<story><title>Tell HN: Crypto/web3 grifters are Now AI/ML grifters</title><text>I am sure most of you noticed the trend, but a lot of folks online, from influencers on twitter&amp;#x2F;instagram&amp;#x2F;tiktok to CEOs of some companies who were big on crypto, web3 (I never understood what that even means) now switched completely to AI&amp;#x2F;ML with the popularity of DALL-E&amp;#x2F;ChatGPT.&lt;p&gt;Me and some of my colleagues are fairly active on the MachineLearning subreddit and we&amp;#x27;ve been getting a lot of unsolicited dms to collaborate in a breakthrough ML&amp;#x2F;AI project. The conversations start something like this: https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;imgur.com&amp;#x2F;a&amp;#x2F;z6GUTGc Yup, you guessed it, they have the idea and we have to implement it. If you look into their profile history, you’ll see that they’ve been heavy on crypto&amp;#x2F;NFT&amp;#x2F;web3 stuff until a few months ago, some even made good money. They don&amp;#x27;t even have the dataset. One guy proposed my friend that he has a startup idea to use GPT-model to let people talk to their pets and that it should be &amp;#x27;fairly easy&amp;#x27; to finetune from an existing model.&lt;p&gt;I am already fairly tired of seeing all the ChatGPT stuff on my socials, and I am not looking forward to another few years of more low effort&amp;#x2F;low quality stuff in peak of inflated expectations phase. I love GPT, I have many pipelines where I actively use it, but I also see the potential where people will abuse it, in every form from  increased spam, personalized phishing, etc. Imagine scammers calling your grand parents not with an non-native accent anymore - heck maybe with your own voice (which in my head is fairly easy to do - get someone&amp;#x27;s family tree, call the grandkid using a model fine-tuned on some local accent, perhaps of the opposite gender and engage them in a conversation - use the voice clips to finetune another model and then call their parents&amp;#x2F;grandparents to get money, heck even the transcript for the scam interaction can be auto-generated). I am a first-generation college student, and getting my parents to use a smartphone has itself been a challenge - there&amp;#x27;s no way I can teach them to identify sophisticated scams. I bracing myself and not looking forward for all of this to come.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>mjr00</author><text>This isn&amp;#x27;t really surprising. Even the HN comments for ChatGPT&amp;#x2F;Stable Diffusion related topics completely drank the kool-aid for a bit. I saw absolutely unhinged blanket statements like &amp;quot;ChatGPT is going to replace junior developers;&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Stable Diffusion is going to destroy the art industry;&amp;quot; &amp;quot;in a few years people will listen to completely AI-generated music playlists on Spotify.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;The hype has died down a bit and sanity has been mostly restored to the comment sections here, but holy hell, HN readers are in this industry, they &lt;i&gt;should&lt;/i&gt; know better, yet so many were, and maybe are, &lt;i&gt;still&lt;/i&gt; fully bought in.&lt;p&gt;The average VC, or other manifestation of &amp;quot;fool with money&amp;quot;, has zero chance. The macro economy aside, it&amp;#x27;s absolutely going to be a feeding frenzy for the entrepreneurs and grifters who can put together a convincing presentation on how they&amp;#x27;re making an AI Netflix that will show infinitely generated AI TV shows or whatever.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>p-e-w</author><text>&amp;gt; &amp;quot;Stable Diffusion is going to destroy the art industry;&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;While there is of course a bit of hyperbole in that statement, I do think it has a lot of truth in it as well.&lt;p&gt;Stable Diffusion isn&amp;#x27;t going to destroy art since art is fundamentally a human endeavor. But many of the creative professions commonly &lt;i&gt;called&lt;/i&gt; &amp;quot;[something] artist&amp;quot;, whose day-to-day work consists of drawing pictures to illustrate a point, making things &amp;quot;look good&amp;quot; etc. are absolutely going to be wiped out. Logo designs, cover illustrations for books and music albums, pictures for marketing releases and so on. No one is going to keep paying people to do those when AIs can do it faster, better, and at no cost. I wouldn&amp;#x27;t be surprised if already in 2023, AI had a noticeable financial impact on those professions.</text></comment>
<story><title>Tell HN: Crypto/web3 grifters are Now AI/ML grifters</title><text>I am sure most of you noticed the trend, but a lot of folks online, from influencers on twitter&amp;#x2F;instagram&amp;#x2F;tiktok to CEOs of some companies who were big on crypto, web3 (I never understood what that even means) now switched completely to AI&amp;#x2F;ML with the popularity of DALL-E&amp;#x2F;ChatGPT.&lt;p&gt;Me and some of my colleagues are fairly active on the MachineLearning subreddit and we&amp;#x27;ve been getting a lot of unsolicited dms to collaborate in a breakthrough ML&amp;#x2F;AI project. The conversations start something like this: https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;imgur.com&amp;#x2F;a&amp;#x2F;z6GUTGc Yup, you guessed it, they have the idea and we have to implement it. If you look into their profile history, you’ll see that they’ve been heavy on crypto&amp;#x2F;NFT&amp;#x2F;web3 stuff until a few months ago, some even made good money. They don&amp;#x27;t even have the dataset. One guy proposed my friend that he has a startup idea to use GPT-model to let people talk to their pets and that it should be &amp;#x27;fairly easy&amp;#x27; to finetune from an existing model.&lt;p&gt;I am already fairly tired of seeing all the ChatGPT stuff on my socials, and I am not looking forward to another few years of more low effort&amp;#x2F;low quality stuff in peak of inflated expectations phase. I love GPT, I have many pipelines where I actively use it, but I also see the potential where people will abuse it, in every form from  increased spam, personalized phishing, etc. Imagine scammers calling your grand parents not with an non-native accent anymore - heck maybe with your own voice (which in my head is fairly easy to do - get someone&amp;#x27;s family tree, call the grandkid using a model fine-tuned on some local accent, perhaps of the opposite gender and engage them in a conversation - use the voice clips to finetune another model and then call their parents&amp;#x2F;grandparents to get money, heck even the transcript for the scam interaction can be auto-generated). I am a first-generation college student, and getting my parents to use a smartphone has itself been a challenge - there&amp;#x27;s no way I can teach them to identify sophisticated scams. I bracing myself and not looking forward for all of this to come.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>mjr00</author><text>This isn&amp;#x27;t really surprising. Even the HN comments for ChatGPT&amp;#x2F;Stable Diffusion related topics completely drank the kool-aid for a bit. I saw absolutely unhinged blanket statements like &amp;quot;ChatGPT is going to replace junior developers;&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Stable Diffusion is going to destroy the art industry;&amp;quot; &amp;quot;in a few years people will listen to completely AI-generated music playlists on Spotify.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;The hype has died down a bit and sanity has been mostly restored to the comment sections here, but holy hell, HN readers are in this industry, they &lt;i&gt;should&lt;/i&gt; know better, yet so many were, and maybe are, &lt;i&gt;still&lt;/i&gt; fully bought in.&lt;p&gt;The average VC, or other manifestation of &amp;quot;fool with money&amp;quot;, has zero chance. The macro economy aside, it&amp;#x27;s absolutely going to be a feeding frenzy for the entrepreneurs and grifters who can put together a convincing presentation on how they&amp;#x27;re making an AI Netflix that will show infinitely generated AI TV shows or whatever.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jameshart</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s a big difference between NFTs and most DeFi, and LLMs and other generative AIs. NFTs and shitcoins clearly had no actual non-scam usecases - they didn&amp;#x27;t actually enable &lt;i&gt;anything&lt;/i&gt; genuinely interesting to be done that was previously impossible (except for breaking the law in some slightly new and interesting ways). But LLMs and friends... these bring things that were impossible, or impractical, or unscalable, into the realm of possibility. There &lt;i&gt;will&lt;/i&gt; be genuinely important things built on this tech. Figuring out what is going to be properly hard work though.&lt;p&gt;But of course, there will also be a ton of lazy ill-thought-out crap, too.&lt;p&gt;And the danger is that NFTs and cryptoscams created a bunch of random lottery winners who think they got rich off their genius insight into how to apply innovative tech, but who actually only proved they know how to generate ill-thought-out crap, very quickly, at the start of a hype curve. So unsurprising to see them moving in. But without the obvious get-rich-quick scam opportunities, and the likely massive compute fees doing anything interesting in this space will involve, it&amp;#x27;s less obvious how long those folks will stick around.</text></comment>