> By flooding bug bounty programs with AI-generated reports, they feel productive and entrepreneurial. Some genuinely believe the AI has found something real. Others know it's questionable but figure they'll let the maintainers sort it out.

I’m not saying that AI hasn’t already given us useful things, but this is a symptom of one very negative change that’s drowned a lot of the positive out for many people: the competence gap used to be an automatic barrier for many things. For example, to get hired as a freelance developer, you had to have at least cargo-culted something together once or twice, and even if you were way overconfident in your capability, you probably knew you weren’t the real thing. However, the AI tools industry essentially markets free competence, and out of context for any given topic, that little disclaimer is meaningless. It’s essentially given people climbing the Dunning-Krueger Mt. Stupid the agency to produce garbage at a damaging volume that’s too plausible looking for them (or laypeople, for that matter) to realize it’s garbage. I also think somewhat nihilist people prone to get-rich-quick schemes (e.g. drop-shipping, NFTs) play these workflows like lottery tickets while remaining deliberately ignorant of their dubious value.