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Comment by JustBreath | Hacker News Reader

And the scary thing is AI is better than traditional scammers because it's systematic. It can wait until you're tired, or even come up with perfectly reasonable explanations for why you should click a link based on your chat history.

"I ordered basketball photos" -> "OMG these basketball photos turned out so cute!"

I'm fairly convinced the long term solution to this will be advocate AI. Basically AI antivirus, a service you pay for that is on your side and defends you and your interests.

And it basically has to be paid for at a fair rate by you, otherwise there will always be an incentive for someone to manipulate it against you.

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Ugly can of worms just opened. I could already foresee a lot of attention and resources being wasted on detecting detecting and removing bots.. Maybe face to face communication will become a thing again..

I'm seriously starting to think the internet will be borderline unusable in a few years.

Most websites that aren't recently built are getting close to impossible to use due to software bloat, things like forced 2FA, cookie bars, ads everywhere.

Add to that an infinite supply of AI generated content, and you end up with a situation where 99% of content is just bots speaking to each other, and the rest is frankly terrible UX.

Maybe this is how we get our non electronic lives back. We just overdo the machine part.

You can see this effect in real life. Go to a supermarket and observe the packaging.

Most brands are screaming over each other with bright colors and discount badges and badges promoting this or that benefit that the same product from the brand next to to this one totally doesn’t have. The aisles are completely overwhelming and you can barely even tell what’s in the box anymore.

Then you see the brand aimed at less price conscious consumers. The price is higher, but the box is a plain solid color with a nice font and just says “Rice”. Nothing else. Just rice. Or cereal. Or whatever.

You see similar effects on the internet. The good stuff just doesn’t feel as shouty (look at HN). Calm is a signal of quality. Noise gets ignored.

That's funny, because over here in Europe private labels who use simple, unenticing packaging are aimed at price conscious consumers, while premium buyers want 'sophisticated' packaging. Maybe we are at a different part of the cycle?

I don't even think what they say holds in the US either - so must be elsewhere.

In the U.S you have brand name with their often noisy labels full of marketing - and then store brand (which is often the exact same stuff as the brand name in different packaging - or stuff that was rejected from quality control of the name brand so is almost the same stuff just slightly worse by some unknown metric). I buy store brand for basically everything but a few food items where the quality is worse enough to be off-putting. Store brand labels aren't quite as plain as No Name labels but are usually a bit more bespoke or just "lower quality" like they didn't want to pay for a graphic designer so had some intern whip up a graphic for the label.

I know the U.K has No Name brand which to my understanding also markets itself as the cheaper no-fuss alternative?

I think there’s 2 sides that use simple packaging with opposite effects. I’m not enough of a designer to know how that works.

You have simple but cheap looking and you have simple but clean and sophisticated looking. Look at Apple’s branding as a good example of the latter.

> just bots speaking to each other

Ah - perhaps therein lies a solution! We all get a personal AI bot. Mine would sound like me, would be able to imitate my voice and my writing style, and would be able to distinguish bots from humans better than me. It would screen my calls and messages.

"Putting you through!"

But it doesn't actually put you through: you have been shadow ghosted!

so you saying there would be a bot that would sound like you and "put someone through". I would be frankly confused if I tried to reach you

Maybe you'd get used to it?

"And it basically has to be paid for at a fair rate by you, otherwise there will always be an incentive for someone to manipulate it against you."

You're right, but if it is really good at this sort of thing it's going to be difficult to incentivize anyone with more money than they can get from manipulating you. There's a crapton of money and power in this.

There is also some protection in that I don't care why most of my contacts would send me a link to buy something, it's going to be out of place. An AI can match me or my wife's internal communication style but there's basically no amount of style matching it can do to make me buy cryptocurrency, or send 10 $500 gift cards somewhere. Honestly current spam already takes a decent run at it through plain ol' human evolution anyhow, and phishing/smishing already has a non-trivial hit rate. The space of such messages is already small enough that humans can blindly hit reasonably well.

> And it basically has to be paid for at a fair rate by you, otherwise there will always be an incentive for someone to manipulate it against you.

In other words, protection money.

It's more like a spam filter or a body guard.

"Protection money" is a term used when the threat is coming from the same agent that is collecting the payment. In this case they are two separate agents.

Online dating turning into a tournament of everyone's catfish detectors conferring with each other and reporting back to their respective principals is going to be real weird.

That's not too far from the Black Mirror episode "Hang the DJ".

I feel like the alternative is trusting Facebook et. al with this.

And sure they'll protect you from malware, but they'll also have some opinions about who you should vote for, what businesses you should patronize, etc...

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