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artyomtoday at 3:13 PM4 repliesview on HN

Unfortunately this is probably just getting started. Con men always existed, but a full scale exploitation of this would make "Nigerian Prince" scams look like artisanal work.


Replies

Balgairtoday at 5:15 PM

I remember the Ashley Madison hack a ways back.

It was a cheaters website and you could pay to send messages to other cheaters, I think that was the business model at least.

Anyways, since the userbase was like 99.99% male, there just were not the numbers to talk with others. So, they just side stepped it and has very crummy chatbots that you would pay like $1 per message to talk with. (this was well before AI LLMs, think AOL bots from the naughts). Thing was, just like with the 'Nigerian Prince' scams, the worse the bot, the better the john.

It all got exposed a while back, but for me, that was the real Turing test - take people and see if they pay real actual money to talk with bots. Turns out, yes, if couched correctly (...like selling ice to Eskimos, just call it French ice).

So, I'm not sure that LLMs are going to unveil a wave of scams. Likely it will be a bit higher, of course, but the low hanging fruit is lucrative and there is enough of it to go around, and that's been true since really forever.

It's like outrunning a bear, you don't actually have to run faster than the bear, you just have to run faster than the poor sop next to you. Same goes for the bear, there is plenty of prey if you just do the little amount of exercise.

pixl97today at 3:19 PM

Heh, just wait till the point where the AI figures it can scam the user itself and cuts the middle men out (human scammers/openai/et el).

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jlaroccotoday at 6:54 PM

No doubt.

The company I work for uses a contracted recruiter for hiring, and the other day he was telling me that they're seeing a huge amount of scams, fake candidates, and "hands off" applications where people are trying to use AI to do basically the whole interview process - apprently even video interviews. We've mandated at least one on-site interview just so we can be sure we're getting actual people.

And most of these job candidates aren't even doing it maliciously, just "life hacking" the interview process. It's going to be a shit show if organized criminals start using AI.

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gotwaztoday at 6:44 PM

Religions have been doing it without tech for thousands of years. The 3 inch chimp brain is not exactly immune to delusion. In fact delusion or story telling is fundamental to how it handles unpredictability.