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X is becoming a 'ghost town' of bots as AI-generated spam content floods the internet — A sign of the scale is the thriving industry in bot-making (www.abc.net.au)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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X is becoming a 'ghost town' of bots as AI-generated spam content floods the internet — A sign of the scale is the thriving industry in bot-making::The internet is filling up with machine-generated "zombie content" designed to game algorithms and scam humans. Experts call it the "great AI flood".

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (4 children)

I’m all for Xitter bashing but it’s the same on Youtube and pretty much everywhere else. What’s actually most striking to me is how simple these bots are. They don‘t even use AI most of the time, just spamming the same hand full of extremely vague statements while having the profile picture of a young woman, often only showing certain body parts.

I‘m suspecting that more and more scammers caught up on the pig butchering trend which has been a huge thing in China for over a decade. Until last year the African prince was still the most damaging type of online scam for the US economy until pig butchering finally dethroned it. That shows how quick it‘s growing.

That being said, platforms in general seem to follow the same pattern in that moderation is practically non-existent anymore and it will only be a matter of time until Brussels will feel inclined to really crack down on it when it inevitably becomes a much bigger problem for online discourse.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (4 children)

What do you mean by pig butchering trend?? Not familiar with that scam

[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

[Alice] "Bob, we're going to butcher a pig and get rich selling the meat!"
[Bob] "Okay. What do I need to do?"
[Alice] "give me some money for pig food."
[Bob] "fine" [gives Alice five coins]
[Alice, a month later] "Bob, our pig is eating a lot. We'll need more money. Could you spare fifteen coins?"
[Bob] "Fifteen? Fuck."
[Alice] "If you don't give me 15 coins the pig will starve, and we'll lose the investment. Remember, once we butcher the pig we're getting rich!"
[Bob] "Fiiiiine." [gives Alice fifteen coins.]
[Bob, a month later] "Hey Alice, how is our pig going?"
[Bob] "Alice? Where are you?" [radio silence]

And Alice just stole 20 coins from Bob, through a pig butchering scam.

The key elements of the scam:

There's a promise of huge profits near the end. That's the "bait".
Investment starts small, but it gets larger over time. That exploits the escalation of commitment of the scammed.
At a certain point, the scammer flees.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago

Wiki link Truly vile, long-term scamming strategy that became an industry in and of itself. There are entire companies that hire people specifically to lull people into trusting them and giving them money ( often their entire savings ) using what is essentially weaponized catfishing

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

The key is to start small - throw away money for the victim so they don’t think it through.

Then you progressively ask for larger amounts working the victim over with the sunk cost fallacy.

It doesn’t take much, the victim naturally doesn’t want to admit they fucked up, and you can reinforce that so they think they’re doing the right thing by investing more money.

Keep it up until they are bankrupt, then disappear.

People have invested years I their twitter profile. They don’t want to admit it was a total waste of time.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

A pig butchering scam is a type of confidence trick and investment fraud in which victims are gradually lured into making increasing contributions, in the form of cryptocurrency, to a seemingly sound investment before the party they are dealing with disappears.

-Wikipedia

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

moderation is practically non-existent

It seems you've never called a Nazi or homophobe a piece of shit on Facebook or Reddit. That's a sure fire way to get banned or at least a warning.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

I’m all for Xitter bashing but it’s the same on Youtube and pretty much everywhere else. What’s actually most striking to me is how simple these bots are. They don‘t even use AI most of the time, just spamming the same hand full of extremely vague statements while having the profile picture of a young woman, often only showing certain body parts.

This is really low quality bot, nowadays they can use artificial inteligence run locally to output content that you would never think was written by a bot. It's just that we don't see it. i'm going to ask chatgpt 3.5 to answer your first comment while denying there is a bot issue, just check if you would be able to spot it and what would happen if hundreds of accounts ran by a single bot were to downvote you and give similar comments.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

LOL, you really think there's a bot issue? Sounds like someone's been watching too many sci-fi movies. Get real, dude.

(Following my previous comment, generated by chatgpt 3.5 in very few seconds).