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Comment by stickfigure | Hacker News Reader

> chatbots encouraging the humans to spend more money ... LLMs absolutely need some restrictions on their use.

No, I can honestly say that I do not lose any sleep over this, and I think it's pretty weird that you do. Humans have been fending off human advertisers and scammers since the dawn of the species. We're better at it than you account for.

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In 2022, reported consumer losses to fraud totaled $8.8 billion — a 30 percent increase from 2021, according to the most recent data from the Federal Trade Commission. The biggest losses were to investment scams, including cryptocurrency schemes, which cost people more than $3.8 billion, double the amount in 2021.

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/people-are-losing-...

The data says we are not that good and getting 30% worse every year.

Furthermore "If it were measured as a country, then cybercrime — which is predicted to inflict damages totaling $6 trillion USD globally in 2021 — would be the world’s third-largest economy after the U.S. and China."

https://cybersecurityventures.com/hackerpocalypse-cybercrime...

US GDP in 2022 was $25.46 trillion. $8.8 billion is 0.03% of that economic activity. Honestly, that seems like a pretty good success rate.

To put this number $8B to context, the estimate COVID-19 relief fund fraud in the US is $200B

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/new-federal-estimate-fi...

US tax fraud is estimated to be $1 trillion a year

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-04-13/tax-cheats...

Yea the point is the people losing the 8B are not the people saving the 1 trillion, or getting most of the Covid relief

> We're better at it

Huge numbers of people are absolutely terrible at it and routinely get rinsed out like rags.

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