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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)

@doctorow.pluralistic.net

I post long threads. Writer (sf novels, etc); blogger (pluralistic.net); activist (eff.org). Latest book: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI" Buy my books (DRM-free!) at craphound.com/shop.

11958 Posts25869 Follower646 Folgt
Cerrabus@cerrabus.bsky.social · 1h ago

Scammers took advantage of this for a while - and likely still do - by creating credential-harvesting lookalikes of popular sites (banks, social media, crypto exchanges, etc) then paying to advertise them on Google. Boom, their honeypot now looks like the top search result.

By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)@doctorow.pluralistic.net · 3h ago

To make this even worse, Google's spent years making it more difficult to distinguish ads from "organic" search results, changing the font and size of the "ad" warning to make it harder to spot, and making the font and color of the ad itself closer to the color of the search results below it. 28/

Rob Haug@robhaug.bsky.social · 1h ago

Reposting one of the most egregious examples from a great thread on scams in Google ads and the enshitifcation of the internet.

By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)@doctorow.pluralistic.net · 3h ago

When Google's users searched for airlines' toll-free phone numbers, Google directed them to phones that rang in the scammers' boiler room, where they were tricked into giving up their passport info and credit card numbers to boiler-room thieves: www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-ne... 20/

Gershom Gorenberg גרשום גורנברג@gershomg.bsky.social · 42m ago

The Truth, I scream, this is the Truth of Our Age, I shout into the void, after this wasted afternoon dealing with an AI "assistant" that assisted with nothing, answered nothing, led nowhere, may its circuits burn in everlasting fire.

By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)@doctorow.pluralistic.net · 4d ago

Businesses *suck* at documenting their processes. Customer-facing chatbots *also* suck. They either can't solve your problem, or, when they seem to solve your problem, the "solution" goes nowhere. 30/

Dr. Meredith Wills ⚾️⚾️👀@bbl-astrophyscs.bsky.social · 2h ago

Reminder: ChatGPT first came online in November 2022. We’re attributing “inevitable” societal changes to a technology that has yet to see its first midterm election.

By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)@doctorow.pluralistic.net · 4d ago

Neoclassical econ assumes rationality. The corollary of, "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" is "you're rich, so you must be very smart!" Thus, people assume that if powerful, well-compensated CEOs insist that "AI is changing everything," well then, *AI must be changing everything*. 1/

A sepia-toned 1950s era boardroom in which men in suits sit around a circular table. The chair of the meeting has been replaced with a man in a straitjacket, making a funny face. The heads of the remaining board-members have been replaced with robots from 1930s pulp magazines. The image has been hand-tinted.
Jennifer Diascro@jenniferdiascro.bsky.social · 2h ago

A contrasting take to the “moral imperative” argument is @doctorow.pluralistic.net's. Really interesting read.

Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying

It has become impossible to tell managers mesmerised by artificial intelligence that the tools are not, in fact, helpful. So employees just play along with the fiction to keep their jobs, writes our t...

thenerve.news

Tressie McMillan Cottom@tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 2h ago

You will be surprised to learn that I do not believe there is a “moral imperative“ to teach educators about AI.

Courthouse Trenchman@stepperleffer.bsky.social · 2h ago

I pay $10 a month for Kagi, & it is worth every bit of it. Google's front has devolved into a digital amalgam of old yellow pages, Sears catalogs, and coin-operated trinket machines, while the back end scans our family photos, reads our emails and deletes our work at will.

By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)@doctorow.pluralistic.net · 3h ago

If Kagi (with a handful of engineers) can extract useful search results from Google's databases, then Google - a thrice-convicted monopolist that's had its pick of *thousands* of the top computer scientists from the world's most prestigious universities for a generation - could also do so. 14/

Courthouse Trenchman@stepperleffer.bsky.social · 2h ago

For anyone with a small business who uses advertisements, this also means that your business is going to pay for clicks from people who are not active customers who do not know that they are clicking on an advertisement. Nothing like paying somebody $5 or $10 to read your website blog...

By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)@doctorow.pluralistic.net · 3h ago

To make this even worse, Google's spent years making it more difficult to distinguish ads from "organic" search results, changing the font and size of the "ad" warning to make it harder to spot, and making the font and color of the ad itself closer to the color of the search results below it. 28/

@be-see.bsky.social · 2h ago

Also if you accidentally book transport through one if these deceptive shell brokers, you are unable to get weather cancelation info and rescheduling opportunities you would have received from the service provider. Ask me how I know.

By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)@doctorow.pluralistic.net · 3h ago

Card companies allow merchants to set terms of service that refuse refunds under almost any circumstances, and, more often than not, the card issuers side with the merchants over their own customers when they call to cancel a charge from one of these scammers. 53/

Judge Rob@judgerob.bsky.social · 3h ago

Great essay. You concentrate on search, but it's also true in their stores. Google Books has scam books with the same name as real books designed where the purported authors generate them with LLMs. Again, trivial for them to address but they don't.

Susi O'Neill@susioneill.bsky.social · 19h ago

hermit-tech.com/blog/ai-mani... @doctorow.pluralistic.net shared this corker in his @thenerve.news column by Nikhil Suresh: enterprise AI is a mania of emperor's new clothes, only the fierce loyalist survive culls yet few can show tangible CEO claims that AI is "changing everything" when it's not

AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decisionmaking

The reality of how much damage AI mania is doing to our ability to run institutions effectively.

hermit-tech.com