> I'm not sure what we can do about this.

I think the easiest thing to do would be to pass a law or regulation requiring companies to be responsible for the ads shown on their sites. If, say, the NYTimes is promoting scams (they are) they should be fined or worse.

I use an adblocker and simply don't see the overwhelming majority of these fraudulent ads. (You should too!) I've installed ad blockers for anyone in my family who might be vulnerable to these scams. (You should too!) I won't consider changing this recommendation until Google and other ad servers start caring enough to filter out scam ads.

However, I still get a lot of fraudulent phone calls and most people I know do too. It used to be the case that you could spot a fraudulent call instantly. Most of them came from Indian call centres from people with thick accents. Those accents can now be eliminated with AI[1]. Robocallers have also, of course, embraced AI and are rapidly becoming more and more sophisticated. I worry that, soon, some of the more vulnerable people I know will be unable to spot these for what they are.

As cheap as an Indian call centre is, AI promises to let scammers canvas a much broader slice of the population for marks and exploit them at a fraction of their current costs. It would be nice to see at least some effort from the AI giants go into helping telcos spot and block fraudulent AI callbots.

_____________

[1]https://www.techspot.com/news/106983-new-ai-voice-technology...

Introducing the term "chum bucket" to my father, who fished and had a visceral appreciation for the analogy, instilled in him the understanding and self-control to not click the chum bucket. Kudos to whoever came up with the term.

I don't think it will be so easy this time around. We probably need to shift liability to the parties able to do something about it (advertising platforms).

Its crazy to me that people even use their browsers without ad blocking. I wanted to limit my screen time a while back and realized that it was the browser that was the problem, so I ditched my heavily content filtered ad blocking brave and pivoted to safari with no ad blocking, my screen time went from 2 hrs / day to 20 minutes / day.

It’s all true but at the same time I don’t see any such ads on the TV. Maybe we already have laws and institutions that solve this exact problem and we need to apply them to social/ad networks?

There's an easy fix. Just extend "Know your customer" to the ad industry, including all parties who engage in the creating, buying, selling, distribution, aggregation, or display of advertisements. After the last decade of mergers and buyouts, the last remaining large scale ad companies would suddenly find it too risky to carry this crap. You need only look at how to banking and financial industries routinely turn down opportunities due to KYC.

We just need the political will. Or, pass a note to some easily lead senators that ad networks sponsor terrorism, or whatever the fear-of-the-day-is.

I've definitely noticed an increase in beautifully creative but still obvious scams lately. But it seems like just a bit of an escalation from what was already a tire fire. Old school Google searches, for example, routinely serve up scam sites masquerading as legitimate e-commerce. Sometimes ones that were recognized as scams more than a year ago. WTF

>Glasses that can adapt to any prescription (not how glasses work) and are also sunglasses sometimes

Not sure about the "any prescription thing", but it's pretty trivial to make glasses that are "also sunglasses sometimes".

Both photochromatic lenses who darken in response to more light and glasses with variable ND filters exist (the former very common and trivial to find, the latter way more niche, but still commercially available, and cheap enough)

Google must be held accountable. It's shocking they get off Scot free advertising scams

+1

And there's another drawback to this flood of bad/scammy ads on YT: people aren't naive and ad effectiveness is plummeting like never before.

This has forced YT to display more ads and introduce mandatory viewing times for two consecutive ads.

A few minutes ago I just got a third (from a first and second emails that were sent half an hour earlier than that) about a "Business Partnership Invitation" for "AI Training Projects" from "Anthony Harrison" <anthonyharrisonai1989@gmail.com>. No need to say what you're supposed to do in that "business" but later in said email they claim they will get 70% of the earnings and you get 30%.

The funny part is that they most probably got my mail from the "Who wants to be hired?" post from here and most probably they're using some sort of ai tool to scan those emails, even those that are "hidden" by a 'please see my portfolio to get my mail' like mine.

It's been the same story for the last few months - I post on HN's "Who wants to be hired?" and a few days later I get no real job offers but scam slop like that.

I keep getting a weird video telling me to never begin a conversation with a stranger by giving them my name, as if corporate environments are full of fae.

1. [January 5, 1889 — Over a Million Out: The Gigantic Fraud Perpetrated on a Sugar Refining Company](https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn84024546/1889-01-05/ed-1/)

2. [October 1893 — The Harness "Electropathic" Swindle](https://thequackdoctor.com/index.php/harness-electric-corset...)

3. [September 1951 — TV Racket in San Francisco Hit](https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Radio-Maintenance/...)

The first is just like quite a few of the AI pitch start-ups that have gone bust. IMO the quality of the spam isn't good, it reads like it was written by an illiterate drunk that constantly mixes and abandons metaphors.

So the world is noisy and uncertain, and we have this light that eliminates noise and illuminates some object inside the chaos, actually no madness not chaos sorry. And now that object is hope and now you're on a journey to get that object and the book is drawing you in... to the world you already inhabit? Oh and the book is also light and the vehicle??? WTF!!! is this magic school bus cracked out bot trying to say??

You’d think if we convicted Elizabeth Holmes for defrauding investors, many AI grifters are doing far worse? What am I missing

Not all men.

In the future, the real flex amongst the rich will be to have humans working for you to isolate you from all the slop. They will filtrate, curate, fact check and sumarize manually every single bit of information before it reaches their rich bosses. All of this in pristine victorian calligraphy with a fountain pen over premium paper.

We will can them scribes.

"I don't pay to get rid of ads, so I get bottom-of-the-barrel scam products hoisted at me. This is AI's fault, somehow, and not how the web has worked since nearly its inception."

But we also have AI that helps people not fall for phishing attacks.