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> There’s an extremely hurtful narrative going around that my product, a revolutionary new technology that exists to scam the elderly and make you distrust anyt
by seizethecheese 9mo ago
> There’s an extremely hurtful narrative going around that my product, a revolutionary new technology that exists to scam the elderly and make you distrust anything you see online, is harmful to society
The article is certainly interesting as yet another indicator of the backlash against AI, but I must say, “exists to scam the elderly” is totally absurd. I get that this is satire, but satire has to have some basis in truth.
I say this as someone whose father was scammed out of a lot of money, so I’m certainly not numb to potential consequences there. The scams were enabled by the internet, does the internet exist for this purpose? Of course not.
- gllmariuty 9mo agoarticle forgot to mention the usual "think about the water usage"
- seizethecheese 9mo agoIt mentions ecological destruction, which I must say is way better than water usage, AI is a power hog after all.
- rootnod3 9mo agoIf it's the "usual reply", maybe it's because....I dunno...water is kinda important?
- queenkjuul 9mo agoI'm also not convinced the HN refrain of "it's actually not that much water" is entirely true. I've seen conflicting reports from sources i generally trust, and it's no secret an all-GPU AI data center is more resource intensive than a general purpose data center.
- Retric 9mo agoWhat’s the point of attacking a straw man while ignoring the actual points being brought up? The water usage by data centers is fairly trivial in most places. The water use manufacturing the physical infrastructure + electricity generation is surprisingly large but again mostly irrelevant. Yet modern ‘AI’ has all sorts of actual problems.
- some_furry 9mo ago[flagged]
- ameliaquining 9mo agoThe person you're replying to is probably not personally a major AI magnate.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- some_furry 9mo agoNo, but the attitude is congruent, even if they don't have the investment money lying around to fill the shoes exactly.
- thegrim000 9mo agoYou mean the guy that has in his bio "YC and VC backed founder" and has made multiple posts in the last couple months dismissing different negative thoughts about AI? Yeah that guy probably doesn't have significant funds tied up in the success of AI.
- shimman 9mo agoIt becomes insulting when they think we're this foolish.
- seizethecheese 9mo agoI don’t, actually, unless you call index funds “tied up”. To be honest, it’s really distasteful to make a high level comment about this article then have people rush to attack me personally. This is the mentality of a mob.
- Barrin92 9mo agoin this case a more appropriate term for the mob is "the people" because one defining dynamic of the rollout of this technology is that a minority of people seem to be extremely invested to shove it into the faces of a majority of people who don't want it, and then claim that they are visionaries and everyone else is 'the mob'. Just like with Mark Zuckerberg's "Metaverse" we're now in a post-market vanity economy where not consumer demand but increasingly desperate founders, investors and gurus are trying to justify their valuations by doling out products for free and shoving their AI services into everything to justify the tens of billions they dumped into it I'm sorry that some people's pension funds, startup funding and increasingly the entire American economy rests on this collective delusion but it's not really most people's problem
- awesome_dude 9mo agoI think that maybe the point isn't that the scams/distrust are "new" with the advent of AI, but "easier" and "more polished" than before. The language of the reader is no longer a serious barrier/indicator of a scam (A real bank would never talk like that, is now, well, that's something they would say, the way that they would say it)
- ryanobjc 9mo agoI mean... explain sora.
- internet101010 9mo agoRevolutionizing cat memes
- ryan_lane 9mo agoScammers are using AI to copy the voice of children and grandchildren, and make calls urgently asking to send money. It's also being used to scam businesses out of money in similar ways (copying the voice of the CEO or CFO, urgently asking for money to be sent). Sure, the AI isn't directly doing the scamming, but it's supercharging the ability to do so. You're making a "guns don't kill people, people do" argument here.
- seizethecheese 9mo agoNot at all. I’m saying AI doesn’t exist to scam elderly, which is saying nothing about whether it’s dangerous in that respect.
- only-one1701 9mo agoPerhaps you’ve heard that the purpose of a system is what it does?
- irjustin 9mo agoIn broad strokes - disagree. This is the knife-food vs knife-stab vs gun argument. Just because you can cook with a hammer doesn't make it its purpose.
- solid_fuel 9mo ago> Just because you can cook with a hammer doesn't make it its purpose. If you survey all the people who own a hammer and ask what they use it for, cooking is not going to make the list of top 10 activities. If you look around at what LLMs are being used for, the largest spaces where they have been successfully deployed are astroturfing, scamming, and helping people break from reality by sycophantically echoing their users and encouraging psychosis.
- only-one1701 9mo agoI was going to reply to the post above but you said it perfectly.
- gosub100 9mo agoIt doesn't exist for that express purpose, but the voice and video impersonation is definitely being used to scam elderly people. Instead of being used to protect us or make our lives easier, it is being used by evildoers to scam the weak and vulnerable. None of the AI believers will do anything about it because it kills their vibe.
- JumpCrisscross 9mo ago> the voice and video impersonation is definitely being used to scam elderly people And like with the child pornography, the AI companies are engaging in high-octane buck passing more than actually trying to tamp down the problem.
- solid_fuel 9mo agoLLMs are fiction machines. All they can do is hallucinate, and sometimes the hallucinations are useful. That alone rules them out, categorically, from any critical control loop. After you eliminate anything that requires accountability and trustworthiness from the tasks which LLMs may be responsibly used for, the most obvious remaining use-cases are those built around lying: - advertising - astroturfing - other forms of botting - scamming old people out of their money
- echelon 9mo ago[flagged]
- gllmariuty 9mo ago> AI is a force multiplier for labor capital for an 2011 account that's a shockingly naive take yes, AI is a labor capital multiplier. and the multiplicand is zero hint: soon you'll be competing not with humans without AI, but with AIs using AIs
- Terr_ 9mo agoEven if it's >1, it doesn't follow that it's good news for the "labor capitalist". "OK, so I lost my job, but even adjusting for that, I can launch so many more unfinished side-projects per hour now!"
- navigate8310 9mo ago> I want to be able to leverage Hollywood grade VFX and make shows and transform my likeness for real time improv. While i certainly respect your interactivity and subsequent force multiplayer nature of AI, this doesn't mean you should try to emulate an already given piece of work. You'll certainly gain a small dopamine when you successfully copy something but it would also atrophy your critical skills and paralyze you from making any sort of original art. You'll miss out on discovering the feeling of any frontier work that you can truly call your own.
- blks 9mo ago
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- muvlon 9mo agoThe article names a lot of other things that AI is being used for besides scamming the elderly, such as making us distrust everything we see online, generating sexually explicit pictures of women without their consent, stealing all kinds of copyrighted material, driving autonomous killer drones and more generally sucking the joy out of everything. And I think I'm inclined to agree. There are a small amount of things that have gotten better due to AI (certain kinds of accessibility tech) and a huge pile of things that just suck now. The internet by comparison feels like a clear net positive to me, even with all the bad it enables.
- pixl97 9mo agoHere's the thing with AI, especially as it becomes more AGI like, it will encompass all human behaviors. This will lead to the bad behaviors becoming especially noticeable since bad actors quickly realized this is a force multiplication factor for them. This is something everyone needs to think about when discussing AI safety. Even ANI applications carry a lot of potential societal risks and they may not be immediately evident. I know with the information superhighway few expected it to turn into a dopamine drip feed for advertising dollars, yet here we are.
- ethbr1 9mo ago> bad actors quickly realized this is a force multiplication factor for them You'd think we would have learned this lesson in failing to implement email charges that net'd to $0 for balanced send/receive patterns. And thereby heralded in a couple decades of spam, only eventually solved by centralization (Google). Driving the cost of anything valuable to zero inevitably produces an infinite torrent of volume.
- mogsor 9mo agoAI doesn't encompass any "human behaviours", the humans controlling it do. Grok doesn't generate nude pictures of women because it wants to, it does it because people tell it to and it has (or had) no instructions to the contrary
- 9mo ago
- ajkjk 9mo agoif you make a thing and the thing is going to be inevitably used for a purpose and you could do something about that use and you do not --- then yes, it exists for that purpose, and you are responsible for it being used in that way. you don't get to say "ah well who could have seen this inevitable thing happening? it's a shame nobody could do anything about it" when it was you that could have done something about it.
- anonymars 9mo ago> you...could have done something about it What is it that isn't being done here, and who isn't doing it?
- ajkjk 9mo agoIn this case we're debating whether one of the purposes of AI is to scan the elderly. Probably 'purpose' is not quite the right word, but the point would be: it is not the purpose of AI to not scam the elderly (or it would explicitly prevent that). (note: I do not actually know if it explicitly prevents that. But because I am very cynical about corporations, I'd tend to assume it doesn't.)
- jychang 9mo agoYeah. Example: stripper poles. Or hitachi magic wands. Those poles WERE NOT invented for strippers/pole dancers. Ditto for the hitachis. Even now, I'm pretty sure more firemen use the poles than strippers. But that doesn't stop the association from forming. That doesn't make me not feel a certain way if I see a stripper pole or a hitachi magic wand in your living room.
- wizardforhire 9mo agoTo be fair to the magic wands, thats why “massagers” were invented in the first place. [1] [2] [3] [1] https://thefactbase.com/the-vibrator-was-invented-in-1869-to-cure-female-disorders/ https://thefactbase.com/the-vibrator-was-invented-in-1869-to... [2] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/m/maines-technology.html https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/m/ma... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_hysteria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_hysteria
- taurath 9mo ago> I get that this is satire, but satire has to have some basis in truth. Do you think that it isn't used for this? The satire part is to expand that usecase to say it exists purely for that purpose.
- drzaiusx11 9mo agoTraining a model on sound data from readily available public social network posts and targeting their followers (which on say fb would include family and is full of "olds") isn't a very far fetched use-case for AI. I've created audio models used as audiobook narrators where you can trivially make a "frantic/panicked" voice clip saying "help it's [grandson], I'm in jail and need bail. Send money to [scammer]" If it's not happening yet, it will...
- evandrofisico 9mo agoIt is happening already, recently Brazilian woman living in Italy was scammed thinking she was having an online relationship with Brazilian tiktoker, the scammers created a fake profile and were sending her audio messages with the voice of said tiktoker cloned via AI. She sent the scammers a lot of money for the wedding but when she arrived in Brazil discovered the con.
- bandrami 9mo agoIt's already happening in India. Voicefakes are working unnervingly well and it's amplified by the fact that old people who had very little exposure to tech have basically been handed a smart phone that has control of their pension fund money in an app.
- rgmerk 9mo agoMy hypothesis: Generative AI is, in part, reaping the reaction that cryptocurrency sowed.
- zbentley 9mo agoCould you expand on that?
- rgmerk 9mo agoNumerous critics pointed out that the only application where cryptocurrencies had any real advantages over conventional finance was crime. The critics were right, and the cryptocurrency ecosystem in which Silicon Valley was a not insubstantial part were wrong. As such, and combined with the ills of social media, Silicon Valley has blow’ any public trust it may have had in the past.
- mrnaught 9mo ago>> enabled by the internet, does the internet exist for this purpose? Of course not. I think point article was trying to make: LLMs and new genAI tools helped the scammers scale their operations.
- lostmsu 9mo agoSo did the Internet
- wat10000 9mo agoThey're used for scams. Isn't that the basis in truth you're looking for in satire? Before this we had "the internet is for porn." Same sort of exaggerated statement.
- techblueberry 9mo agoPorn was enabled by the internet’s but does the internet exist for this purpose? Yes. Yes it does. That is the satire.
- weebull 9mo ago> Why you think the net was born? > Porn porn porn
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- vitajex 9mo ago> satire has to have some basis in truth In order to be funny at least!
- popalchemist 9mo agoWhile the employees of the companies that make AI may have noble, even humanity-redeeming/saving intentions, the billionaire class absolutely has bond-villain level intentions. The destruction of the middle class and the removal of all livable-wage jobs is absolutely part of the techno-feudalist playbook that Trump, Altman, Zuckerberg, etc are intentionally moving toward. I'd say that is a scam. They want to recreate the conditions of earlier society - an upper class (them, who own the entire means of production and can operate the entire machine without the need for peons' input) who does whatever they want because the lower class is incapable of opposing them. If you aren't familiar, look into it.
- GoodJokes 9mo ago[dead]
- thefz 9mo ago> The scams were enabled by the internet, does the internet exist for this purpose? Of course not. But did it accelerate the whole process? Hell yeah.
- tim333 9mo agoThe original the article is spoofing is interviewers asking Huang about the narrative that: >It's the jobs and employment. Nobody's going to be able to work again. It's God AI is going to solve every problem. It's we shouldn't have open source for XYZ... https://youtu.be/k-xtmISBCNE?t=1436 https://youtu.be/k-xtmISBCNE?t=1436 and he says a "end of the world narrative science fiction narrative" is hurtful.
- panda-giddiness 9mo agoIt's satire. It's supposed to be absurd. Why else do students still read A Modest Proposal nearly three hundred years after its publication? Regardless, LLMs are already being abused to mass produce spam, and some of that spam has almost certainly been employed to separate the elderly from their savings, so there's nothing particularly implausible about the satirical product, either.
- tremon 9mo agoThe article doesn't specify which elderly they're referring to. They've certainly successfully captured the gerontocrats in Washington and Wall Street that keep bouying their assets.
- johnnyanmac 9mo ago>I get that this is satire, but satire has to have some basis in truth. The Trump administration is using AI generated imagery to advance his narrative, and it seems like it's a thing that mostly the elderly would fall for. So yes, there is some truth to it. In general, the elderly will always be more vulnerable to technological exploitation.