Written by a Human
A few days ago I saw an article on Hacker News that was titled "not by AI". The website purpose was to just add a badge to your content if it was produced without the use of AI.
I kept reading this website, but then it looked quite odd when it was laying down requirements for using this badge. This isn't a company as far as I know - who cares if I make the badge a different color or size. That left a sour taste in my mouth so I made this blog instead.
The AI explosion in the past few months is no joke - if you look at OpenAI (ChatGPT and DALL-E 2) they grew their user-base to 100 million users in about two months. That is a record (source) in consumer application history which just shows how quickly AI is becoming the discussion of 2023.
In a few minutes of searching you can find AI tools for tons of categories:
- Writing code - GitHub Copilot
- Image generation - Midjourney
- Meeting note generation - Jamie
- Voice generation - Murf
From the ones I selected here - you can quickly see how content to consume will get more and more difficult to discern human generated vs machine. Imagine a company or business that writes a new post/blog weekly to stay relevant on searches. I'm guessing with a simple prompt of that week's content - the entire post may be generated.
This may not be a terrible thing as these tools continue to evolve, but I'm also nervous that much like SPAM dominates the amount of emails we get - that AI generated content will dominate our media consumption.
Where I'm really nervous is the scam department. Right now scams are pretty easy to detect between:
- Obvious generic messaging
- Broken English
- Automatic detection via Gmail
However, imagine a near future where you can ask an AI generation tool to generate a custom misleading email from the point of a view of a student. Now scam authors can target people with a wide variety of generated content which in turn may be more successful than the obvious static scams that exist today.
Take this scam email I got today.
Greetings.
I am Mrs. Rula Ghani,I am contacting you based on my personal interest to develop a mutual business relationship with you in your country or your company. which I believe we could mutually benefit from, The amount involved is $22,000,000.00 USD only.
Please reply urgently for more details.
I only write in english but i use Google translate to translate to vietnamese so you can read and understand.
Regards,
Mrs. Rula Ghani
This is taken word for word and you can see how obvious this scam is. One quick Google search of the contents and you stumble upon a post on StopScamFraud, which explains this is a Advanced-Fee Fraud attempt. So if attempts to scam are generated uniquely each time - it'll get more difficult to teach others how to avoid being scammed.
For as much as it looks painfully obvious now - think that in February 2023 the FTC reported that $8.8 billion was scammed from consumers in 2022. This blows my mind especially since fraud affects each generation differently. It may be the tech support scams for the grandparents, but the young adults are trusting get rich quick YouTube scams.
Fraud and scams will never change, but a few categories of scams may get a nice boost from the features that AI brings monthly.
For this blog - it'll be human written till the end. There is an added little bit of therapy writing weekly and no automation or tool will replace that. I won't add a badge, but you can rest assured that I am writing every post on this blog.