Hacker News Reader

Comment by HomeDeLaPot | Hacker News Reader

Every YouTube ad I see now is an AI-generated scam ad hawking everything from free electricity to anti-aging products to birdhouses hand-carved by an AI-generated senior citizen. I've seen some multiple times, days or weeks apart. Their advertising standards are a complete joke.

View on HN

I've flagged an AI-generated add once that promoted a small device that could cool a hot room (many degrees celcius lower, very quickly, for very little energy and very little money and without external components), defying the laws of thermodynamics.

They said they investigated it and concluded it did not break any rules and no actions where taken.

"Lisa, get in here... in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!"

That was a good one from the simpsons:

https://frinkiac.com/comic?b=AQIBBlMwNkUyMafYCwABEvQBygNqSSB...

There do exist "evaporative coolers", sometimes called "swamp coolers". The trick is that they require water and raise the humidity of their surroundings. But they tick all the boxes you listed - plenty of delta-t, extremely low power, no external tubes or parts.

It's not magic because it relies on the "fuel" of cool water to evaporate.

I'm not the same guy but I can verify that the advert for the impossible micro-evaporative cooler quoted impossible performance capabilities.

YouTube adverts frequently contain fraudulent, misleading information. It appears that no law is being broken.

I can believe that, I'm just here to point out that some of the laws being not-broken are the laws of thermodnamics. You can cool a room cheaply with dry ice, for instance. There are tricks.

I get what you're saying, that it's "thermodynamics violation OR trick". But if you're checking whether the ad is lying at face value, you exclude tricks like dry ice or precooling.

also known as an olla pot!

I've seen similar ads. For the ones I've seen the device isn't necessarily fake: it's just a swamp cooler. They're cheap and efficient if you're suffering in a dry heat.

ETA: the ads I've seen are still deceptive because they're claiming this is revolutionary new technology, which of course it isn't.

In July there was a BBC article on this, and how they were advertised on Facebook and YouTube.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj6g41pzy41o

The whole idea behind scam sites marketing is to present an ad that knowledgeable people will find unattractive but gullible people will be lured into. Self selection keeps the based demographic from investigating the scam.

ah yes, like the Nigerian prince scam

that's because the only rule they are investigating is if it makes them more money leaving it there and paying an eventual fine or removing it

And they still try to gaslight us into removing our adblockers. No thanks.

I flagged an AI-generated ad for an online casino that is not legal where I live. They run weird filters over the logo, never say what they actually do in the audio and also don't mention the company name just "look at our logo and find us online", it seems like they try to dodge some auto detection. They also replied they investigated and concluded it did not break any rules.

I guess they missed the rules of physics in their evaluation.

They got back to you? I never got any response after repeatedly flagging that implausibly fast and cheap, "German engineered" 32TB external drive.

The AI-generated video ads are getting really bizarre on YouTube. There's class of them that feature some AI-generated song with AI-generated animated characters. One song began with lyrics about having sex with a Jewish billionaire's wife and learning some secret (at which point I was able to skip the ad) and another is some grotesque looking creature singing about foamy urine.

Normally I have an ad-blocker and don't see any ads, but I happened to be using the YouTube app recently on my iPad so I was subjected to this insanity.

I guess scammer money is as green as anyone else's.

FYI, using YouTube through Brave browser on iPhone/iPad will block ads. Same with Instagram!

I'm so happy someone else has seen the Jewish billionaire's wife ad it's so weird and no one I know IRL has seen it and if you try to describe to someone in person you sound insane.

Makes wonder what kind of absolute batshit crazies it’s supposed to be targeting?

I think it's often "medical" cures.

I believe the Jewish billionaire's wife's secret was to "longevity".

I think the target is the elderly. My understanding is they have always been a frequent target of these sort of internet scams.

This senior citizen doing stuff got me. I bought a pair of cow slippers because I thought he was making them from his farm in Australia. Turns out they use that same "character" to hawk multiple products.

YouTuber Pleasant Green has several videos about all those fake ads making rounds. The one about fake old people is this one:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=f9MbhNJ5EIU

Unfortunately at this point I assume that everything I see online is fake until I have a good reason to think otherwise.

Every risk the early AI researchers warned us about came true, the companies released it anyway and here we are.

I use adblock and on my TV, Youtube Premium.

I loaded a stock web browser on VPN and checked Youtube looking for ads. Holy shit, it's all scams. Sample size of three, but not a single ad was a known company or a decent product.

every time I use the Internet on a computer without some sort of ad blocking, I am astounded to learn that there are still people who use the Internet without an ad blocker.

The Internet is unusable these days without ublock origin or a pihole.

> Youtube Premium.

I use other means when I must have access to content that is only on youtube. I'm not paying money into a company so happy to allow as much scammy crap as the adverts on there are full off.

Youtube Premium is so dodgy. It's already expense and even if you get it, they will default to a miserable 480p on Mobile, while you have 1080p60fps available.

You can change it manually, but it's a defeat of the entire purpose..they intentionally removed the setting to apply the max. quality available to all videos you watch, while already charging you a monthly subscription for the goddamn premium. What a bunch of goo(gl)ns

Only my kids use the TV to watch YouTube, and in order to protect them from ads (it is illegal to advertise to children in my country), I block the ads using SmartTube which includes SponsorBlock. Since such is also advertising. Google is a rotten to the core company who's purpose is whitewashing scams and spying on private eyes. Whenever Google talks about 'security' I need to keep in mind their snake tongue definition of 'security' does not align with mine. Such as: combining security updates with (unwanted) new features, play 'integrity' (hurting non-Android devices), DRM not owning my devices (hello?! The pirated content is already available!), something such as manifest V3 which has a different purpose than the one they mention, and hard-coded DNS servers with device (Google Chromecast) refusing to work without.

In case you weren’t aware:

“ My development environment was infected by unknown malicious software, as a result of which a few builds may have been affected. Once the issue was detected, I secured everything with a full disk wipe, restored a clean setup, and now all builds are scanned with VirusTotal. The F-Droid version will also be verified before release.

Public keys may have been compromised, which is why I am sharing this issue.”

What does that refer to?

Comment from the developer of the smartube the person I replied to said he used.

I treat Youtube Premium as a reward for Google making non-Premium such a horribly uninviting, anti-social place; ie. I would never pay to stop the bully punching me in the face, I would stop putting my face in the bully's window.

There's no standards. AdSense is sort of a paid social media of its own. You sign up and post a tweet, then those tweets get embedded to sites if AI clears it. The key difference between Twitter and AdSense is that you're supposed to be using the latter for your own financial gain.

And it just so happens that someone doing something for their personalized financial gain is a super strong negative indicator of everything.

These ads are uncanny valley right now. But imagine, in a year or two, they'll dial it in, and it'll be indistinguishable from actual TV ads.

Apart for the fact they'll be hawking obvious scam bullshit.

Not obvious to everyone.

I've seen ads using famous people (as in a Prime Minister) to sell whatever faking the whole thing, how is that even legal

Reply on news.ycombinator.com