Member-only story
The Hucksters & Scammers of Artificial Intelligence
If you’re on Twitter (uhm, X), TikTok, Instagram and any of these platforms, you’ve no doubt seen the posts exclaiming in fabulous, glorious, amazing hyperbole just how many incredible, groundbreaking, game-changing, enchanting and pick-your-superlative, ways AI changed the entire world in 30 seconds just, well, right this very second.
Did you know that hundreds of thousands of teenagers are making $50,000 a month from chatbots and AI tools? That you too, can make millions by using these free tools? That if you learn how to write a prompt you’ll only have to work two minutes a week? You can design, launch and make $2 million from a website in 30 minutes? It’s all true. Just pay me $20 for my cheat sheet and you too will unlock the secrets to eternal wealth and happiness.
These hustles and scams are nothing new. In fact, the very nature of them goes back nearly 200 years to the 1800’s. Snake oil salesmen. The term snake oil survives to this day so profound was its cultural impact. You can read the fascinating history of snake oil here. Scams, frauds and such have been an aspect of human societies for many thousands of years. Probably even going back to our hunter-gatherer phase.
Print newspaper classifieds were long filled with all kinds of nefarious schemes. All you had to do was send a money order or cash in an envelope and you’d get all the details on how to make millions from home. Today, you can pay that tax bill before you get arrested with pre-paid credit cards.
Such forms of anti-social behaviours and criminal activity are a part of all societies around the world. As communications technologies evolve, so does the darker side of human behaviours that seek advantage. As email became more broadly available, so the scams ramped up. Princes and former politicians in Africa wanted to generously give their millions to you because, well, they’re just super nice. All you had to do was pay a few thousand dollars for the uhm, legal fees.
In terms of AI scams, most are focused on a specific subset of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Generative AI, such as Claude, Grok and ChatGPT. Keeping in mind that there is no singular AI as I wrote before. So at least it’s relatively contained. But the deeper damage to the AI world, unfortunately, may be…
