21 ms·

Tell HN: Crypto/web3 grifters are Now AI/ML grifters

299 points by alsodumb 4y ago

I am sure most of you noticed the trend, but a lot of folks online, from influencers on twitter/instagram/tiktok to CEOs of some companies who were big on crypto, web3 (I never understood what that even means) now switched completely to AI/ML with the popularity of DALL-E/ChatGPT. Me and some of my colleagues are fairly active on the MachineLearning subreddit and we've been getting a lot of unsolicited dms to collaborate in a breakthrough ML/AI project. The conversations start something like this: https://imgur.com/a/z6GUTGc Yup, you guessed it, they have the idea and we have to implement it. If you look into their profile history, you’ll see that they’ve been heavy on crypto/NFT/web3 stuff until a few months ago, some even made good money. They don't even have the dataset. One guy proposed my friend that he has a startup idea to use GPT-model to let people talk to their pets and that it should be 'fairly easy' to finetune from an existing model. I am already fairly tired of seeing all the ChatGPT stuff on my socials, and I am not looking forward to another few years of more low effort/low quality stuff in peak of inflated expectations phase. I love GPT, I have many pipelines where I actively use it, but I also see the potential where people will abuse it, in every form from increased spam, personalized phishing, etc. Imagine scammers calling your grand parents not with an non-native accent anymore - heck maybe with your own voice (which in my head is fairly easy to do - get someone's family tree, call the grandkid using a model fine-tuned on some local accent, perhaps of the opposite gender and engage them in a conversation - use the voice clips to finetune another model and then call their parents/grandparents to get money, heck even the transcript for the scam interaction can be auto-generated). I am a first-generation college student, and getting my parents to use a smartphone has itself been a challenge - there's no way I can teach them to identify sophisticated scams. I bracing myself and not looking forward for all of this to come.

smoldesu 4y ago
Gotta use those outdated GPUs for something!
rvz 4y ago
No surprise about that and was all expected as soon as Stable Diffusion, DALL-E and ChatGPT were unleashed into the wild. We already have seen plenty of AI grifters on HN creating clones and copies of AI SaaS and bot offerings with almost no use case on top of ChatGPT with the AI bros selling their snake-oil as "the future" and AI totally replacing everyone's jobs almost just like the extreme crypto maximalists screaming about their utopia of replacing the banking system with crypto coins. It is another grift for the AI bros, with OpenAI and Microsoft being the winners and can easily gate-keep and price out the majority of these grifter jumping on the bandwagon late, unless Stable Diffusion drives everything down to zero by releasing a better model for free. But the truth is both crypto and AI are here to stay no matter the grifters and the opportunists. The inevitability on both of these technologies is that the laws will catch up with them eventually.
tripplyons 4y ago
As someone who is genuinely interested in both blockchain and machine learning, I have seen many people in the crypto space suddenly start acting like they know things about machine learning when ChatGPT came out. Many of them are repeating falsehoods or are unaware of the history of machine learning, including recent events.
- saurik 4y ago
  As someone who was genuinely interested in distributed computing back 20 years ago, the same lack of awareness of history is extremely prevalent in crypto. That said, I feel like that's true of people in general, at least in tech (I can't speak to other fields much), and it is extremely frustrating: history is important!
  - threeseed 4y ago
    To be fair many of the people involved in crypto today are too young to be aware of the history. For me crypto is similar to the late 90's where everyone talked about how P2P i.e. decentralised communication was going to change the world. Remnants still live on today up and down the tech stack but that vision never became a reality. I think crypto will similarly find its way into the traditional finance sector and live on but the utopia of decentralised finance will never eventuate.
    - arcticbull 4y ago
      > I think crypto will similarly find its way into the traditional finance sector and live on but the utopia of decentralised finance will never eventuate. To do that it would have to do something, anything, even one tiny little bit better than something in finance. So far it's like quantum computing. Nothing is better solved with a quantum computer right now. Will that change in the future? Maybe. Until it does they simply won't be used. After all, why would they - except as an opportunity to build in-house expertise in a new space, and for the perception of being hip? There is no preordained future where it's accepted, it has to earn its spot.
threeseed 4y ago
At least we can be thankful it is coinciding with a tough funding environment. And that it's far more difficult to bootstrap an AI model based business given the infrastructure costs versus a boring old SaaS one.
ge96 4y ago
What I recently saw is people trying to charge commissions from art generated by AI. Which I guess you can do that but sucks for the actual creators.
- bb88 4y ago
  Also, usually using many popular artists' work as training data for the model.
  - thedorkknight 4y ago
    Human artists also use popular artist's work as training data
    - acdha 4y ago
      There’s a big difference in how closely most people emulate other artists. Humans tend to want a distinct identify so it’s frowned on to use high skill to make something very similar, and they can only make new art relatively slowly. We’ve never had to consider industrial scale without the ethical concerns before.
      - bb88 4y ago
        My issue is that if someone has a remarkable new style, sure it's going to be copied by humans, but it takes time to do so. And usually the original artist becomes famous along the way -- perhaps even rich. Imagine a brand new artist who has a distinct style, but yet the art style is used to print 20,000 successful NFT rug pulls. If there was a market, there is no longer one anymore. I think that's the problem.
    - baby 4y ago
      What's funny to me is that people are yelling at open source programs. This is a new kind of yelling at the clouds.
    - chidg 4y ago
      There's a major difference of scale. No individual human artist can reliably learn to copy every other artists' styles, and then produce infinite works in those styles.
bawolff 4y ago
Some people like to chase whatever is hot. That is life.
kristopolous 4y ago
Their repurposing their hardware investment. It's the same magical thinking. I wouldn't be surprised to see capital flood into these markets. Capital investors haven't shown themselves to be the sharpest knives in the last few years
Gatsky 4y ago
“What are you drinking, the water or the wave?” The Magus, by John Fowles
blondin 4y ago
the fear is not warranted. current scams are crypto-related. not web3, which doesn't have money written all over it. these scammers follow the money. still curious how they will use AI or ML for scams. the example given does not convince me. and doesn't need any of the current AI/ML advancement.
- braingenious 4y ago
  What web3 stuff exists without crypto?
  - DonHopkins 4y ago
    The original Web3 stuff that came less than a year after the Web2 stuff in the early 2000's, a few years before the web went to 11, two decades ago. Web3 sounds to me like antiquated nostalgia for something that happened at the turn of the century.
    - braingenious 4y ago
      What, specifically, are you talking about?
      - nl 4y ago
        There was an attempt to make semantic web = web3.0 in around 2009 or so. Eg https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305443181_PROGRESSION_OF_WEB_30SEMANTIC_WEB_FROM_WEB_10_A_SURVEY https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305443181_PROGRESSI... (April 2009) It didn't really go anywhere. Web3 now is sort of a thing because one of the main Ethereum client libraries is called Web3: https://github.com/web3/web3.js https://github.com/web3/web3.js
        braingenious 4y ago
        So, web3 doesn’t rely on crypto so long as you define the term in a way that’s inconsistent with how it’s basically universally used today?
jfoster 4y ago
I've noticed the hype shifting from crypto to AI, but at least AI is actually going to be somewhat revolutionary and (in my opinion) deserving of the hype. Hopefully it gets mostly used in good ways, rather than as new ways to scam.
- jaredcwhite 4y ago
  Oh that train's already left the station. Plenty of us understand the cons far outweigh the perceived benefits, and it's already bad NOW. It's only going to get much, much worse.
  - guhayun 4y ago
    Lets not keep doing the dangerous boring labourous jobs ourselves And i would love for researchers to not have to code
  - jfoster 4y ago
    It seems too early to call it definitely good or definitely bad. Feels like it should eventually be one or the other, though.
- jayant_kaushik 4y ago
  It already is revolutionary and maybe we overlook how it is helping us all daily, work faster, spend more quality time, make things easy. I’ll give just one very small example: I have this huge photo library on my phone and sometimes I need to find a particular photo or receipt from a specific business that I clicked 3-4 years ago. Doing that manually means spending at least 10 mins to 30 mins if I don’t remember the exact month or year I clicked it in. And I used to mostly defer finding the photo as much as I could. Or do it when I was totally bored and nothing to do. Cue AI: I type the business name or photo description in the search bar and it displays the photo right there. 3 seconds. Another could be about the Camera app using CV to read live text or numbers. I guess CV and LLMs are specifically going to explode this year as they already have a strong base and proven use case.
  - 4y ago
alphabetting 4y ago
It's really annoying but I think the hype is deserved this time. If you think the discourse on AI is saturated now I'd just wait. Wouldn't be surprised if it's 10x current levels in a next couple years.
DonHopkins 4y ago
Here's a hilariously over-the-top AI job posting that one of those grifters (Luc Du Pont of Phoenix Core Entertainment) recently sent to me. Anybody want to develop work in "hackathon" format to train AI to play PONG, in exchange for promises of equity and a cut of profits instead of cash for your time? This Big Idea Guy assured me: "Biggest thing is i solved the hard ai/cognitive problem. Hence our secrecy". Color me impressed! Who wouldn't want to work passionately for promises of peanuts in exchange for a piece of that pie? And not only has he trademarked "Synthetic Cognitive Identities (TM)" but also he's applied to trademark "ARTIFICIAL PERSONALITY". https://uspto.report/company/Luke-Du-Pont-S-Phoenix-Core-Entertainment https://uspto.report/company/Luke-Du-Pont-S-Phoenix-Core-Ent... All that groundbreaking top secret trademarked AI technology solving "the hard ai/cognitive problem" just to play PONG. But can it pass butter? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7HmltUWXgs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7HmltUWXgs Also his now-shut-down Twitter account and his own words when I confronted him about it prove that he is a flaming homophobic transphobic bigot who retweets White Supremacist propoganda, so you better not apply if you're remotely "woke," or aren't qualified and willing to singlehandedly develop a cutting edge MVP on Unity and Unreal Engine at the same time. Pick a lane, dude. Oh and you'd also better know how to use Bayes' Theorem to cover your Posterior = Likelihood × Prior ÷ Evidence. He though he'd just throw that qualifying requirement in to filter out the charlatans. JOB DESCRIPTION Summary of the Position: The Potential Engineer will develop work in “hackathon” format collaborating with a cross-disciplinary team to build amazing new technology and tools in the newly designed Artificial Intelligence space of Synthetic Cognitive Identities (TM). This space is specifically a MVP for a SCI to play Pong against a player under the rules of the leadership design. Nuget package and dll come in play in targeting unity and unreal as release platforms for ease of usability. Main Responsibilities: Be responsible for your feature's network, memory, GPU and CPU usage Work on fixing issues in your feature's work. Make necessary updates to improve stability / performance of the SCI engine Implement Unity Engine plugins Work closely with Sr. Developers on project implementation QUALIFICATIONS Experience & Qualifications Required: Passion for software development – we expect you to like to write and maintain code Experience with the latest Unity Engine release Experience with Unity profiling tools Experience with Python Experience with LISP Experience with C # Experience with Unreal Engine Blueprints Experience with the latest Unreal Engine release Experience with Unreal profiling tools Experience with Unreal plugin implementation Experience with C++ Cross-platform libraries Experience with communication protocols (HTTP / Web Sockets) Familiarity with build processes, compiler tool-chains Experience writing multi-threaded code and reasoning about dependency graphs Experience with Git Optimization skills for both code and assets Statistical and data analytics Bayes' theorem Debugging skills Be ready to invest the effort to become an even better developer LDAP/Active Directory High performance computing Network and software security Cloud and virtualization technologies Edge computing We will appreciate: Interest in the latest programming trends such as functional and reactive programming High availability - hardware and software clustering Tensor flow/Tensor board AWS application load balancer and elastic load balancing (ec2 compute)
eplm 4y ago
Yeah, I've noticed a lot of "AI artists" suddenly pop up out of nowhere. As far as I can see, they're just typing a prompt into Stable Diffusion or DALL-E and picking a nice image. It's lazy, talentless, and demeans the actual artists whose work was stolen to train these models.
- bestcoder69 4y ago
  And not to mention, fun!
  - cableshaft 4y ago
    How dare something be fun. Everything must be dour serious business at all times.
- Art9681 4y ago
  We all stand on the shoulders of giants. I imagine the first person to carve a stick figure into a rock impressed some folks. Soon enough, the entire village experimented with carving figures into rocks. The smart ones mimicked the techniques of the good ones, and made it better. Soon, the village was flooded with various artworks of stick figures, some more intricate than others. Some had wobly lines, some lines as straight as a ruler. Eventually the expectations changed. No longer was the village impressed with stick figures. A distinction had to be made between the average stick figure carvers and the good ones. They called them "artists". Eventually someone figured out how to add color. The cycle repeats and expectations changed, the average distinguished from the talented. No longer was drawing a stick figure without color considered art. To be an artist, you had to use color. Then someone showed up with a brush, then Photoshop, then Stable Diffusion. In the year 2023, expectations changed, yet again. And the average were separated from the talented, and the best prompt writers were considered artists. In the year 2040...
  - bakugo 4y ago
    Nobody is carving stick figures into rocks here. They're pressing a button on a machine that someone else built that carves stick figures into a rock for them. Saying "best prompt writer" is like saying "best button presser", there's nothing impressive about it.
Geee 4y ago
I don't see it in this way. People are genuinely excited about ChatGPT and are finding ways to build apps around it. I don't see what's bad about this. For influencers, ChatGPT/AI is a great topic because the field is moving fast, there's lots of new development to cover and people are interested. Crypto grifting was selling the dream to get rich. There was nothing in it to begin with. I think 'grifting' means dishonesty - selling snake oil. I don't think applies to AI, even if it's just a temporary hype cycle. I should mention that Bitcoin is obviously a real thing; "crypto" is the thousands of useless coins which claim to be the next Bitcoin.
- muzani 4y ago
  They're just journalists playing with speculation. Half a century ago, it was about nukes, rockets, quantum stuff, robots, and AI. Nobody is really an expert in ChatGPT specifically, so it's a low hanging fruit.
- Quarrelsome 4y ago
  didn't the OP state that someone was going to use ML so people could talk to their pets? That's grift because there is fundamentally zero science to make that happen so they would just be lying to all their customers.
  - nl 4y ago
    Ironically I looked very hard at a couple of legitimate projects in this space (before ChatGTP). In particular https://www.earthspecies.org/ https://www.earthspecies.org/ is a pretty interesting project.
- jaredcwhite 4y ago
  > People are genuinely excited about ChatGPT Are you kidding me? The movement of people like me who are deeply skeptical about the benefits of generative AI and place them in similar categories of "potentially hazardous to society" inventions like drugs, weapons, etc. is alive and well. We're genuinely fearful that there are folks out there who apparently aren't aware of the severe legal and cultural minefields that these sort of unregulated tools present. I haven't the slightest doubt that, now that we're seeing the collapse of "web3" nonsense/blockchain apps/cryptocurrencies/etc., there's a wealth of grifters looking for their next score and "AI" is the obvious successor.
chrisco255 4y ago
[flagged]
- k2enemy 4y ago
  We can feed prompts into chatGPT ourselves if that's what we want to read.
svnt 4y ago
This is where you insist on getting paid up front, underpromise, and raise your rates until the interest dies to a manageable level.
mrtksn 4y ago
If they are actually going to pay for your time, why just don't take the job? Riding the latest trends is very normal for media personalities or entrepreneurs, if trends change so do they. If they fail to do that, they will perish. Obviously, don't do the unethical stuff but if they were somewhat lucky in the crypto boom it would be nice to have that money redirected to ML. I don't know if its possible to make people talk to their friends using GPT models but sounds like something that people can actually pay for. If they don't have the dataset, building one or acquiring one can be added to the todo list.
- Sebb767 4y ago
  > If they are actually going to pay for your time, why just don't take the job? You probably never received such am offer. It's always in the form of "I bring the idea, you do all the work and, instead of money, you'll receive a ${rand(5,20)}% share of the resulting company!". And if you offer to do the work for money instead, you'll never hear back. People serious enough to put money behind their ideas won't randomly ping Reddit mods with them.
  - mrtksn 4y ago
    I wouldn't dismiss everyone as grifters though. Every now and then it's not the guy with the idea who just needs someone to implement it, but it's actually someone who got lucky in something previously and has resources. That's why I say do it if they are actually going to pay for your time. I don't know if anyone ever falls to the guy with idea but no resources and no expertise to do it themselves anyway?
    - acdha 4y ago
      Maybe but the style of that definitely felt more like someone getting ready to low-ball. It brought back dotcom-era memories of the guys who wanted to clone some big web site - they always thought it would be “fairly easy”, too.
      - mrtksn 4y ago
mabbo 4y ago
I wonder if we can turn this around and somehow scam these people of their crypto? "This is an excellent idea and I would be happy to get started on it. Please send me X BTC to this address as a downpayment."
LarsDu88 4y ago
In the 1700s, the new world was the hot new thing leading to the south seas bubble. In the 1850s people bandwagoned rail and steam power, leading to the rail bubble. In the 1920s it was radio technology. In 1970s it was polaroid. In 2000 it was dotcom. Every bubble busts, but the end result has left us with rail lines, the United States, radio, television, digital cameras, and fiber optic lines. The overall direction is upwards. EVs will probably be the long term outcome of the last bubble. AI still has a long way to go. Crypto will probably go the way of the less useful bubbles (beanie babies and tulips)
- cardamomo 4y ago
  Thank you for sharing. I hadn't heard of the South Seas Bubble. Now I'm wondering if such a bubble—formed around a single company—could come about today.
  - whitexn--g28h 4y ago
    Enron, FTX
    - meheleventyone 4y ago
      GameStop. Tesla. Tech stocks generally until last year. Doesn’t need to be fraudulent to be a bubble.
- baby 4y ago
  > Crypto will probably go the way of the less useful bubbles (beanie babies and tulips) People say that and yet it's been like what, 14 years? How long can a tulip market really last?
  - _5uxp 4y ago
    They don't understand the potential, they just repeat same info for years.
getravi 4y ago
Grifters gonna grift.
zamalek 4y ago
I saw a video the other day claiming to be the start of a "ChatGPT expert in 13 days." A what?
- p1esk 4y ago
  Wow, 13 days? Usually it’s 13 minutes.
  - mrtksn 4y ago
    You can’t fit enough ads in 13 minutes to justify the education expenses.
  - terminal_d 4y ago
    It takes more than 13 minutes to add the channel plugs and the "like share subscribe" etc crapola.
Animats 4y ago
Oh, no. Are these some of the same people who pivoted from binary options in Tel Aviv to crypto out of Bulgaria and Cyprus to this? If it involves a large outgoing call center sales operation, there's a good chance it is. That seems to be the core skill set of that crowd.
allenleee 4y ago
I'm hope the trend will go nuclear one day :))
noobermin 4y ago
I hate to say I called it but I literally called it years ago, "AI" will be the new grift in due time.
braingenious 4y ago
The immediate bummer about ChatGPT and its ilk for me isn’t scammers (though I’m sure it’s an issue that will get worse), but… insufferably dull people. I figured that “old people getting on Facebook” must have been the final Eternal September, but apparently nope. Now, people that otherwise would never post (on social media, forums, etc) due to not having any knowledge or opinion on a given topic have the option of copying and pasting text back and forth to mindlessly farm engagement. The era of the Ultimate Reply Guy is upon us, and it sucks. In the same way that rickrolling was a substitute for having a sense of humor, “Here’s what the robot says” is a substitute for insight or personality.
- mentalpiracy 4y ago
  > Now, people that otherwise would never post (on social media, forums, etc) due to not having any knowledge or opinion on a given topic have the option of copying and pasting text back and forth to mindlessly farm engagement. This is such an odd, hostile way to react to people posting things on the internet that I'm genuinely curious what part of this you have an actual problem with? Framed another way, what you're describing here is that using ChatGPT is interesting enough to trigger engagement from social media users who are otherwise mostly inactive. If that is indeed the case, imo that is a pretty strong indicator of appeal to a wide audience.
  - phdelightful 4y ago
    > Framed another way, what you're describing here is that using ChatGPT is interesting enough to trigger engagement from social media users who are otherwise mostly inactive. If that is indeed the case, imo that is a pretty strong indicator of appeal to a wide audience. I understood the comment to mean the posters are not posting about ChatGPT, but using ChatGPT to generate vapid (?, or inauthentic?) posts to farm engagement where there would otherwise be silence.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - 4y ago
LaserToy 4y ago
Opportunists? I worked on ML/AI, I call AI: artificial idiot…
mjr00 4y ago
This isn't really surprising. Even the HN comments for ChatGPT/Stable Diffusion related topics completely drank the kool-aid for a bit. I saw absolutely unhinged blanket statements like "ChatGPT is going to replace junior developers;" "Stable Diffusion is going to destroy the art industry;" "in a few years people will listen to completely AI-generated music playlists on Spotify." The hype has died down a bit and sanity has been mostly restored to the comment sections here, but holy hell, HN readers are in this industry, they should know better, yet so many were, and maybe are, still fully bought in. The average VC, or other manifestation of "fool with money", has zero chance. The macro economy aside, it's absolutely going to be a feeding frenzy for the entrepreneurs and grifters who can put together a convincing presentation on how they're making an AI Netflix that will show infinitely generated AI TV shows or whatever.
- fragmede 4y ago
  [flagged]
- dmix 4y ago
  I've also seen plenty of serious journalism and comments about ChatGPT destroying Google search, writing, journalism, art, education, and on HN the usual bits about countless programmers thoughtlessly copying/pasting buggy code into production without testing/QA/getting fired after the 3rd time, or even people shoving pills down their throat because they read some health stuff on ChatGPT without second thought. There's a lot of people getting hysterical about it... just like there's the usual true believer audience (see: new age/conspiracy/etc in the past and now crypto). Every major new change generates these extremes... and no its not unique to HN or crypto bros. Personally I'm skeptical things are getting worse because we still have the same reputation and social critique systems to keep these groups in check. But it's always good to keep on top of the current things these groups latch on to... including both doomers AND culty/conspiracy extremes.
- jameshart 4y ago
  There's a big difference between NFTs and most DeFi, and LLMs and other generative AIs. NFTs and shitcoins clearly had no actual non-scam usecases - they didn't actually enable anything genuinely interesting to be done that was previously impossible (except for breaking the law in some slightly new and interesting ways). But LLMs and friends... these bring things that were impossible, or impractical, or unscalable, into the realm of possibility. There will be genuinely important things built on this tech. Figuring out what is going to be properly hard work though. But of course, there will also be a ton of lazy ill-thought-out crap, too. And the danger is that NFTs and cryptoscams created a bunch of random lottery winners who think they got rich off their genius insight into how to apply innovative tech, but who actually only proved they know how to generate ill-thought-out crap, very quickly, at the start of a hype curve. So unsurprising to see them moving in. But without the obvious get-rich-quick scam opportunities, and the likely massive compute fees doing anything interesting in this space will involve, it's less obvious how long those folks will stick around.
spamizbad 4y ago
So in the aughts there were people who would do this except rather than crypto/web3 or AI/ML it was creating a clone of either Google, MySpace or Facebook. They were the idea person and you would be the person who was going to code it up real quick for them. They are in the process of raising money so they can pay you $20/hour for your time and maybe offer you 5% of the company (you are not a co-founder tho). It's a hustle as old as time.
bakugo 4y ago
No surprise there, AI is the current flavor-of-the-year solution-to-every-problem-ever techbro gimmick that people are only jumping on because they think they can make a quick buck on it if they jump on ASAP. A year or two from now, it will hopefully return to the background where it belongs, it has already done more than enough damage to the internet.
__MatrixMan__ 4y ago
Ugh, finally. Crypto is good for nothing. Just leave us alone so we can build shit in peace.
faangiq 4y ago
No shit AI has been a grift for decades.
jesuspiece 4y ago
Wow, thanks for the doom and gloom prediction about the potential negative consequences of AI and chatbots. I'm sure the world is just on the verge of being completely taken over by malicious chatbots running rampant, scamming grandmas left and right. But hey, at least we'll have some low quality content to look forward to on social media. Can't wait.
wmf 4y ago
AI is far less harmful[1] than crypto because there's nothing in AI for retail to put money into. There's no plausible story about 10xing or 100xing your money. [1] unless it kills us all
- riku_iki 4y ago
  they didn't create aicoin yet?
bfgoodrich 4y ago
[dead]
nequo 4y ago
As a sibling mentions, we have this windfall of cheap GPUs in the economy. They are not used to mine crypto anymore. So we can put them to use to ... train ML models. This can still be more productive than crypto was. But hopefully the ML models trained won't be used for face recognition in dictatorships or for finally replacing all software engineers with a beefed up version of GPT.
baby 4y ago
It must be that the whole field of ML/AI is a scam then /s
jbenjoseph 4y ago
It's way harder to scam people with AI/ML stuff compared to crypto since it fundamentally doesn't involve transfers of large sums of money. Well perhaps venture capitalists, but it's their job to be able to tell the real from the fake. The hype around AI is well deserved though.
joegibbs 4y ago
I suppose the good thing about this is at least AI is definitely useful for creating tools that improve productivity, whereas a lot of crypto was just speculation - it was easy to make a shitcoin and pump it up, but with AI you have to actually make a usable product that people would pay for. That is, unless you're making some kind of AI auto-scamming system, but that's less of a grey area.
morsecodist 4y ago
I have noticed this as well. I am interested in NLP and these language models are really cool but the level of hype makes the topic frustrating to engage with these days. It's hard to sift good information from an ocean of hype-fueled click bait.
tluyben2 4y ago
I noticed this too. But I see some far less innocent signals than you see. I myself was very surprised by chatgpt; I studied AI in the 90s, AI winter, and, although progress was interesting since 2012, I really didn’t think this would happen anything soon. In my companies, I have used ML for some things, but it was never anything really groundbreaking; just quite boring (as I work in payments). With chatgpt and gpt3.5 thing really changed for me. So did stable diffusion (esp midjourney), but that is more because I cannot draw even a stick figure if pressured to, so it is enjoyable make images that mean something to me. But chatgpt I see something more in for the future, programming and business; things that interest me. If anything, it rekindled my interest in ML and I started playing with models on huggingface and colab, which is fun. Made some quite open source things for me to make it easy to try chatgpt on work and personal projects quickly to see if I can do anything with it (even though some commercially viable; if davinci 003 is any sign, it will be way too expensive for most to make a profit on reliably longer term even if it does bring value). But now everyone indeed is launch projects in high tempo to make money early on, launching projects on producthunt and Twitter, getting a lot of attention and a bunch of them seem to make money even though it doesn’t actually work. Most are no more than a saas template on the gpt3 api (or chatgpt unofficial as ‘prelaunch’) or one of the stable diffusion api’s, with a bit of lazy prompt priming showing a few cherry picked demos. Again, I had good results with chatgpt for real things; I used php parser, chatgpt and a lot of prompting (I refuse to call it prompt engineering) to automatically analyse a 300k LoC php project and provide me with md files (and so a pdf of those files) of the reviewed code with explanations. It also generates an executive overview without code. But if I would have to pay for tokens, because of how you have to (automatically) tune and refeed depending on the output (which I could read, pull through the PHP parser to check if it was complete), I would have a huge loss. With gpt3 davinci pricing, I would be out well over 25k. You can see that people are now hiring people to quickly create ‘MVPs’ with the purpose of quick pump and dumps. Just get a lot of traction, sell a few subscriptions and flip it. At least many in the nft/crypto community lost their own money by ‘hodling’. Here is seems most ‘products’ are created with the creators knowing it will never work: probably had some great results when manual prompting, made an automated product and now have something they ask (a lot) of money for which does not really work so they need to move it. It are indeed many of the dame ‘get rich quick’/‘the new world order’ crowd. They did not understand nfts or crypto but spent 1000s (…) on it anyway. They built crappy web3 stuff without value and flipped those fast. So I guess what I am seeing is more akin to web3 as that has the same ‘wow the new future, much launch something fast’ to ‘hmm, this is not really working but I have some hype, let’s flip it’. I guess it is not very known here but for ‘internet marketers’, people with a lot of Twitter followers and mailing list subscribers (millions of them), this is how it works; they monitor the hypes, create products, send out to subscribers; many of them are starry-eyed fans and will sign up and pay immediately (usually it includes some kind of free ebook; more now as most of these are now mostly generated) and then flip them. They don’t really care about whatever it is; nft/crypto/web3/Ai. They move on and don’t care if it fails or not; they are out already. These people are actually the driver for others to join hypes; they hear from their guru/mentor etc that this is really go time this time and get invested by trying to join the train. It ruins lives as we have seen with crypto (but I have seen it many times before in the last 20+ years); these people follow the marketers, buy their books, courses, saas etc but never read, follow or use them. If they would have, they would know to get out on a high and move to the next thing. They hardly ever actually do that but keep holding on to the idea they bought into this time (often they are young and too new to know this is a cycle). I think we will see 1000s of ‘products’ which are half baked API layers or ‘beta’ products waiting for investment by people like you describe; quick upwork hire and suddenly you have an AI company, gold for investors. Many of them will appear for sale in the coming months and people will buy them if they have any kind of traction (and let’s be honest, traction is trivial at this point still).
appleaday1 4y ago
The use of Dall-E that I have seen in the crypto space is hilarious as they have been trying to make memes with it, so I found that to be very positive. Generally, this is a huge problem Reddit site-wide ever since they launched their PM/DM system. I literally had to write a Reddit Bot to warn our subreddit to NOT talk to strangers on Reddit DMs. At some point I thought about how to thwart scammers by creating fake threads and fake users. Honestly, reddit seriously needs to get its threat modelling together. DMs cause more damage than the benefits that it espouses.
cybersecurity99 4y ago
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jzellis 4y ago
This industry has drawn scum like flies to shit for decades. When I was a kid starting out, it was the beginning of the dot.com boom, and you'd see these endless stupid startup ideas thrown together by MBAs who suddenly thought SF or the Valley were the place to be instead of Wall Street. (Many of these back then involved unrealistic or bizarre schemes involving streaming media, as I recall.) Then it was social media. The same sketchy freaks were all gonna do the new MySpace or Facebook. I remember one dude telling me at a meetup that he was doing "Facebook for payroll". What the fuck does that even mean, dude? Then came crypto, and the serious scumbags and loonies showed up, because you didn't even need VCs to make money - the money itself was the product. Every ancap dipshit and New Age cokehead and Eastern Promises ass connected-to-scary-Russiam-sex-traffickers jerkoff came squirming out of the woodwork. Now it's AI. As soon as any tech can be utilized by stupid or sociopathic people to scam or spam other people, it's suddenly hailed as a "boom". And now millions of human-hours and trillions of dollars will be thrown at teaching ML models to sell you boner pills and get your grandma's credit card number. And all the interesting, useful directions we could be going as technologists are being mostly ignored, so that failed child actors and Patrick Bateman ass hustlers can throw extravagant launch parties and hype up their worthless companies until their investors finally figure out it's a scam and they go to jail, at which point Hulu or Netflix makes a docudrama miniseries about them starring somebody who was a box office draw when the last wave of tech hype was upon us. Capitalism is so boring and predictable. Always the lowest hanging fruit, always the creepiest scum trying to pick it. I'd probably go be Amish if I could convince myself to believe in Jesus.
- terminal_d 4y ago
  Well said. Most of this shit just circles back onto itself. Unfortunately having a very public, very unequal distribution of rewards only seems to perpetuate the cycle, and with commodities where the service is the product and the reward, the gravy train never ends and there's a sucker born every minute. The only way to be content is to not play.
shetill 4y ago
Most of YC Cofounder matching is full of those same grifters, that have 0 tech know how and expect you to do everything
reportgunner 4y ago
I am suprised we don't get endless autogenerated AI art NFTs.
smarri 4y ago
"One guy proposed my friend that he has a startup idea to use GPT-model to let people talk to their pets and that it should be 'fairly easy' to finetune from an existing model." - haha this is hilarious!! A younger me once thought, like the person who pitched that to your friend, that all I needed was an idea (..and if only I could find someone to build it...I'd be a huge success!!) and as I matured and got experience in the world, I realised that ideas are cheap and execution is hard. We need more doers! I'm a reformed ideas guy.
cableshaft 4y ago
This might predate the web3 bubble bursting by a bit. I am somewhat adjacent to the space in my spare time (help some friends with their code sometimes) and they were getting pretty hyped up about having NFTs with A.I. personalities trained into them and having them in a metaverse as NPCs you could talk to. Then ChatGPT happened and they got even more excited about that, as it seemed even more plausible and doable. I wouldn't classify those people as grifters, they genuinely believe they're bringing about a new future and the web3 bubble bursting is temporary (I'm more skeptical myself, but not so much I'm not willing to help out here and there). Not to say there weren't a ton of grifters in the space, there definitely were (and a lot of them). As well as people who thought they weren't being grifters, but then the bottom fell out of web3 and they're like, 'oh shit, guess I was wrong about all this', and they ended up becoming one without intending to. There are people that can be in both crypto and A.I. grifting at the same time, too. Like they see A.I. art as a quick and easy way to generate art for NFTs. So they're not mutually exclusive fields. And some people just perpetually bounce from one get rich quick scheme to another. It's happened since way before crypto, and it'll keep happening. If you stay at the forefront of it, and cash out as the frenzy starts to hit, it's probably fairly effective, too, but if you're perpetually late to these things, as most people are, it's just going to keep being a money pit for you.
ithilien 4y ago
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w1nst0nsm1th 4y ago
AI is the next big bubble. You can see it just watching youtube videos announcing the end of 'data era' and the start 'knowledge era', running on the hype.

299 points by alsodumb 4y ago

smoldesu 4y ago

Gotta use those outdated GPUs for something!

rvz 4y ago

No surprise about that and was all expected as soon as Stable Diffusion, DALL-E and ChatGPT were unleashed into the wild. We already have seen plenty of AI grifters on HN creating clones and copies of AI SaaS and bot offerings with almost no use case on top of ChatGPT with the AI bros selling their snake-oil as "the future" and AI totally replacing everyone's jobs almost just like the extreme crypto maximalists screaming about their utopia of replacing the banking system with crypto coins. It is another grift for the AI bros, with OpenAI and Microsoft being the winners and can easily gate-keep and price out the majority of these grifter jumping on the bandwagon late, unless Stable Diffusion drives everything down to zero by releasing a better model for free. But the truth is both crypto and AI are here to stay no matter the grifters and the opportunists. The inevitability on both of these technologies is that the laws will catch up with them eventually.

tripplyons 4y ago

As someone who is genuinely interested in both blockchain and machine learning, I have seen many people in the crypto space suddenly start acting like they know things about machine learning when ChatGPT came out. Many of them are repeating falsehoods or are unaware of the history of machine learning, including recent events.

saurik 4y ago
As someone who was genuinely interested in distributed computing back 20 years ago, the same lack of awareness of history is extremely prevalent in crypto. That said, I feel like that's true of people in general, at least in tech (I can't speak to other fields much), and it is extremely frustrating: history is important!
- threeseed 4y ago
  To be fair many of the people involved in crypto today are too young to be aware of the history. For me crypto is similar to the late 90's where everyone talked about how P2P i.e. decentralised communication was going to change the world. Remnants still live on today up and down the tech stack but that vision never became a reality. I think crypto will similarly find its way into the traditional finance sector and live on but the utopia of decentralised finance will never eventuate.
  - arcticbull 4y ago
    > I think crypto will similarly find its way into the traditional finance sector and live on but the utopia of decentralised finance will never eventuate. To do that it would have to do something, anything, even one tiny little bit better than something in finance. So far it's like quantum computing. Nothing is better solved with a quantum computer right now. Will that change in the future? Maybe. Until it does they simply won't be used. After all, why would they - except as an opportunity to build in-house expertise in a new space, and for the perception of being hip? There is no preordained future where it's accepted, it has to earn its spot.

threeseed 4y ago

At least we can be thankful it is coinciding with a tough funding environment. And that it's far more difficult to bootstrap an AI model based business given the infrastructure costs versus a boring old SaaS one.

ge96 4y ago

What I recently saw is people trying to charge commissions from art generated by AI. Which I guess you can do that but sucks for the actual creators.

bb88 4y ago
Also, usually using many popular artists' work as training data for the model.
- thedorkknight 4y ago
  Human artists also use popular artist's work as training data
  - acdha 4y ago
    There’s a big difference in how closely most people emulate other artists. Humans tend to want a distinct identify so it’s frowned on to use high skill to make something very similar, and they can only make new art relatively slowly. We’ve never had to consider industrial scale without the ethical concerns before.
    - bb88 4y ago
      My issue is that if someone has a remarkable new style, sure it's going to be copied by humans, but it takes time to do so. And usually the original artist becomes famous along the way -- perhaps even rich. Imagine a brand new artist who has a distinct style, but yet the art style is used to print 20,000 successful NFT rug pulls. If there was a market, there is no longer one anymore. I think that's the problem.
  - baby 4y ago
    What's funny to me is that people are yelling at open source programs. This is a new kind of yelling at the clouds.
  - chidg 4y ago
    There's a major difference of scale. No individual human artist can reliably learn to copy every other artists' styles, and then produce infinite works in those styles.

bawolff 4y ago

Some people like to chase whatever is hot. That is life.

kristopolous 4y ago

Their repurposing their hardware investment. It's the same magical thinking. I wouldn't be surprised to see capital flood into these markets. Capital investors haven't shown themselves to be the sharpest knives in the last few years

Gatsky 4y ago

“What are you drinking, the water or the wave?” The Magus, by John Fowles

blondin 4y ago

the fear is not warranted. current scams are crypto-related. not web3, which doesn't have money written all over it. these scammers follow the money. still curious how they will use AI or ML for scams. the example given does not convince me. and doesn't need any of the current AI/ML advancement.

braingenious 4y ago
What web3 stuff exists without crypto?
- DonHopkins 4y ago
  The original Web3 stuff that came less than a year after the Web2 stuff in the early 2000's, a few years before the web went to 11, two decades ago. Web3 sounds to me like antiquated nostalgia for something that happened at the turn of the century.
  - braingenious 4y ago
    What, specifically, are you talking about?
    - nl 4y ago
      There was an attempt to make semantic web = web3.0 in around 2009 or so. Eg https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305443181_PROGRESSION_OF_WEB_30SEMANTIC_WEB_FROM_WEB_10_A_SURVEY https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305443181_PROGRESSI... (April 2009) It didn't really go anywhere. Web3 now is sort of a thing because one of the main Ethereum client libraries is called Web3: https://github.com/web3/web3.js https://github.com/web3/web3.js
      - braingenious 4y ago
        So, web3 doesn’t rely on crypto so long as you define the term in a way that’s inconsistent with how it’s basically universally used today?

jfoster 4y ago

I've noticed the hype shifting from crypto to AI, but at least AI is actually going to be somewhat revolutionary and (in my opinion) deserving of the hype. Hopefully it gets mostly used in good ways, rather than as new ways to scam.

jaredcwhite 4y ago
Oh that train's already left the station. Plenty of us understand the cons far outweigh the perceived benefits, and it's already bad NOW. It's only going to get much, much worse.
- guhayun 4y ago
  Lets not keep doing the dangerous boring labourous jobs ourselves And i would love for researchers to not have to code
- jfoster 4y ago
  It seems too early to call it definitely good or definitely bad. Feels like it should eventually be one or the other, though.
jayant_kaushik 4y ago
It already is revolutionary and maybe we overlook how it is helping us all daily, work faster, spend more quality time, make things easy. I’ll give just one very small example: I have this huge photo library on my phone and sometimes I need to find a particular photo or receipt from a specific business that I clicked 3-4 years ago. Doing that manually means spending at least 10 mins to 30 mins if I don’t remember the exact month or year I clicked it in. And I used to mostly defer finding the photo as much as I could. Or do it when I was totally bored and nothing to do. Cue AI: I type the business name or photo description in the search bar and it displays the photo right there. 3 seconds. Another could be about the Camera app using CV to read live text or numbers. I guess CV and LLMs are specifically going to explode this year as they already have a strong base and proven use case.
- 4y ago

alphabetting 4y ago

It's really annoying but I think the hype is deserved this time. If you think the discourse on AI is saturated now I'd just wait. Wouldn't be surprised if it's 10x current levels in a next couple years.

DonHopkins 4y ago

Here's a hilariously over-the-top AI job posting that one of those grifters (Luc Du Pont of Phoenix Core Entertainment) recently sent to me. Anybody want to develop work in "hackathon" format to train AI to play PONG, in exchange for promises of equity and a cut of profits instead of cash for your time? This Big Idea Guy assured me: "Biggest thing is i solved the hard ai/cognitive problem. Hence our secrecy". Color me impressed! Who wouldn't want to work passionately for promises of peanuts in exchange for a piece of that pie? And not only has he trademarked "Synthetic Cognitive Identities (TM)" but also he's applied to trademark "ARTIFICIAL PERSONALITY". https://uspto.report/company/Luke-Du-Pont-S-Phoenix-Core-Entertainment https://uspto.report/company/Luke-Du-Pont-S-Phoenix-Core-Ent... All that groundbreaking top secret trademarked AI technology solving "the hard ai/cognitive problem" just to play PONG. But can it pass butter? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7HmltUWXgs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7HmltUWXgs Also his now-shut-down Twitter account and his own words when I confronted him about it prove that he is a flaming homophobic transphobic bigot who retweets White Supremacist propoganda, so you better not apply if you're remotely "woke," or aren't qualified and willing to singlehandedly develop a cutting edge MVP on Unity and Unreal Engine at the same time. Pick a lane, dude. Oh and you'd also better know how to use Bayes' Theorem to cover your Posterior = Likelihood × Prior ÷ Evidence. He though he'd just throw that qualifying requirement in to filter out the charlatans. JOB DESCRIPTION Summary of the Position: The Potential Engineer will develop work in “hackathon” format collaborating with a cross-disciplinary team to build amazing new technology and tools in the newly designed Artificial Intelligence space of Synthetic Cognitive Identities (TM). This space is specifically a MVP for a SCI to play Pong against a player under the rules of the leadership design. Nuget package and dll come in play in targeting unity and unreal as release platforms for ease of usability. Main Responsibilities: Be responsible for your feature's network, memory, GPU and CPU usage Work on fixing issues in your feature's work. Make necessary updates to improve stability / performance of the SCI engine Implement Unity Engine plugins Work closely with Sr. Developers on project implementation QUALIFICATIONS Experience & Qualifications Required: Passion for software development – we expect you to like to write and maintain code Experience with the latest Unity Engine release Experience with Unity profiling tools Experience with Python Experience with LISP Experience with C # Experience with Unreal Engine Blueprints Experience with the latest Unreal Engine release Experience with Unreal profiling tools Experience with Unreal plugin implementation Experience with C++ Cross-platform libraries Experience with communication protocols (HTTP / Web Sockets) Familiarity with build processes, compiler tool-chains Experience writing multi-threaded code and reasoning about dependency graphs Experience with Git Optimization skills for both code and assets Statistical and data analytics Bayes' theorem Debugging skills Be ready to invest the effort to become an even better developer LDAP/Active Directory High performance computing Network and software security Cloud and virtualization technologies Edge computing We will appreciate: Interest in the latest programming trends such as functional and reactive programming High availability - hardware and software clustering Tensor flow/Tensor board AWS application load balancer and elastic load balancing (ec2 compute)

eplm 4y ago

Yeah, I've noticed a lot of "AI artists" suddenly pop up out of nowhere. As far as I can see, they're just typing a prompt into Stable Diffusion or DALL-E and picking a nice image. It's lazy, talentless, and demeans the actual artists whose work was stolen to train these models.

bestcoder69 4y ago
And not to mention, fun!
- cableshaft 4y ago
  How dare something be fun. Everything must be dour serious business at all times.
Art9681 4y ago
We all stand on the shoulders of giants. I imagine the first person to carve a stick figure into a rock impressed some folks. Soon enough, the entire village experimented with carving figures into rocks. The smart ones mimicked the techniques of the good ones, and made it better. Soon, the village was flooded with various artworks of stick figures, some more intricate than others. Some had wobly lines, some lines as straight as a ruler. Eventually the expectations changed. No longer was the village impressed with stick figures. A distinction had to be made between the average stick figure carvers and the good ones. They called them "artists". Eventually someone figured out how to add color. The cycle repeats and expectations changed, the average distinguished from the talented. No longer was drawing a stick figure without color considered art. To be an artist, you had to use color. Then someone showed up with a brush, then Photoshop, then Stable Diffusion. In the year 2023, expectations changed, yet again. And the average were separated from the talented, and the best prompt writers were considered artists. In the year 2040...
- bakugo 4y ago
  Nobody is carving stick figures into rocks here. They're pressing a button on a machine that someone else built that carves stick figures into a rock for them. Saying "best prompt writer" is like saying "best button presser", there's nothing impressive about it.

Geee 4y ago

I don't see it in this way. People are genuinely excited about ChatGPT and are finding ways to build apps around it. I don't see what's bad about this. For influencers, ChatGPT/AI is a great topic because the field is moving fast, there's lots of new development to cover and people are interested. Crypto grifting was selling the dream to get rich. There was nothing in it to begin with. I think 'grifting' means dishonesty - selling snake oil. I don't think applies to AI, even if it's just a temporary hype cycle. I should mention that Bitcoin is obviously a real thing; "crypto" is the thousands of useless coins which claim to be the next Bitcoin.

muzani 4y ago
They're just journalists playing with speculation. Half a century ago, it was about nukes, rockets, quantum stuff, robots, and AI. Nobody is really an expert in ChatGPT specifically, so it's a low hanging fruit.
Quarrelsome 4y ago
didn't the OP state that someone was going to use ML so people could talk to their pets? That's grift because there is fundamentally zero science to make that happen so they would just be lying to all their customers.
- nl 4y ago
  Ironically I looked very hard at a couple of legitimate projects in this space (before ChatGTP). In particular https://www.earthspecies.org/ https://www.earthspecies.org/ is a pretty interesting project.
jaredcwhite 4y ago
> People are genuinely excited about ChatGPT Are you kidding me? The movement of people like me who are deeply skeptical about the benefits of generative AI and place them in similar categories of "potentially hazardous to society" inventions like drugs, weapons, etc. is alive and well. We're genuinely fearful that there are folks out there who apparently aren't aware of the severe legal and cultural minefields that these sort of unregulated tools present. I haven't the slightest doubt that, now that we're seeing the collapse of "web3" nonsense/blockchain apps/cryptocurrencies/etc., there's a wealth of grifters looking for their next score and "AI" is the obvious successor.

chrisco255 4y ago

[flagged]

k2enemy 4y ago
We can feed prompts into chatGPT ourselves if that's what we want to read.

svnt 4y ago

This is where you insist on getting paid up front, underpromise, and raise your rates until the interest dies to a manageable level.

mrtksn 4y ago

If they are actually going to pay for your time, why just don't take the job? Riding the latest trends is very normal for media personalities or entrepreneurs, if trends change so do they. If they fail to do that, they will perish. Obviously, don't do the unethical stuff but if they were somewhat lucky in the crypto boom it would be nice to have that money redirected to ML. I don't know if its possible to make people talk to their friends using GPT models but sounds like something that people can actually pay for. If they don't have the dataset, building one or acquiring one can be added to the todo list.

Sebb767 4y ago
> If they are actually going to pay for your time, why just don't take the job? You probably never received such am offer. It's always in the form of "I bring the idea, you do all the work and, instead of money, you'll receive a ${rand(5,20)}% share of the resulting company!". And if you offer to do the work for money instead, you'll never hear back. People serious enough to put money behind their ideas won't randomly ping Reddit mods with them.
- mrtksn 4y ago
  I wouldn't dismiss everyone as grifters though. Every now and then it's not the guy with the idea who just needs someone to implement it, but it's actually someone who got lucky in something previously and has resources. That's why I say do it if they are actually going to pay for your time. I don't know if anyone ever falls to the guy with idea but no resources and no expertise to do it themselves anyway?
  - acdha 4y ago
    Maybe but the style of that definitely felt more like someone getting ready to low-ball. It brought back dotcom-era memories of the guys who wanted to clone some big web site - they always thought it would be “fairly easy”, too.
    - mrtksn 4y ago

mabbo 4y ago

I wonder if we can turn this around and somehow scam these people of their crypto? "This is an excellent idea and I would be happy to get started on it. Please send me X BTC to this address as a downpayment."

LarsDu88 4y ago

In the 1700s, the new world was the hot new thing leading to the south seas bubble. In the 1850s people bandwagoned rail and steam power, leading to the rail bubble. In the 1920s it was radio technology. In 1970s it was polaroid. In 2000 it was dotcom. Every bubble busts, but the end result has left us with rail lines, the United States, radio, television, digital cameras, and fiber optic lines. The overall direction is upwards. EVs will probably be the long term outcome of the last bubble. AI still has a long way to go. Crypto will probably go the way of the less useful bubbles (beanie babies and tulips)

cardamomo 4y ago
Thank you for sharing. I hadn't heard of the South Seas Bubble. Now I'm wondering if such a bubble—formed around a single company—could come about today.
- whitexn--g28h 4y ago
  Enron, FTX
  - meheleventyone 4y ago
    GameStop. Tesla. Tech stocks generally until last year. Doesn’t need to be fraudulent to be a bubble.
baby 4y ago
> Crypto will probably go the way of the less useful bubbles (beanie babies and tulips) People say that and yet it's been like what, 14 years? How long can a tulip market really last?
- _5uxp 4y ago
  They don't understand the potential, they just repeat same info for years.

getravi 4y ago

Grifters gonna grift.

zamalek 4y ago

I saw a video the other day claiming to be the start of a "ChatGPT expert in 13 days." A what?

p1esk 4y ago
Wow, 13 days? Usually it’s 13 minutes.
- mrtksn 4y ago
  You can’t fit enough ads in 13 minutes to justify the education expenses.
- terminal_d 4y ago
  It takes more than 13 minutes to add the channel plugs and the "like share subscribe" etc crapola.

Animats 4y ago

Oh, no. Are these some of the same people who pivoted from binary options in Tel Aviv to crypto out of Bulgaria and Cyprus to this? If it involves a large outgoing call center sales operation, there's a good chance it is. That seems to be the core skill set of that crowd.

allenleee 4y ago

I'm hope the trend will go nuclear one day :))

noobermin 4y ago

I hate to say I called it but I literally called it years ago, "AI" will be the new grift in due time.

braingenious 4y ago

The immediate bummer about ChatGPT and its ilk for me isn’t scammers (though I’m sure it’s an issue that will get worse), but… insufferably dull people. I figured that “old people getting on Facebook” must have been the final Eternal September, but apparently nope. Now, people that otherwise would never post (on social media, forums, etc) due to not having any knowledge or opinion on a given topic have the option of copying and pasting text back and forth to mindlessly farm engagement. The era of the Ultimate Reply Guy is upon us, and it sucks. In the same way that rickrolling was a substitute for having a sense of humor, “Here’s what the robot says” is a substitute for insight or personality.

mentalpiracy 4y ago
> Now, people that otherwise would never post (on social media, forums, etc) due to not having any knowledge or opinion on a given topic have the option of copying and pasting text back and forth to mindlessly farm engagement. This is such an odd, hostile way to react to people posting things on the internet that I'm genuinely curious what part of this you have an actual problem with? Framed another way, what you're describing here is that using ChatGPT is interesting enough to trigger engagement from social media users who are otherwise mostly inactive. If that is indeed the case, imo that is a pretty strong indicator of appeal to a wide audience.
- phdelightful 4y ago
  > Framed another way, what you're describing here is that using ChatGPT is interesting enough to trigger engagement from social media users who are otherwise mostly inactive. If that is indeed the case, imo that is a pretty strong indicator of appeal to a wide audience. I understood the comment to mean the posters are not posting about ChatGPT, but using ChatGPT to generate vapid (?, or inauthentic?) posts to farm engagement where there would otherwise be silence.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - 4y ago

LaserToy 4y ago

Opportunists? I worked on ML/AI, I call AI: artificial idiot…

mjr00 4y ago

This isn't really surprising. Even the HN comments for ChatGPT/Stable Diffusion related topics completely drank the kool-aid for a bit. I saw absolutely unhinged blanket statements like "ChatGPT is going to replace junior developers;" "Stable Diffusion is going to destroy the art industry;" "in a few years people will listen to completely AI-generated music playlists on Spotify." The hype has died down a bit and sanity has been mostly restored to the comment sections here, but holy hell, HN readers are in this industry, they should know better, yet so many were, and maybe are, still fully bought in. The average VC, or other manifestation of "fool with money", has zero chance. The macro economy aside, it's absolutely going to be a feeding frenzy for the entrepreneurs and grifters who can put together a convincing presentation on how they're making an AI Netflix that will show infinitely generated AI TV shows or whatever.

fragmede 4y ago
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dmix 4y ago
I've also seen plenty of serious journalism and comments about ChatGPT destroying Google search, writing, journalism, art, education, and on HN the usual bits about countless programmers thoughtlessly copying/pasting buggy code into production without testing/QA/getting fired after the 3rd time, or even people shoving pills down their throat because they read some health stuff on ChatGPT without second thought. There's a lot of people getting hysterical about it... just like there's the usual true believer audience (see: new age/conspiracy/etc in the past and now crypto). Every major new change generates these extremes... and no its not unique to HN or crypto bros. Personally I'm skeptical things are getting worse because we still have the same reputation and social critique systems to keep these groups in check. But it's always good to keep on top of the current things these groups latch on to... including both doomers AND culty/conspiracy extremes.
jameshart 4y ago
There's a big difference between NFTs and most DeFi, and LLMs and other generative AIs. NFTs and shitcoins clearly had no actual non-scam usecases - they didn't actually enable anything genuinely interesting to be done that was previously impossible (except for breaking the law in some slightly new and interesting ways). But LLMs and friends... these bring things that were impossible, or impractical, or unscalable, into the realm of possibility. There will be genuinely important things built on this tech. Figuring out what is going to be properly hard work though. But of course, there will also be a ton of lazy ill-thought-out crap, too. And the danger is that NFTs and cryptoscams created a bunch of random lottery winners who think they got rich off their genius insight into how to apply innovative tech, but who actually only proved they know how to generate ill-thought-out crap, very quickly, at the start of a hype curve. So unsurprising to see them moving in. But without the obvious get-rich-quick scam opportunities, and the likely massive compute fees doing anything interesting in this space will involve, it's less obvious how long those folks will stick around.

spamizbad 4y ago

So in the aughts there were people who would do this except rather than crypto/web3 or AI/ML it was creating a clone of either Google, MySpace or Facebook. They were the idea person and you would be the person who was going to code it up real quick for them. They are in the process of raising money so they can pay you $20/hour for your time and maybe offer you 5% of the company (you are not a co-founder tho). It's a hustle as old as time.

bakugo 4y ago

No surprise there, AI is the current flavor-of-the-year solution-to-every-problem-ever techbro gimmick that people are only jumping on because they think they can make a quick buck on it if they jump on ASAP. A year or two from now, it will hopefully return to the background where it belongs, it has already done more than enough damage to the internet.

__MatrixMan__ 4y ago

Ugh, finally. Crypto is good for nothing. Just leave us alone so we can build shit in peace.

faangiq 4y ago

No shit AI has been a grift for decades.

jesuspiece 4y ago

Wow, thanks for the doom and gloom prediction about the potential negative consequences of AI and chatbots. I'm sure the world is just on the verge of being completely taken over by malicious chatbots running rampant, scamming grandmas left and right. But hey, at least we'll have some low quality content to look forward to on social media. Can't wait.

wmf 4y ago

AI is far less harmful[1] than crypto because there's nothing in AI for retail to put money into. There's no plausible story about 10xing or 100xing your money. [1] unless it kills us all

riku_iki 4y ago
they didn't create aicoin yet?

bfgoodrich 4y ago

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nequo 4y ago

As a sibling mentions, we have this windfall of cheap GPUs in the economy. They are not used to mine crypto anymore. So we can put them to use to ... train ML models. This can still be more productive than crypto was. But hopefully the ML models trained won't be used for face recognition in dictatorships or for finally replacing all software engineers with a beefed up version of GPT.

baby 4y ago

It must be that the whole field of ML/AI is a scam then /s

jbenjoseph 4y ago

It's way harder to scam people with AI/ML stuff compared to crypto since it fundamentally doesn't involve transfers of large sums of money. Well perhaps venture capitalists, but it's their job to be able to tell the real from the fake. The hype around AI is well deserved though.

joegibbs 4y ago

I suppose the good thing about this is at least AI is definitely useful for creating tools that improve productivity, whereas a lot of crypto was just speculation - it was easy to make a shitcoin and pump it up, but with AI you have to actually make a usable product that people would pay for. That is, unless you're making some kind of AI auto-scamming system, but that's less of a grey area.

morsecodist 4y ago

I have noticed this as well. I am interested in NLP and these language models are really cool but the level of hype makes the topic frustrating to engage with these days. It's hard to sift good information from an ocean of hype-fueled click bait.

tluyben2 4y ago

I noticed this too. But I see some far less innocent signals than you see. I myself was very surprised by chatgpt; I studied AI in the 90s, AI winter, and, although progress was interesting since 2012, I really didn’t think this would happen anything soon. In my companies, I have used ML for some things, but it was never anything really groundbreaking; just quite boring (as I work in payments). With chatgpt and gpt3.5 thing really changed for me. So did stable diffusion (esp midjourney), but that is more because I cannot draw even a stick figure if pressured to, so it is enjoyable make images that mean something to me. But chatgpt I see something more in for the future, programming and business; things that interest me. If anything, it rekindled my interest in ML and I started playing with models on huggingface and colab, which is fun. Made some quite open source things for me to make it easy to try chatgpt on work and personal projects quickly to see if I can do anything with it (even though some commercially viable; if davinci 003 is any sign, it will be way too expensive for most to make a profit on reliably longer term even if it does bring value). But now everyone indeed is launch projects in high tempo to make money early on, launching projects on producthunt and Twitter, getting a lot of attention and a bunch of them seem to make money even though it doesn’t actually work. Most are no more than a saas template on the gpt3 api (or chatgpt unofficial as ‘prelaunch’) or one of the stable diffusion api’s, with a bit of lazy prompt priming showing a few cherry picked demos. Again, I had good results with chatgpt for real things; I used php parser, chatgpt and a lot of prompting (I refuse to call it prompt engineering) to automatically analyse a 300k LoC php project and provide me with md files (and so a pdf of those files) of the reviewed code with explanations. It also generates an executive overview without code. But if I would have to pay for tokens, because of how you have to (automatically) tune and refeed depending on the output (which I could read, pull through the PHP parser to check if it was complete), I would have a huge loss. With gpt3 davinci pricing, I would be out well over 25k. You can see that people are now hiring people to quickly create ‘MVPs’ with the purpose of quick pump and dumps. Just get a lot of traction, sell a few subscriptions and flip it. At least many in the nft/crypto community lost their own money by ‘hodling’. Here is seems most ‘products’ are created with the creators knowing it will never work: probably had some great results when manual prompting, made an automated product and now have something they ask (a lot) of money for which does not really work so they need to move it. It are indeed many of the dame ‘get rich quick’/‘the new world order’ crowd. They did not understand nfts or crypto but spent 1000s (…) on it anyway. They built crappy web3 stuff without value and flipped those fast. So I guess what I am seeing is more akin to web3 as that has the same ‘wow the new future, much launch something fast’ to ‘hmm, this is not really working but I have some hype, let’s flip it’. I guess it is not very known here but for ‘internet marketers’, people with a lot of Twitter followers and mailing list subscribers (millions of them), this is how it works; they monitor the hypes, create products, send out to subscribers; many of them are starry-eyed fans and will sign up and pay immediately (usually it includes some kind of free ebook; more now as most of these are now mostly generated) and then flip them. They don’t really care about whatever it is; nft/crypto/web3/Ai. They move on and don’t care if it fails or not; they are out already. These people are actually the driver for others to join hypes; they hear from their guru/mentor etc that this is really go time this time and get invested by trying to join the train. It ruins lives as we have seen with crypto (but I have seen it many times before in the last 20+ years); these people follow the marketers, buy their books, courses, saas etc but never read, follow or use them. If they would have, they would know to get out on a high and move to the next thing. They hardly ever actually do that but keep holding on to the idea they bought into this time (often they are young and too new to know this is a cycle). I think we will see 1000s of ‘products’ which are half baked API layers or ‘beta’ products waiting for investment by people like you describe; quick upwork hire and suddenly you have an AI company, gold for investors. Many of them will appear for sale in the coming months and people will buy them if they have any kind of traction (and let’s be honest, traction is trivial at this point still).

appleaday1 4y ago

The use of Dall-E that I have seen in the crypto space is hilarious as they have been trying to make memes with it, so I found that to be very positive. Generally, this is a huge problem Reddit site-wide ever since they launched their PM/DM system. I literally had to write a Reddit Bot to warn our subreddit to NOT talk to strangers on Reddit DMs. At some point I thought about how to thwart scammers by creating fake threads and fake users. Honestly, reddit seriously needs to get its threat modelling together. DMs cause more damage than the benefits that it espouses.

cybersecurity99 4y ago

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jzellis 4y ago

This industry has drawn scum like flies to shit for decades. When I was a kid starting out, it was the beginning of the dot.com boom, and you'd see these endless stupid startup ideas thrown together by MBAs who suddenly thought SF or the Valley were the place to be instead of Wall Street. (Many of these back then involved unrealistic or bizarre schemes involving streaming media, as I recall.) Then it was social media. The same sketchy freaks were all gonna do the new MySpace or Facebook. I remember one dude telling me at a meetup that he was doing "Facebook for payroll". What the fuck does that even mean, dude? Then came crypto, and the serious scumbags and loonies showed up, because you didn't even need VCs to make money - the money itself was the product. Every ancap dipshit and New Age cokehead and Eastern Promises ass connected-to-scary-Russiam-sex-traffickers jerkoff came squirming out of the woodwork. Now it's AI. As soon as any tech can be utilized by stupid or sociopathic people to scam or spam other people, it's suddenly hailed as a "boom". And now millions of human-hours and trillions of dollars will be thrown at teaching ML models to sell you boner pills and get your grandma's credit card number. And all the interesting, useful directions we could be going as technologists are being mostly ignored, so that failed child actors and Patrick Bateman ass hustlers can throw extravagant launch parties and hype up their worthless companies until their investors finally figure out it's a scam and they go to jail, at which point Hulu or Netflix makes a docudrama miniseries about them starring somebody who was a box office draw when the last wave of tech hype was upon us. Capitalism is so boring and predictable. Always the lowest hanging fruit, always the creepiest scum trying to pick it. I'd probably go be Amish if I could convince myself to believe in Jesus.

terminal_d 4y ago
Well said. Most of this shit just circles back onto itself. Unfortunately having a very public, very unequal distribution of rewards only seems to perpetuate the cycle, and with commodities where the service is the product and the reward, the gravy train never ends and there's a sucker born every minute. The only way to be content is to not play.

shetill 4y ago

Most of YC Cofounder matching is full of those same grifters, that have 0 tech know how and expect you to do everything

reportgunner 4y ago

I am suprised we don't get endless autogenerated AI art NFTs.

smarri 4y ago

"One guy proposed my friend that he has a startup idea to use GPT-model to let people talk to their pets and that it should be 'fairly easy' to finetune from an existing model." - haha this is hilarious!! A younger me once thought, like the person who pitched that to your friend, that all I needed was an idea (..and if only I could find someone to build it...I'd be a huge success!!) and as I matured and got experience in the world, I realised that ideas are cheap and execution is hard. We need more doers! I'm a reformed ideas guy.

cableshaft 4y ago

This might predate the web3 bubble bursting by a bit. I am somewhat adjacent to the space in my spare time (help some friends with their code sometimes) and they were getting pretty hyped up about having NFTs with A.I. personalities trained into them and having them in a metaverse as NPCs you could talk to. Then ChatGPT happened and they got even more excited about that, as it seemed even more plausible and doable. I wouldn't classify those people as grifters, they genuinely believe they're bringing about a new future and the web3 bubble bursting is temporary (I'm more skeptical myself, but not so much I'm not willing to help out here and there). Not to say there weren't a ton of grifters in the space, there definitely were (and a lot of them). As well as people who thought they weren't being grifters, but then the bottom fell out of web3 and they're like, 'oh shit, guess I was wrong about all this', and they ended up becoming one without intending to. There are people that can be in both crypto and A.I. grifting at the same time, too. Like they see A.I. art as a quick and easy way to generate art for NFTs. So they're not mutually exclusive fields. And some people just perpetually bounce from one get rich quick scheme to another. It's happened since way before crypto, and it'll keep happening. If you stay at the forefront of it, and cash out as the frenzy starts to hit, it's probably fairly effective, too, but if you're perpetually late to these things, as most people are, it's just going to keep being a money pit for you.

ithilien 4y ago

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w1nst0nsm1th 4y ago

AI is the next big bubble. You can see it just watching youtube videos announcing the end of 'data era' and the start 'knowledge era', running on the hype.