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B&H Photo Published an AI-Generated Guide Written by a Fake Person

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Re: B&H Photo Published an AI-Generated Guide Written by a Fake Person

#21

Who cares? This is both my initial reaction and, on reflection, something I’m genuinely curious about. If one can’t tell the difference without deep investigation, the consumer likely doesn’t care (I don’t). Hopefully / presumably it would still go through whatever editorial controls are in place. So who does care? If this is rooted in fears of our jobs being taken, the train has left the station and we need to deal…

> Who cares? This is both my initial reaction and, on reflection, something I’m genuinely curious about. If one can’t tell the difference without deep investigation, the consumer likely doesn’t care (I don’t).

"I was reading something to learn about some topic I don't know about, and it might've all been a bunch of bullshit, but since I didn't know it was bullshit, who cares!" What the . . . .

Re: B&H Photo Published an AI-Generated Guide Written by a Fake Person

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At first, I figured that's the explanation, but you're ignoring a more puzzling statement in the article: > To explain how an AI-generated story written by an AI-generated person was published despite this policy, B&H says it was part of a “test” to identify and protect against such content. > “Our editors wrote a test article in mid-November as part of their efforts to identify and protect against AI-generated conte…

Yeah, that's pretty suspicious; I missed that.

Real Principal Skinner saying he only went to the bordello to get directions away from the bordello energy

Re: B&H Photo Published an AI-Generated Guide Written by a Fake Person

#23
post #17

Who cares? This is both my initial reaction and, on reflection, something I’m genuinely curious about. If one can’t tell the difference without deep investigation, the consumer likely doesn’t care (I don’t). Hopefully / presumably it would still go through whatever editorial controls are in place. So who does care? If this is rooted in fears of our jobs being taken, the train has left the station and we need to deal…

As soon as I get the feeling that an article was written by a LLM, I stop reading. Usually it's repetitive phrasing, or grade school essay style summaries that turn me off. In short, a poor ratio of text to actual information. Even bad writing can have useful information in it, and I will plow through it. But vapid text that meanders without saying anything isn't worth anyone's time. On the other hand, if LLM-generat…

I was always under the impression that the grade school style summaries started before LLMs. Search engines recommends that kind of writing as condition to get into the answer box. It is bad writing never the less.

Re: B&H Photo Published an AI-Generated Guide Written by a Fake Person

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding the sales tax “hijinks”, B&H actually won that lawsuit because the judge agreed that the law did not require them to pay sales tax on those payments as the NY AG claimed. It’s not hijinks if they are interpreting the law more correctly than the government.

I think it’s fair to call creative tax dodges “hijinks,” even if they ultimately end up being legal. This is the standard that I’d apply to Apple as well (with their Irish Maneuver). (Another example of this in B&H’s case is their store-branded credit card, which gives you a NY tax rebate. This appears to be fine legally, but it matches the general trend.)

I wouldn't consider that a tax dodge at all given that the New York State Tax Department had previously issued advisories stating that the way that B&H was accounting for their sales taxes was the correct way to do so[1], and what they were doing was no different from the manufacturer supporting a sale with a drop in wholesale price on the item, which they sometimes do instead of manufacturer coupons. The attorney general was just plain wrong.

[1] https://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/tax-authorities/1121150/...

Re: B&H Photo Published an AI-Generated Guide Written by a Fake Person

#25

Who cares? This is both my initial reaction and, on reflection, something I’m genuinely curious about. If one can’t tell the difference without deep investigation, the consumer likely doesn’t care (I don’t). Hopefully / presumably it would still go through whatever editorial controls are in place. So who does care? If this is rooted in fears of our jobs being taken, the train has left the station and we need to deal…

If I can tell it's AI generated, I stop reading immediately because if the creator didn't care enough to at least edit the article to not be obviously AI generated, why should I care enough to spend my precious time reading it?

Re: B&H Photo Published an AI-Generated Guide Written by a Fake Person

#26

> When reached for comment, a B&H representative claimed the company’s policy was not to use AI-generated content and that it would “investigate this matter with our content teams.” Shortly thereafter, the article and profile were deleted. But for a month, the story remained online and positioned itself as an expert guide written by a real person and visitors to the blog would have been none the wiser. Seems like a s…

Regarding the B&H complaint, that was in 2019, you can update it with "B&H Photo Prevails in NY Sales Tax Dispute" in 2021 [1].

[1] https://advertisinglaw.fkks.com/post/102h8g1/bh-photo-prevai...

Re: B&H Photo Published an AI-Generated Guide Written by a Fake Person

#27
My rule of 100: for every scam or ruse that's discovered, there are 99 others like it that fly under the radar.

Applied to medicine, my field: for every error that's discovered and made public, 99 others just like it go unremarked.

For every air industry near miss, 99 others are never reported.

Re: B&H Photo Published an AI-Generated Guide Written by a Fake Person

#29
AI is heralding a new era of enshittification. Was this a "Oops, we're sorry! Our mistake!" Or was it more a case of, "We're sorry we got caught!" I don't trust them.

The last time I tried ordering something from B&H Photo their inscrutable fraud prevention algorithms put a hold on shipping my order after they charged my card. No idea how much "AI" was involved, but I'm fairly confident it's either currently or in the future going to be more than "none at all." They tried calling me to verify, but calls from numbers not in my contact list go straight to voicemail because of all the phone spam I get. I called them back and talked to someone in their verification department, thinking that would be the end of it and the item I ordered would promptly be on its way.

Apparently that didn't work. A couple of days went by without it shipping, and then they tried calling me again. I canceled my order and let them know they'd permanently lost a customer.

Eventually someone from their customer service department reached out and said, "We can't tell you what the criteria is for triggering order verification," as if explaining that to me would somehow change my mind about doing business with them in the future. "Oh well yeah, your super-smart fraud prevention algorithms clearly make mistakes, and I'll happily just play phone tag with you for a week or so to get everything cleared up." Nope.

For this and many other reasons, I'm now buying everything I can at physical retail stores with cash, in part to help make sure it's still going to be possible to buy things in physical stores with cash in the future. I'm hoping it might yet be a while before real-life meatspace commerce is going to become thoroughly AI-enshittified.

Re: B&H Photo Published an AI-Generated Guide Written by a Fake Person

#30

My rule of 100: for every scam or ruse that's discovered, there are 99 others like it that fly under the radar. Applied to medicine, my field: for every error that's discovered and made public, 99 others just like it go unremarked. For every air industry near miss, 99 others are never reported.

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