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by 29_29 1072 days ago
My friends in Web3 are now AI experts building chatbots
2 comments

I think everyone knew they’d move onto the next scam
At least applications built upon the “we call the OpenAI api” product strategy are less scammy than Web3 felt.
Never fear, we’ll get there
There are definitely a bunch of outright scammers already operating in that space. A bunch of the “AI-powered” browser extensions are just malware, for example. https://www.pcmag.com/news/beware-ai-scams-meta-blocks-1000-...
Exactly, the AI chatbots is the perfect technology for autoscamming people.
Hey, you know… that’s a use case! Better than Web3’s common use case of… ?

</sarcasm>

I think scam is perhaps not quite right. I see AI as the evolution beyond social media algorithms. Now it will feel even more human resulting in the manipulation being even more subtle and effective over time. Being more human like may also help people feel like sharing more information with it. Some may even think it is their friend. I think there is a lot more psychology in play with AI whereas Web3 mostly plays on ones greed and facilitates wash trading and faux investments into unregistered unlicensed securities. So for AI I believe a better description could be manipulation framework.
Comparing web3 scams to this new wave of AI is unironically ignorant and delusional.

For one small example I literally get daily value from Copilot and happily pay for it, and there is much more beyond this. I've never once gotten meaningful value from web3.

These people migrated to AI because their goal is to get rich quick. Whether or not it's a scam is orthogonal. It's the same people got excited about metaverse, producing online courses, and weed startups. If they aren't in tech they're doing supplements and drop shipping.

Unrelated, but I don't think AI is a scam.

That's not the point. Yes, there are many legit startups, exploring the very real value add that AI has to offer.

But the people that previously sold scammy web3 stuff did move on to peddle scammy ai stuff.

I don’t think Copilot and whatever fresh hell the popularised version of AI is are comparable.
like 90%