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Comment by wolvoleo | Hacker News Reader

Tbh I'm all in favour of ad fraud because it undermines the whole industry which I'd love to see disappear.

I love running ad nauseam which instead of hiding ads clicks them all in an invisible browser, making advertisers pay for ads I didn't even see. And devaluing the entire concept. I wish ublock origin did this too, it's so common that it would totally screw up entire ecosystems. The number of people running ad nauseam is unfortunately minimal.

And no, I'm not doing anything illegal. I can do whatever I want with the content on my computer. Ad fraud is a term invented for websites creating artificial clicks so they get paid, the end user doesn't benefit from it.

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I often wondered if this strategy could work with email/phone scammers as well?

Have an LLM write positive email responses, stringing them along as long as possible.

Imagine the Nigerian prince of scams... instead of getting 0.1% response rates that he can work on, he gets 99% responses of encouraging replies stringing him along. He would drown in false positives.

On the other hand, the Nigerian prince of scams would probably just use his LLM:s to take care of the answers, and we'll have email storms of LLM:s stringing along LLM:s.

> On the other hand, the Nigerian prince of scams would probably just use his LLM:s to take care of the answers, and we'll have email storms of LLM:s stringing along LLM:s.

I already see that happening in other ways.

On a forum I frequent there's been a user who instantly replies to new articles with a long irrelevant blahblah with a bunch of bulletpoints and emoji. And a while later another user started insta-replying to everyone with the same kind of crap.

Both were banned after a while and the forum now has a stricter "No AI" policy but even that caused some uproar, some users say they want it so they can be more elaborate without having the linguistic skills. But personally I'd love to see it go because most of these replies added nothing to the conversation.

You can do nice things with AI, yes. But it needs a human to tell it what to do. If you just put in a generic prompt "Write something insightful about this article" it's going to provide nothing but slop.

Have you talked to Lenny?

https://lennytroll.com/

https://github.com/sladesys/LennyTroll

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rz2LQCm4ymY

If not illegal, what if it's used as justification to further lock down browsers and operating systems? Apple makes a ton of money selling traffic to Google and has a vested interest in preserving the effectiveness of targeted advertising.

That will happen anyway. All the manufacturers want to do this so they can route every install through their app store and collect rent from it. It's Apple's primary source of profit these days.

Besides, I'm not going to suck up to the big corpos just so they might leave me alone if I'm lucky, tbh. I'm too rebellious for that.

> the whole industry which I'd love to see disappear.

For what alternative? Paying money to each website to access it?

I'd be happy with a lot of the current websites to disappear. There's way too much crap around anyway. And the ones that are worth it, yeah I'd pay for them. If they are ethical and worth it (I won't pay for anything from Google of course).

Besides, I don't really care what the replacement business model is. I just don't want this one.

You know, there was a time when people actually paid to have their content hosted online. You read that right. Instead of trying to make money with a website, people PAID money to have a website.

You mean the time when websites did not have to deal with the bandwidth and infrastructure to handle millions of users and bots?

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