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Comment by bgwalter | Hacker News Reader

Here is a free business idea: Create an agentic "AI" video watcher. "AI" YouTube creators can register with the service, which will then watch their videos, will generate click-throughs to the advertisers and interact with the advertiser's web pages. The service is financed by profit sharing.

This streamlines video watching, which humans are notoriously slow at. It could lead to efficiency gains in video and ad watching that are practically unlimited.

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I'm guessing that is a facetious response, but in case it isn't: this is just plain old fraud.

Sounds like you just need to execute on it fast enough that the government cant respond before youre too big to fight. standard strategy

Not really. Click fraud isn't anything new, it has existed for decades, and there are many ways that it can be (and currently is) mitigated privately. The most common way is to ban, shadowban, or demonetize the offender. And if that doesn't work you can always be held civilly liable.

Contracting with others to commit fraud and violate contracts is not a good business idea even if you stay off the government's radar.

I don't think that's fraud unless its done by the channel operator. Me as an end user auto-clicking ads is not even in the same ballpark as actual fraud.

> I don't think that's fraud unless its done by the channel operator.

That's exactly what the parent comment suggested.

Almost sure that's a tongue-in-cheek response. Right?

Yes! I'm pretty sure though that given the current hype someone can come up with an elaborate legal and moral justification for increasing video watching efficiency.

Be Facebook and call it pivot-to-video.

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