / selfish / otherwise anti-social behavior at an unprecedented scale, it also enables some pretty cool stuff and new creative potential. Focusing on the tech rather than those using it to harm others is barking up the wrong tree. It's looking for a technical solution to a social problem.

> there's an implicit understand amongst humans that, in the case of things ostensibly human-created, a human found it worth creating

Yep, this is the current understanding that is being hard challenged by LLMs.

Maybe they're just trying to say that robo taxis look like the future, not bike taxis?

the words themselves have influence, regardless of who spoke them.

Well, the LLMs were trained with data that required human effort to write, it's not just random noise. So the result they can give is, indirectly and probabilistically regurgitated, human effort.