> 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.

The 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.

> 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.

if 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.

Training 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...

My hypothesis: Generative AI is, in part, reaping the reaction that cryptocurrency sowed.

>> 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.

Scammers 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.

It 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.

LLMs 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

I 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)

Porn was enabled by the internet’s but does the internet exist for this purpose?

Yes. Yes it does. That is the satire.

They'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.

I mean... explain sora.

While 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.

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article forgot to mention the usual "think about the water usage"

> satire has to have some basis in truth

In order to be funny at least!