Well you have people who work in vocational jobs who develop brand loyalties to tools such as John Deere, Caterpillar, Snap On, and so on. These companies sell branded merchandise such as apparel and other trinkets to promote the brand via their fans. Visit a vocational forum and you will see how people can be rabid tool brand fanatics, smack talking each others favorite tool brands.

I do believe there is AI shilling for sure. But I also believe there are people who really want AI to level the playing field for them so they too can be/feel like a 10x engineer or whatever. They invest themselves in the technology using a branded product which they can form an emotional attachment (e.g. Claude helped me feed my family. Thanks Claude!) So you get these gushy posts that feel like shilling but might be an emotional outburst of support for their favorite brand.