1
In any scam, any con, any hustle, the big winners are the people who supply the scammers - not the scammers themselves. The kids selling dope on the corner are making less than minimum wage, while the respectable crime-bosses who own the labs clean up. Desperate "retail investors" who buy shitcoins from Superbowl ads get skinned, while the MBA bros who issue the coins make millions (in real dollars, not crypto).
1/
The fact that AI spam doesn't pay is important to the fortunes of AI companies. Most high-value AI applications are very risk-intolerant (self-driving cars, radiology analysis, etc). An AI tool might help a human perform these tasks more accurately - by warning them of things that they've missed - but that's not how AI will turn a profit. There's no market for AI that makes your workers cost more but makes them better at their jobs:
https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/
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Plenty of people think that spam might be the elusive high-value, low-risk AI application. But that's just not true. The point of AI spam is to get clicks from people who are looking for better content. It's SEO. No one reads 2000 words of algorithm-pleasiing LLM garbage over an omelette recipe and then subscribes to that site's feed.
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And the omelette recipe generates pennies for the spammer that posted it. They are doing massive volume in order to make those pennies into dollars. You don't make money by posting one spam. If every spammer had to pay the actual recovery costs (energy, chillers, capital amortization, wages) for their query, every AI spam would lose (lots of) money.
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Hustle culture and passive income are about turning other peoples' dollars into your dimes. It is a negative-sum activity, a net drain on society. Behind every seemingly successful "passive income" is a con artist who's getting rich by promising - but not delivering - that elusive passive income, and then blaming the victims for not hustling hard enough:
https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2023/12/blueprint-trouble
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I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by #WilWheaton! Pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback:
http://thebezzle.org
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Image:
Cryteria (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg
CC BY 3.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
eof/
@[email protected] should this entire thread be on public visibility? feels like spam when you post it tbh
@aen_[email protected] https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/16/how-to-make-the-least-worst-mastodon-threads/
@[email protected] whoa thanks 😊, i didn't know you could do that
honestly still makes it kinda unreadable but i subscribe to the email newsletter anyway
@aen_[email protected] Thanks!
A nice mastodon display tip from @[email protected]