On federated platforms like Lemmy, a small number of highly active users can also create the impression of a broader cultural shift.

And bear in mind that this goes in both directions, it's possible for highly active anti-AI users to flood the discourse.

Community opinion is often a bistable state. If 70% of the userbase has opinion A and is constantly downvoting and browbeating anyone who says anything positive about opinion B, one would naturally expect the userbase to soon be 80% opinion A. Then 90%. And so forth. The few holdouts who continue to say positive things about opinion B get labelled as "bots" and "trolls" and are dismissed.