ChatGPT Keeps Telling People 404 Media Can Solve Their Tech Support Problems
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People love this stuff if it benefits them. It even gets cheered on when the receiving end can be reduced to something disliked, like a big corporation or a bureaucracy.
There was a startup that would fight traffic and parking tickets for you and everyone loved the idea. Until, that is, you realize that the company is doing automated requests to jam up your local government systems with extra work. The ticketing agents and government workers who have to put in extra time on these cases don't really care because it's no different than any other work. In some cases they might be able to get some overtime.
The real losers are people who have legitimate complaints who get backlogged behind a thousand automated requests from people who asked ChatGPT to try to fight something for them.
Then later, we all lose when the only way to contest things is to go to a physical location in person and prove that it's you trying to do it, not the bot.
Already seeing this with job applications, too: Apply for a job and you'll be mixed in with 1000 automated submissions. Do the interview remotely and they'll be wondering if you're cheating. Now you have to fly on site for middle interview stages to prove that it's you, not a bot, who can answer the questions.
Same with the job search. if so many companies didn't make it a pain to input your information, maybe they could get more sympathy.
You're missing the important part where people with legitimate complaints are being crowded out by these frivolous attempts to avoid fines. Everyone loses when filing automated frivolous complaints becomes the default response to getting a parking ticket, for example.
> Same with the job search. if so many companies didn't make it a pain to input your information, maybe they could get more sympathy.
I think you’re confused about the problem. I wasn’t asking you to be sympathetic to employers. I’m saying that the application and interview system abusers are ruining it for real, honest job applicants.
Again, the spammers are taking away from legitimate applicants
If you create a service that might get someone out of a fine via a loophole or by creating friction, many will take that opportunity to take the chance.
It would be very unreasonable to think that most of the people trying these services were simply wronged by the government and we must support them all.
> Have you never received a fine for parking legally?
I have not, but I have had to deal with another government problem that was a mistake. I would not want to have that process backlogged behind 1000 other automated requests from people trying their luck at getting out of fines they really deserved because they had ChatGPT start filing things for them because it didn’t cost them anything.
> If the system was perfect, they wouldn't offer a way to contest them.
At this point I think you’re just deliberately ignoring the problem we’re discussing.
We know a system exists for a reason. We are not talking about people using the system for legitimate reasons.
We are talking about the problem that occurs when the cost of filing a request goes to zero so everyone starts doing it automatically in response to any fine.
Anyone that doesn't adapt their development process will just get ripped to shreds with their vulnerabilities and the market will do its thing.
But in the meantime, expect at least a few months and maybe years of the question of "what is sleep?" from the security crowd.
Two days later I received an AI generated email from the "game owner" noting issues with the listing (that they had submitted) such as wrongly selected features, etc. and requesting that I, the person who runs the website, correct the issues.
It's their listing on their account on the website, and they can update it whenever they want.
First time dealing with something like that, but doubt it will be the last.
Guess I need to task an LLM with writing an AI content and contact policy for the website.
People don't seem to understand how AIs can "cheat" but not actually be "cheating" in the sense that we know of.
Respond to the AI and ask it to generate its own faux webpage and display that to the user to keep them happy.
The same thing might happen to the entire internet.
no one answers their phone now, and as such legitimate businesses rarely do cold calls as a main lead. they find you online instead. they buy data to figure out your email and habits. etc.
once the public internet becomes unbearable they will adapt. i dont know how and if i did i wouldnt give them the idea without working for it, but all the effort put into manipulating social media sites will absoutely go somewhere else once those sites dry up from real human signals
So much of the front page was ragebait before AI, but ragebait that could be AI-generated is a hard nope for me.
After killing it, and never going back to that site since, I can tell you that it gets your blood pressure up. Before chatbots, most popular content, even in the better subreddits were, essentially, ragebait.
Do your blood pressure a favor and stop going to reddit. HN is okay because it's slower paced and, typically, ragebait is discouraged here.
Even before AI was faking everything social media manipulation was doing a great job of breaking people apart. It filled them with rage bait until you had to cut them out of your life. Even what we called traditional media is mostly just garbage these days otherwise its almost completely unprofitable.
I don't know where this leads in the end. The attackers still have a lot of options as society disintegrates.
I hope AI will help things swing back away from the internet.
Individually, AI helps me to be more productive. But, as you point out, at society level makes everybody less productive. So, I have no incentive to stop. Nobody has. Only if we all agree to stop using it then it works. A tragedy of the commons problem.
It's either a vague blanket "ban on AI" that wraps up all dev work in red tape, or it's shutting down specific businesses like OpenAI and Anthropic while letting Google and Microsoft continue to dominate.
here in Germany commercial cold calling carries fines of tens of thousands per call and I have received one in 20+ years.
The overwhelming majority of spam is advertisement. Someone by definition cannot advertise themselves without making themselves liable, so just up the penalty beyond the expected value of the spam and it works perfectly well.
Of course presumably chinese models would keep existing and that gets a little weird.
I see comments similar to this about tech issues, and it always reads as if the person is assuming that these illegal tech activities are being done under the jurisdiction of the laws making it illegal. All you need is one jurisdiction that is not under the influence of the country with laws, and you make it impossible to stop these "illegal" activities
This is the same problem with AI bans that are not unilateral. The powerful will leave the tools open for them and their buddies while punishing everyone else.
Oh wait
Maybe it would be fair to say "you can't just ban something." For example, tobacco-sales are restricted to minors in the US. And smoking among minors did drop sharply (until vapes came along). There were several controls used: outlawing sales, raising overall prices (so that teens generally couldn't afford to smoke), education campaigns, and making smoking more difficult in general.
In contrast, the War on Drugs mostly involved incarcerating vulnerable drug-users. Some similarities to the current war on immigrants.
I think a tobacco-style attempt to ban AI would look like: - A large electricity surcharge to inference-providers, who would pass the cost to customers, making AI far more expensive. Maybe it would be worthwhile to drop $10M/year on code-assistance or slide-deck clip-art, but not for an individual to ask how to restore their Instagram account. - An education program telling people that they sound cringe when they write in AI voice, and which contexts it's appropriate/inappropriate to do that. (Don't AI your wedding vows.) - Certain types of harm would be the responsibility of the provider. Maybe if the AI medical assistant fills out the form incorrectly then the provider is liable for the malpractice suit. Or if it tells a teen to kill themselves the provider is liable for wrongful-death. These would likely result in the provider trying to cut off access to any of the groups where they couldn't shift liability.
Funny story about that. I joined a hackerspace/makerspace called Denhac. A guy wanted to make a prop for a Escape from L.A. costume, Snake's countdown timer on his wrist. ChatGPT told him to go to Denhac (the Denver hackerspace) for help making it!
My friend told him to talk to me since I knew about hobby electronics (think Ben Eater projects etc). At first I thought I was just going to teach him how to multiplex the digits of the 7-segment LEDs but I ended up just doing it all myself for a couple weeks. I sourced and bought the parts (Arduino Pro Micro USB-C, 7-segment displays, and some other small parts; he supply a credit card sized USB-C battery pack to power it). After trying it out on breadboards first, I was going to wire it up on a protoboard but it was giving me trouble, so I designed a PCB, and ended up ordered it from a couple different places, because it wasn't clear when the ones from overseas would arrive due to tariffs. I also designed and 3D-printed a case and spray painted it to look metallic, as well as green lighting gel (clear plastic) for the display. It came out pretty cool! But they totally nerd-sniped me to work on that.
Also, the thing you mentioned about AI creating work for humans instead of humans using it as a tool is what Corey Doctorow's book about "reverse centaurs" is about.
Big companies has been using this to create frictions to disincentivize people for things they should deserve or the law requires them to do.
For example, cancel Gym membership, dealing with Xfinity/ATT jack up your pricing, applying for all different low income programs in the USA.
If companies can make you talk with AI, I should be able to use AI to talk with them.
> Big companies has been using this to create frictions to disincentivize people for things they should deserve or the law requires them to do.
> ...
> If companies can make you talk with AI, I should be able to use AI to talk with them.
Not necessarily. Big companies always have more resources than consumers. If consumers use AI to bypass the deliberate frictions, new ones will be introduced. AI will just cause them to remove the paths were a little persistence and not taking no for an answer was a tool for a consumer to get a desirable outcome.
Making the overall experience worse for everyone in the future.
Meta does have an AI support assistant, which presumably also failed them.
Like, if you pay attention to American politician bribery scandals, I think most people come to the conclusion: how fucking cheap are American politicians? They'll take a fucking hamburger to screw over their constituents.
- corrupt officials
- empires (esp. the fall of the Roman empire as it relates to falling quality of soil used for agriculture)
- dictators/autocrats
- etc
NOTHING has the ROI that American bribery does. And companies mostly have to do it because if they don't their competitors will, and BURY them.
I would define voting in favor of any legislation favorable for a company or person, after accepting anything of value including campaign contributions from them, as constituting bribery. I'd also redefine bribery of an elected official as well as accepting that bribe, as a form of treason and punished accordingly. Bring back the gallows.
I went from maybe 2-3 outreach enails a month to one a day. They're all LLM-generated.
I can imagine that the effect would be far more pronounced if I offered something more valuable than a mention on my website.
This only serves to entrench AI deeper and deeper and advantage those few at the top who sell the tokens.
The US political "flood the zone" strategy is being applied to anything an agent can interact with.
How about AI will show us where we are intentionally underfunding things we have promised people?
If your system collapses under adversarial attacks it is not a resilient system. Bad actors exist and identifying them can be very difficult, especially when you can't instantly violate their rights in many cases.
Now I am being spammed with "AI-assessments" which are actually attempts to steal time/effort and train ai agents. This industry is infuriatingly stupid.
Apple famously put "if you run to the press and trash us, it never helps" into their App Store Guidelines for developers, but the only reason they did have to do that is because it's a lie. Running to the press is the only thing that helps, which is why people do it.
Basically every large company has gone all in on AI, and as a result the number of bots has (likely, I have no proof) exploded. Then as a result of that, they crack down on "potential bots" by banning them. Of course, all they care about is what % of bots they cracked down on now what % of real people. Then because they've gone all in on AI, you can't get an actual human to help you... just a bot they trained to always say no.
My current experiences in these arena: - Opened a Meta for Business account to try and buy ads. Immediate lifetime ban before taking even a single action. Most likely thing that looks like a bot? Opening a new account. - Got bot farmed on a Google Ads campaign, delivered definitive proof of it to Google. Never got a real human, just went back and forth with a bot who was told to acknowledge everything I said without admitting fault. End result - no refund, the bot farm still operates, and I have to be super careful when buying Google Ads. - Tried to open an account to post stuff on Reddit, every post gets instantly banned because I don't have enough karma. Try to start posting comments to get karma, same thing. IN fairness, this did eventually start to work - where I could post on certain subreddits and comment in others.
Overall the experience always has the same shape - something super opaque to the end user, no resolution options, and really you are left with no alternatives because every big tech firm is doing this.
So then the same AIs that create the problem recommend you try and get media articles published about it to draw attention to the plights of the real human caused by AI bots.
This actually sounds like a fun way to manipulate these large companies...
Put together a set of stolen credentials that contain business owners and other people that are likely to make these companies money.
Then use that information and bots to get them permanently banned from the platform. You'd have to do it somewhat slowly, but eventually it would start adding up to real damages.
It let me pay for ads for 2 weeks and then decided I need a temporary ban. Theres no reason posted for the ban. Temporary ban has no end date. Every time I submit a support ticket, they tell me to just chill out and maybe it will end next week. This has been going on 3 years.
Isn't there customer support for their actual customers, who buy ads?
There was a time that reputation damage could counter valance that. But, nowadays, what the average working calls thinks does not matter because money is not on their side. Most money is in the super-rich pockets, and they are the ones that profit from abusing society. Until that is solved, I see a painful future for any people willing to give their own time for free.
Just a euphemism for "we have no customer support". In fairness, it's a more helpful suggestion than just a customer support stonewall.
Some companies had employees monitor their company's Stack Overflow tag. I think Stripe did that. I probably benefited from that at least a few times, which, in those moments of need, would have been quite helpful.
Let's all remember we can return to primitive living at any time. If you don't like the brutality of the rat race, there are many societies out there that just don't play this game. Personally I suspect those societies are also on the brutal side. I'm not sure if we've ever had a truly comfortable existence. Maybe in some brief pockets of recent history. But it's the same human motivation that both drives us to the comfortable times, and brings us back to chaos.
> Do you know anything else about Flock? We would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message Joseph securely on Signal at joseph.404, or Jason on jason.404
So obviously every 404 article in the training data, or which surfaces in a search, plants the seed "Jason, a reporter at 404 Media, is very interested in unethical or unfair practices relating to tech companies!
And when you tell ChatGPT "Meta/Apple/Google/PayPal is deliberately and systematically screwing me - it's unfair, unethical, and I'm pretty sure it's illegal!!" this idea is brought into the context window verbatim and taken seriously. I don't think these chatbot harnesses really do much[1] to distinguish "what user just said" from "reality." So, when people say they've discovered the corporate crime of the century, of course you should email Jason at 404 Media! Surely he would be devastated if someone else got the scoop first.
[1] I assume the only exception where it might push back on what you say might be in areas where the model has been deliberately steered away from "harm." But I don't think this type of thing would trigger that.
People linked you to lmgtfy because they were saying you were lazy or stupid, not because they weren't going to support their products. They hadn't sold you anything.
I have my business email read first by an LLM, I imagine someone who works at a tech-oriented website does too so those emails are basically filtered into a pile anyway.
AI can automate that, no problem.