To add: I have started getting AI-generated outreach that opens with a personalised compliment, but that is clearly AI-written. I get more of those in a week than I used to get normal outreach in a month.

AI can be very helpful in lots of ways, but I think it's fair to say that it is most powerful as an enabler for bad actors.

We’ve essentially reduced the cost of being a prick to zero.

There’s some great thinking on this topic from Nicklas Lundblad in this Hannah Fry video on AI Agents: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnzR5aOElvw

He talks about how agents/delegates extend the agency of the people who operate them. And “almost all of society is premised on the fact that agency is scarce”. But software agents grant vastly more agency.

The thing that stops the worst people from annoying the hell out of you is that they lack the agency to do so. But now…

Wasn’t that was social media?

The risk of being punched in the mouth for your word choice dropped to zero, and suddenly all of these opinions were being shouted at anybody that would listen.

I suppose we can automate that sharing better now.

Yeah, the whole rise of the web has had that unfortunate side effect, but no one had treated it like a positive until now. Hell, Meta is showing off how to use their AI to jam up phone lines and bother call centers without having to spend time on the phone!

It’s unfortunate he seems to have gone around the bend, because there is so much that happens in our current unreality that reminds me of Mike Baron’s Nexus comic from the 80s. The “Trade War” storyline has the two competing marketplaces, run by Vooper and the other by a robot named Honest Crocus, get into an audio advertising war so all-consuming it winds up drowning out 911 calls and coming out of the plumbing when you’re in the toilet. Now we finally have the tools, we are going to make that happen along with a million other bad ideas.

It's not just that. Several social medias have evolved to the point where being a prick is mandatory or is rewarded. Chief example is X, where you get rewarded for agreeing with Elon; but see also the stereotypes of Reddit and Discord mods.

We have a ways to go before we hit zero, since we are inventing entire new ways to be a prick.

I think we are a year or so away from the first tik toks of humanoid robots walking up to people and punching them for views.

You could avoid it. AI slop is everywhere.

https://nicolasbouliane.com/images/content2x/ai-slop-everywh...

"AI can be very helpful in lots of ways, but I think it's fair to say that it is most powerful as an enabler for bad actors."

Yes, the effects can be seen all over the Oscars.

Does anybody insist the Oscar winners can't be (pun intended?) bad actors? As I recall, it's been widely criticised for a long time but the mass media shoves it down our throats anyway.

Sounds a lot like crypto.

Crypto always felt similarly cynical to me, but it was still somewhat niche.

Now everyone must support AI because the entire economy is tied to it. Everyone's bonus depends on implementing it. Everyone's job search depends on cheering for it. It's like a virus.

Two crypto billionaires have just given one of the most cynically manipulative political parties in British history the largest donations received by any political party in British history.

The US president has crypto investments and shitcoins. His wife has a shitcoin. His weird sons have crypto businesses. (His former opponent's wisecracking prodigal-failson has an ironic shitcoin, for goodness' sake.)

The functioning of the US government and its international aid had a chainsaw taken to it by the richest man in the world, who named the entire endeavour ironically like a crypto memecoin.

One of the two biggest AI companies is run by a guy who also has a shitcoin-for-your-iris-scans company. And much of the long-tail of the AI industry is former crypto/NFT bros just wearing different turtlenecks. The big incubators and VC firms have moved smoothly from one niche to the other along with them.

These dead-eyed people are not niche at all. They are now the whole game.

America is 'scaling' their low-trust society into the rest of the world and industrial levels

The only long term solution I can see is the old PGP web of trust where people meet in person to exchange their public keys/certs.

The problem is not attribution. I can tell who generated the slop I encounter.

The problem is entirely that fact that with LLMs it is almost impossible to know if you are interacting with an actual human.