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AI-generated 'poverty porn' fake images being used by aid agencies

theguardian.com

171–180 of 222 posts

Re: AI-generated 'poverty porn' fake images being used by aid agencies

#171

I was thinking about it, because wife was telling me story from work, where a woman was scammed with AI generated stuff and her colleague was a little too nonchalant about it ( 'it is on her to do her due diligence' ). And it made me annoyed. How can you possibly make due diligence when everyone around you is incentivized to lie? We do have a concept of fraud, but advertising seems to be able to move around its edges…

> her colleague was a little too nonchalant about it ( 'it is on her to do her due diligence' ). I’m always fascinated by victim blaming culture, which has been pervasive long before generative AI. You see it most frequently in cases where the victim is thought to be a safe target: Someone wealthier, an office rival, a corporation. On HN it appears in every thread about someone being scammed, but it was most obvious…

> On HN it appears in every thread about someone being scammed, but it was most obvious in the recent threads where JPMorgan was defrauded by a startup they acquired. Seemingly 1/3 of the comments were from people commenting that JPMorgan was actually at fault for allowing themselves to be scammed.

I find that awful. JPMorgan should be held accountable, like many similar firms, for all the money that they themselves have stolen. But one crime does not justify the other. The people that scammed JPMorgan will not use the money to pay off JPMorgan's victims.

What it seems that in the USA nobody believes in justice anymore, as even the Supreme Court is just another partisan agency helping the rich. Americans may justify getting money thru crime because it is so normalized. Blaming victims helps to feel good about it.

The real answer is to have stronger institutions that see everybody equally under the law, and to have better laws that punish all type of criminals including economic crimes.

Re: AI-generated 'poverty porn' fake images being used by aid agencies

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> her colleague was a little too nonchalant about it ( 'it is on her to do her due diligence' ). I’m always fascinated by victim blaming culture, which has been pervasive long before generative AI. You see it most frequently in cases where the victim is thought to be a safe target: Someone wealthier, an office rival, a corporation. On HN it appears in every thread about someone being scammed, but it was most obvious…

It could also be a more charitable " I make significant efforts to fight against this and spent years/months of my life trying to convince others to do the same only to be ignored, so fuck them". Like that RMS meme where the world is finally getting the pointy end of the proprietary software trap and cries for help and he just whispers "Gno".

> I make significant efforts to fight against this

More powerful people, the ones profiting from economic crimes, are fighting to keep scams legal. And they are the ones that create confusing laws that blame victims for falling for scams in the disguise of "personal responsibility". When lawmakers are the scammers, scams become legal and the victims will not see justice.

Re: AI-generated 'poverty porn' fake images being used by aid agencies

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can be beguiled by random images from an unknown solicitor to make rash financial decisions, the root of the problem is probably sitting in front of the screen. "A fool and his money are soon parted" is not a new thing, it's just easier to accomplish than ever before thanks to the dopamine conditioned internet and AI content generation. These victims don't need new legal layers of trust, they need a social med…

I have met multiple cybersecurity experts, and they really were experts and in general very intelligent and knowledgeable people, that have fallen for very obvious scams. One of them was one of those gift card scams which in my eyes is possibly the most obvious one. I myself have almost fallen for a well crafted phishing attack, the only reason I never ended up putting in my card details was that I was technical enou…

Were they really "cybersecurity experts" though? Cybersecurity has been a gold rush field lately which has attracted a lot of grifters and people who are only in it for the money. I've met cybersecurity "though leaders" who talked a good game but were really zeros. A lot of people confuse confidence and fluency for expertise.

Re: AI-generated 'poverty porn' fake images being used by aid agencies

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big city US and entrepreneurial mobility requires formalized interactions that rely less on trust. The high trust environments put a limit to outlier performance. They are clannish, rumor and reputation driven etc. High trust environments are usually high trust inwards and low trust outwards toward outsiders who show up. They may show great hospitality but won't trust you with their affairs. Outlier entrepreneurial r…

Usually clanish and highly nepotistic societies are classified as low trust. High trust is related to "I trust my neighbors to do the right thing" not "I trust them because they are of my clan".

Yeah maybe I'm mixing up the terms a bit.

There are always ingroups and outgroups. And the ingroup can't expand in an unbounded way if there's high mobility.

Also,marriage patterns are relevant here. Clannish behavior is most prevalent in high-cousin-marriage societies, and you have a more expanded circle of trust when the familial relatedness is more distributed.

High trust is quite unstable either way. You need something to connect you. It's far from automatic. We'll have to rediscover a lot of this stuff that was just thrown out with all the rational Homo oeconomicus theories about people being fungible cogs in a machine and that you can just shred communities and shuffle around the pieces in an atomized way and expect things to go on with trust as before, because this sort of stuff is less measurable.

Re: AI-generated 'poverty porn' fake images being used by aid agencies

#175

I was thinking about it, because wife was telling me story from work, where a woman was scammed with AI generated stuff and her colleague was a little too nonchalant about it ( 'it is on her to do her due diligence' ). And it made me annoyed. How can you possibly make due diligence when everyone around you is incentivized to lie? We do have a concept of fraud, but advertising seems to be able to move around its edges…

> her colleague was a little too nonchalant about it ( 'it is on her to do her due diligence' ). I’m always fascinated by victim blaming culture, which has been pervasive long before generative AI. You see it most frequently in cases where the victim is thought to be a safe target: Someone wealthier, an office rival, a corporation. On HN it appears in every thread about someone being scammed, but it was most obvious…

You picked a bad example. JPMorgan Chase has itself violated the law many times: for example, they willfully violated the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in thousands of cases. So fuck those guys for being scammers themselves. There are no clean hands here and in that instance I absolutely blame the "victim". Like if an armed robber steals cash from a drug smuggler, the smuggler shouldn't expect sympathy from anyone.

My comment is specific to JPMorgan Chase. While I know that I would not fall prey to similar scams, I am not endorsing victim blaming in general.

Re: AI-generated 'poverty porn' fake images being used by aid agencies

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all snarky because I have no idea what the real answer is here, but although this sounds pretty good, it strikes me how in conflict this would be with most peoples' ideals if we tried any sort of system to scale this to larger populations (like a city). Perhaps we want privacy-but-not-anonymity. Or perhaps society doesn't scale easily.

The real answer is to rebuild the high trust society by relentlessly removing the low trust elements, the same way the high trust society was created to begin with.

That isn't a real answer. There is no effective way to remove the low-trust elements who physically operate in jurisdictions with no effective law enforcement. Like what are we going to do, fire cruise missiles at random Internet cafes in Nigeria and Cambodia?

Re: AI-generated 'poverty porn' fake images being used by aid agencies

#177
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it just probabilistic? That's who's most likely in poor and/or in refugee camps.

50,000 ft priors on probability don’t extend to good perspectives on specific settings

I don't know what this means.

Re: AI-generated 'poverty porn' fake images being used by aid agencies

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah. You're taking too literally something that should only be figurative. Internet advertisers don't remember when you cut someone off in traffic by mistake, or don't wave back one morning when you're feeling grumpy, or you have a disagreement with a customer regarding when work was considered finished.

You are living in the past. I do not mean it in pejorative sense. People are wholesale dumping their entire lives into various llms. Various advertising profiles know much more than you cutting off someone in traffic. More than that, they can infer a lot more. And if they don't, they will be replaced by companies that do..

>People are wholesale dumping their entire lives into various llms.

Not to be dismissive, but that's on them. You can control what you tell the bartender. You can't control what people whisper about you behind your back.

>Various advertising profiles know much more than you cutting off someone in traffic.

They "know" different things. Also, oh no! You mean to tell me advertisers are tracking me to optimize which ads get blocked by uBO? Woe is me! What ever shall I do? Try opting out of having a bad reputation in a small village.

Re: AI-generated 'poverty porn' fake images being used by aid agencies

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> her colleague was a little too nonchalant about it ( 'it is on her to do her due diligence' ). I’m always fascinated by victim blaming culture, which has been pervasive long before generative AI. You see it most frequently in cases where the victim is thought to be a safe target: Someone wealthier, an office rival, a corporation. On HN it appears in every thread about someone being scammed, but it was most obvious…

> I don’t know what drives it "If the victim somehow did something to deserve it, then it won't happen to me" (just world fallacy) Seemed to come up a lot on this one recently too (fake job interview trying to get you to install malware): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45591707

I don't know about that. Regarding that particular example, anyone willing to interview with a "blockchain" company is very likely a scammer (or at least scammer adjacent) themselves. I mean there might be some legitimate use for blockchain technology but so far it's 99.9% scams and anyone unaware of that simply hasn't been paying attention for the past decade.
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