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> 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.
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's satire. It's supposed to be absurd. Why else do students still read A Modest Proposal nearly three hundred years after its publication?
Regardless, LLMs are already being abused to mass produce spam, and some of that spam has almost certainly been employed to separate the elderly from their savings, so there's nothing particularly implausible about the satirical product, either.
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.
The original the article is spoofing is interviewers asking Huang about the narrative that:
>It's the jobs and employment. Nobody's going to be able to work again. It's God AI is going to solve every problem. It's we shouldn't have open source for XYZ... https://youtu.be/k-xtmISBCNE?t=1436
and he says a "end of the world narrative science fiction narrative" is hurtful.
My hypothesis: Generative AI is, in part, reaping the reaction that cryptocurrency sowed.
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...
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)
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.
The article doesn't specify which elderly they're referring to. They've certainly successfully captured the gerontocrats in Washington and Wall Street that keep bouying their assets.
>> 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.
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
> The scams were enabled by the internet, does the internet exist for this purpose? Of course not.
But did it accelerate the whole process? Hell yeah.
>I get that this is satire, but satire has to have some basis in truth.
The Trump administration is using AI generated imagery to advance his narrative, and it seems like it's a thing that mostly the elderly would fall for. So yes, there is some truth to it.
In general, the elderly will always be more vulnerable to technological exploitation.
> satire has to have some basis in truth
In order to be funny at least!
Viewed from historical perspective, big tech is really reaping the benefits of the intellectual wealth accumulated over many thousands of years by humanity collectively. This should be recognized to find a better path forward.
Up Next: A McSweeney's article where McSweeney's takes the debates about it on Hacker News as seriously as Hacker News takes McSweeney's: way too much
> As someone who desperately needs this technology to work out, I can honestly say it is the most essential tool ever created in all of human history.
For those having trouble finding the humor, it lies in the vast gulf between grand assertions that LLMs will fundamentally transform every aspect of human life, and plaintive requests to stop saying mean things about it.
As a contrast: truly successful products obviate complaints. Success speaks for itself. In TV, software, e-commerce, statins, ED pills, modern smartphones, social media, etc… winning products went into the black quickly and made their companies shitloads of money (profits). No need to adjust vibes, they could just flip everyone the bird from atop their mountains of cash. (Which can also be pretty funny.)
There are mountains of cash in LLMs today too, but so far they’re mostly on the investment side of the ledger. And industry-wide nervousness about that is pretty easy to discern. Like the loud guy with a nervous smile and a drop of sweat on his brow.
So much of the current discourse around AI is the tech-builders begging the rest of the world to find a commercially valuable application. Like the AgentForce commercials that have to stoop to showing Matthew McConaughey suffering the stupidest problems imaginable. Or the OpenAI CFO saying maybe they’ll make money by taking a cut of valuable things their customers come up with. “Maybe someone else will change the world with this, if you’ll all just chill out” is a funny thing to say repeatedly while also asking for $billions and regulatory forbearance.
guys were just trying to take jobs away from you.... please stop being mean to us - richest people on earth 2026
Today I asked copilot agent a question about a selector in a cypress test and it requested to run a python command in my terminal.
We, humans, will read this and laugh, chuckle, but the AI Overloads will not understand that. This will be added to the training data and become a truth. But what if that is?
Jensen needs to keep escalating the hype to keep the hoarding dynamics in play. Because that's what's selling GPU's. You can't look at voracious GPU demand as a real signal of AI app profitability or general demand. It's a function of global tech oligarchs with gargantuan cash hoards not wanting to be left behind. But hoarding dynamics are nonlinear through self reinforcment and the moment any hint of limitations of current gen AI crop up spend will collapse.
Someone remind me why this tech called AI deserves attention of this magnitude again.
Investing and scalping are two different things. When you invest the pie grows larger, scalping you take more than you can eat from the existing pie.
Very few companies are investing into AI, most are engaged in scalping, hoping they are big enough to weather the storm.
Excellent satire, absolutely something I could see in The Onion or Hard Drive as an Op-Ed.
Powerful catharsis in this
AI is alien intelligence, really. If biotech created an unusual mold that responds to electric impulses the way LLMs do, we would rightfully declare that this mold has some sort of intelligence and for this reason it is, technically speaking, an alien lifeform. AI is just that intelligent mold, but based on transistors instead of organic cells. Needless to say, it's a bad idea to create a competing lifeform that's smarter than us, regardless of whatever flimsy benefits it might have.
It is highly amusing to me that the same ~2,000 people who have the most to gain from LLM success also largely control the media narratives and the vast majority of the global economy.
Someone coined a term for those of the general population who trust this small group of billionaires and defend their technology.
“Dumb fucks”
The same people selling you AI today (AGI tomorrow) were the ones selling remote work yesterday. Then "mandated" everyone back to the office.
Oh, and most of them had a crypto bag too.
<sigh>
fully expected this to be about nadella
Is this a sign that us of the plebs are starting to grow discontent?
I hate LLMs as much as the next guy, but this was honestly just not very funny. Humor can be a great vehicle for criticism when it's done right, but this feels like clickbait-level lazy writing. I wouldn't criticize it anywhere else, but I have enjoyed reading a bunch of actually good writing from mcsweeney's over the years in the actual literary journal and on their website.
"Oh, it's another tool in your repertoire like Bash" doesn't garner billions of dollars in investment. So they have to address it as the next electricity or the internet, when in its current form, it's much closer to a crypto grift than it is to electricity.
- can we please get an article like this dedicated to windows 11?
The Luddites weren’t anti technological progress, they were anti losing their job and entire way of life with an impolite “get fucked you fucking peasant” message to boot.
I wonder what name the tech bros will come up to call us for the same feeling nowadays.
nice satire
> . Yes, it’s expanding the surveillance state, and yes, it’s destroying the education system, and yes, it’s being trained on copyrighted work without permission, and yes, it’s being used to create lethal autonomous weapons systems that can identify, target, and kill without human input, but… I forget my point, but ultimately, I think you should embrace it.
What's your answer to this? How did it turn out for nuclear energy? If it wasn't for this sort of thinking we'd have nuclear power all over the world and climate issues would not have been as bad.
You should embrace it, because other countries will and yours will be left behind if you don't. That doesn't mean put up with "slop", but that also doesn't mean be hostile to anything labeled "AI" either. The tech is real, it is extremely valuable (I applaud your mental gymnastics if you think otherwise), but not as valuable as these CEOs want it to be or in the way they want to be.
On one hand you have clueless executives and randos trying to slap "AI" on everything and creating a mess. On the other extreme you have people who reject things just because it has auto-complete (LLMs :) ) as one of it's features. You're both wrong.
What Jensen Huang and other CEOs like Satya Nadella are saying about this mindless bandwagonning of "oh no, AI slop!!!" b.s. is true, but I think even they are too caught up in tech circles? Regular people don't to the most part feel this way, they only care about what the tool can do, not how it's doing it to the most part. But..people in tech largely influence how regular people are educated, informed,etc...
Look at the internet, how many "slop" sites were there early on? how much did it get dismissed because "all the internet is good for is <slop>"?
Forget everything else, just having an actual program.. that I can use for free/cheap.. on my computer.. that can do natural language processing well!!! that's insane!! Even in some of the sci-fi I've been rewatching in recent years, the "AI/Computer" in spaceships or whatever is nowhere near as good as chatgpt is today in terms of understanding what humans are saying.
I'm just calling for a bit of a perspective on things? Some are too close to things and looking under the hood too much, others are too far and looking at it from a distance. The AI stock valuation is of course ridiculous, as is the overhyped investments in this area, and the datacenter buildout madness. And like I said, there are tons of terrible attempts at using this tech (including windows copilot), but the extremes of hostility against AI I'm seeing is also concerning, and not because I care about this awesome tech (which I do), but you know.. the job market is rough and everything is already crappy.. I don't want to go through an AI market crash or whatever on top of other things, so I would really appreciate it on a personal level if the cause of any AI crash is meritocratic instead of hype and bandwagonning, that's all.
> just use my evil technology
Ridiculous to say the technology, by itself, is evil somehow. It is not. It is just math at the end of the day. Yes you can question the moral/societal implications of said technology (if used in a negative way) but that does not make the technology itself evil.
For example, I hate vibe coding with a passion because it enables wrong usage (IMHO) of AI. I hate how easy it has become to scam people using AI. How easy it is to create disinformation with AI. Hate how violence/corruption etc could be enabled by using AI tools. Does not mean I hate the tech itself. The tech is really cool. You can use the tech for doing good as much as you can use it for destroying society (or at the very minimum enabling and spreading brainrot). You choose the path you want to tread.
Just do enough good that it dwarfs the evil uses of this awesome technology.
> "immoral technofascist life"
Many people would rather argue about morality and conscience (of our time, of our society) instead of confronting facts and reality. What we see here is a textbook case of that.
It’s wild to me that we both see people like Jensen as great while also tolerating public whining of the sort in the linked article. Don’t get me wrong, there are people who are far worse! But why do we put up with a billionaire whining that people are critical of what they make? At that scale it is guaranteed to have haters. It’s just statistics, man.
Maybe he shouldn’t have claimed if we could get in a moving vehicle with his ai driving no problem
Perhaps things would work out better if people didn't say mean things regardless of who it's about.
You can still criticise without being mean.