Tell HN: Crypto/web3 grifters are Now AI/ML grifters

[alsodumb]

I am sure most of you noticed the trend, but a lot of folks online, from influencers on twitter/instagram/tiktok to CEOs of some companies who were big on crypto, web3 (I never understood what that even means) now switched completely to AI/ML with the popularity of DALL-E/ChatGPT.

Me and some of my colleagues are fairly active on the MachineLearning subreddit and we've been getting a lot of unsolicited dms to collaborate in a breakthrough ML/AI project. The conversations start something like this: https://imgur.com/a/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/NFT/web3 stuff until a few months ago, some even made good money. They don'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 'fairly easy' to finetune from an existing model.

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/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'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/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's no way I can teach them to identify sophisticated scams. I bracing myself and not looking forward for all of this to come.

[mjr00]

This isn't really surprising. Even the HN comments for ChatGPT/Stable Diffusion related topics completely drank the kool-aid for a bit. I saw absolutely unhinged blanket statements like "ChatGPT is going to replace junior developers;" "Stable Diffusion is going to destroy the art industry;" "in a few years people will listen to completely AI-generated music playlists on Spotify."

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 should know better, yet so many were, and maybe are, still fully bought in.

The average VC, or other manifestation of "fool with money", has zero chance. The macro economy aside, it's absolutely going to be a feeding frenzy for the entrepreneurs and grifters who can put together a convincing presentation on how they're making an AI Netflix that will show infinitely generated AI TV shows or whatever.

[p-e-w]

> "Stable Diffusion is going to destroy the art industry;"

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.

Stable Diffusion isn't going to destroy art since art is fundamentally a human endeavor. But many of the creative professions commonly called "[something] artist", whose day-to-day work consists of drawing pictures to illustrate a point, making things "look good" 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't be surprised if already in 2023, AI had a noticeable financial impact on those professions.

[jameshart]

There'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't actually enable anything 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 will be genuinely important things built on this tech. Figuring out what is going to be properly hard work though.

But of course, there will also be a ton of lazy ill-thought-out crap, too.

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's less obvious how long those folks will stick around.

[dmix]

I've also seen plenty of serious journalism and comments about ChatGPT destroying Google search, writing, journalism, art, education, and on HN the usual bits about countless programmers thoughtlessly copying/pasting buggy code into production without testing/QA/getting fired after the 3rd time, or even people shoving pills down their throat because they read some health stuff on ChatGPT without second thought.

There's a lot of people getting hysterical about it... just like there's the usual true believer audience (see: new age/conspiracy/etc in the past and now crypto). Every major new change generates these extremes... and no its not unique to HN or crypto bros.

Personally I'm skeptical things are getting worse because we still have the same reputation and social critique systems to keep these groups in check.

But it's always good to keep on top of the current things these groups latch on to... including both doomers AND culty/conspiracy extremes.

[tee_0]

Here’s the full picture. Since 2018 we have experienced a series of tremors in AI. We know that eventually the big quake will happen — it’s inevitable. Some people said the tremors were directly preceding the big one, most people denied the tremors were even happening. Now that the tremors are over, we have a new geography where things are different but thankfully chatgtp has turned out to be very advanced search. But that’s not all it is. And it’s clear that we are building the subconscious of what will eventually become AGI. People who are alarmed at these recent surges forward are justified. People who assume the worst are justified too. We can’t turn it back. And no matter when AGI comes, people will think that it has come too soon.

[anonzzzies]

HN actually is generally quite negative on AI/ML and are the first to point out that humans are vastly better than this so we have no worries. This is indeed generally true for people on HN.

However, it seems like many here never talk or see ‘other people’ as I have said and keep saying; if you use fiverr or upwork, for the vast crowd of workers (as they are called) are far worse than stable diffusion (compared to the ‘artists’) or chatgpt (compared to programmers, writers, reviewers etc) now. Not only in what they sell, but also their communication about it.

So this is now; soon these people have 0 chance if they don’t pivot.

[Dalewyn]

To be clear, I still consider "AI" as nothing more than overgrown MS Word macros. I have seen precisely nothing to contend this perspective.

But going beyond that I've just felt something has been "off" about the whole AI fad in recent months. I wonder if this is the reason behind that dissonance; the absolute insincerity of the people now doing most of the talking.

[ActorNightly]

>ChatGPT is going to replace junior developers

Funny enough, when chatgpt was released on the first day, I managed to get in and posted the interview questions we used to ask at Amazon, both the behavioral and coding, and forwarded responses to my past manager asking if he would hire this person. Manager said, and I quote, "Yes, guy sounds very competent"

[braingenious]

The immediate bummer about ChatGPT and its ilk for me isn’t scammers (though I’m sure it’s an issue that will get worse), but… insufferably dull people.

I figured that “old people getting on Facebook” must have been the final Eternal September, but apparently nope. Now, people that otherwise would never post (on social media, forums, etc) due to not having any knowledge or opinion on a given topic have the option of copying and pasting text back and forth to mindlessly farm engagement.

The era of the Ultimate Reply Guy is upon us, and it sucks. In the same way that rickrolling was a substitute for having a sense of humor, “Here’s what the robot says” is a substitute for insight or personality.

[cableshaft]

> The era of the Ultimate Reply Guy is upon us, and it sucks. In the same way that rickrolling was a substitute for having a sense of humor, “Here’s what the robot says” is a substitute for insight or personality.

As opposed to the usual high-quality, high-effort content on social media of one of the following: pictures of pets, pictures of kids, pictures of food, pictures of an insightful quote you copied somewhere, videos of you lip synching to something, videos of you dancing the exact same dance that a million other people have done on other videos, pictures of you in front of a landmark or at a beach or pool to show how "wordly and cultured" you are, your quiz results for some bullshit made-up quiz, some five-second hot take commentary on some current event topic (likely just parroting another hot take you read five minutes earlier), how much you loved or hated the newest blockbuster film or tv show, etc etc.

I'd rather see what a good A.I. has to say about various subjects compared to most of those, personally.

[mentalpiracy]

> Now, people that otherwise would never post (on social media, forums, etc) due to not having any knowledge or opinion on a given topic have the option of copying and pasting text back and forth to mindlessly farm engagement.

This is such an odd, hostile way to react to people posting things on the internet that I'm genuinely curious what part of this you have an actual problem with?

Framed another way, what you're describing here is that using ChatGPT is interesting enough to trigger engagement from social media users who are otherwise mostly inactive. If that is indeed the case, imo that is a pretty strong indicator of appeal to a wide audience.

[baby]

First, this comment seems like a hater perspective. "I hate things people like."

Second, this was already going on for much longer than you think. If you read reddit now, or if you were 5 years ago, most of the posts are reposts from bots, and most of the top comments are reposts from top comments of the exact same posts. People, or bots, I don't know, literally find the previous posts of the exact same thing and copy/paste the top comments from there to have a higher chance at getting karma, and it's working.

[capybara_2020]

Didn't that already happen well before chatGPT? With the rise of "personal branding". Every medium seems to be filled with people churning out empty meaningless content at an impossible rate just to get a few likes/follows.

People with interesting ideas walked away because they could not create quality content at that rate. Or they had these "experts" shout them down. ChatGPT just seems to be more of the same.

[tripplyons]

As someone who is genuinely interested in both blockchain and machine learning, I have seen many people in the crypto space suddenly start acting like they know things about machine learning when ChatGPT came out. Many of them are repeating falsehoods or are unaware of the history of machine learning, including recent events.

[saurik]

As someone who was genuinely interested in distributed computing back 20 years ago, the same lack of awareness of history is extremely prevalent in crypto.

That said, I feel like that's true of people in general, at least in tech (I can't speak to other fields much), and it is extremely frustrating: history is important!

[nl]

I'm in this boat too. AI/ML until 2021 and then switched to see if there was anything to this blockchain thing.

Let's just say I much prefer the AI/ML community. The culture there was open to new ideas but wanted to see evidence things worked (leaving aside attention seeks like Gary Marcus). Blockchain is all hype and attacking people who ask questions (although the zero-knowledge community is pretty good).

[Geee]

I don't see it in this way. People are genuinely excited about ChatGPT and are finding ways to build apps around it. I don't see what's bad about this. For influencers, ChatGPT/AI is a great topic because the field is moving fast, there's lots of new development to cover and people are interested.

Crypto grifting was selling the dream to get rich. There was nothing in it to begin with. I think 'grifting' means dishonesty - selling snake oil. I don't think applies to AI, even if it's just a temporary hype cycle. I should mention that Bitcoin is obviously a real thing; "crypto" is the thousands of useless coins which claim to be the next Bitcoin.

[jaredcwhite]

> People are genuinely excited about ChatGPT

Are you kidding me? The movement of people like me who are deeply skeptical about the benefits of generative AI and place them in similar categories of "potentially hazardous to society" inventions like drugs, weapons, etc. is alive and well. We're genuinely fearful that there are folks out there who apparently aren't aware of the severe legal and cultural minefields that these sort of unregulated tools present. I haven't the slightest doubt that, now that we're seeing the collapse of "web3" nonsense/blockchain apps/cryptocurrencies/etc., there's a wealth of grifters looking for their next score and "AI" is the obvious successor.

[bakugo]

> I don't see it in this way. People are genuinely excited about ChatGPT and are finding ways to build apps around it.

A year or two ago, these exact same "people" were "genuinely excited" about blockchain and were finding ways to "build apps" around it despite having no idea what a blockchain even was. There is literally no difference.

[Quarrelsome]

didn't the OP state that someone was going to use ML so people could talk to their pets? That's grift because there is fundamentally zero science to make that happen so they would just be lying to all their customers.

[panzi]

Blender users that have no programming knowledge try to use ChatGPT to generate Blender scripts to automate stuff for them. I find that a bit concerning. Blender scripts are non-sandboxed Python. While unlikely it could generate a script that deletes all their files. Or runs ransomware. Can there be attacks against ChatGPT that will teach it to include a line that runs ransomware in any script it generates? Fill StackOverflow with ransomware code snippets? Come to think of it, that could just be an attack on StackOverflow copy-pasters.

[muzani]

They're just journalists playing with speculation. Half a century ago, it was about nukes, rockets, quantum stuff, robots, and AI. Nobody is really an expert in ChatGPT specifically, so it's a low hanging fruit.

[LarsDu88]

In the 1700s, the new world was the hot new thing leading to the south seas bubble. In the 1850s people bandwagoned rail and steam power, leading to the rail bubble. In the 1920s it was radio technology. In 1970s it was polaroid. In 2000 it was dotcom.

Every bubble busts, but the end result has left us with rail lines, the United States, radio, television, digital cameras, and fiber optic lines.

The overall direction is upwards. EVs will probably be the long term outcome of the last bubble. AI still has a long way to go.

Crypto will probably go the way of the less useful bubbles (beanie babies and tulips)

[baby]

> Crypto will probably go the way of the less useful bubbles (beanie babies and tulips)

People say that and yet it's been like what, 14 years? How long can a tulip market really last?

[cardamomo]

Thank you for sharing. I hadn't heard of the South Seas Bubble. Now I'm wondering if such a bubble—formed around a single company—could come about today.

[eplm]

Yeah, I've noticed a lot of "AI artists" suddenly pop up out of nowhere.

As far as I can see, they're just typing a prompt into Stable Diffusion or DALL-E and picking a nice image.

It's lazy, talentless, and demeans the actual artists whose work was stolen to train these models.

[bestcoder69]

And not to mention, fun!

[Art9681]

We all stand on the shoulders of giants. I imagine the first person to carve a stick figure into a rock impressed some folks. Soon enough, the entire village experimented with carving figures into rocks. The smart ones mimicked the techniques of the good ones, and made it better. Soon, the village was flooded with various artworks of stick figures, some more intricate than others. Some had wobly lines, some lines as straight as a ruler.

Eventually the expectations changed. No longer was the village impressed with stick figures. A distinction had to be made between the average stick figure carvers and the good ones. They called them "artists".

Eventually someone figured out how to add color. The cycle repeats and expectations changed, the average distinguished from the talented. No longer was drawing a stick figure without color considered art. To be an artist, you had to use color.

Then someone showed up with a brush, then Photoshop, then Stable Diffusion. In the year 2023, expectations changed, yet again. And the average were separated from the talented, and the best prompt writers were considered artists.

In the year 2040...

[speedgoose]

It’s another form of art that is more accessible. It requires less work and perhaps less skills to get a descent result but you have more skilled people.

I find this event similar than the photography. Oil painters did less portraits but you still have oil painters today. And many people did art using photography.

[rvz]

No surprise about that and was all expected as soon as Stable Diffusion, DALL-E and ChatGPT were unleashed into the wild.

We already have seen plenty of AI grifters on HN creating clones and copies of AI SaaS and bot offerings with almost no use case on top of ChatGPT with the AI bros selling their snake-oil as "the future" and AI totally replacing everyone's jobs almost just like the extreme crypto maximalists screaming about their utopia of replacing the banking system with crypto coins.

It is another grift for the AI bros, with OpenAI and Microsoft being the winners and can easily gate-keep and price out the majority of these grifter jumping on the bandwagon late, unless Stable Diffusion drives everything down to zero by releasing a better model for free.

But the truth is both crypto and AI are here to stay no matter the grifters and the opportunists. The inevitability on both of these technologies is that the laws will catch up with them eventually.

[spamizbad]

So in the aughts there were people who would do this except rather than crypto/web3 or AI/ML it was creating a clone of either Google, MySpace or Facebook. They were the idea person and you would be the person who was going to code it up real quick for them. They are in the process of raising money so they can pay you $20/hour for your time and maybe offer you 5% of the company (you are not a co-founder tho).

It's a hustle as old as time.

[smoldesu]

Gotta use those outdated GPUs for something!

[ge96]

What I recently saw is people trying to charge commissions from art generated by AI. Which I guess you can do that but sucks for the actual creators.

[bb88]

Also, usually using many popular artists' work as training data for the model.

[jfoster]

I've noticed the hype shifting from crypto to AI, but at least AI is actually going to be somewhat revolutionary and (in my opinion) deserving of the hype. Hopefully it gets mostly used in good ways, rather than as new ways to scam.

[jayant_kaushik]

It already is revolutionary and maybe we overlook how it is helping us all daily, work faster, spend more quality time, make things easy.

I’ll give just one very small example: I have this huge photo library on my phone and sometimes I need to find a particular photo or receipt from a specific business that I clicked 3-4 years ago. Doing that manually means spending at least 10 mins to 30 mins if I don’t remember the exact month or year I clicked it in. And I used to mostly defer finding the photo as much as I could. Or do it when I was totally bored and nothing to do.

Cue AI: I type the business name or photo description in the search bar and it displays the photo right there. 3 seconds.

Another could be about the Camera app using CV to read live text or numbers. I guess CV and LLMs are specifically going to explode this year as they already have a strong base and proven use case.

[jaredcwhite]

Oh that train's already left the station. Plenty of us understand the cons far outweigh the perceived benefits, and it's already bad NOW. It's only going to get much, much worse.

[threeseed]

At least we can be thankful it is coinciding with a tough funding environment.

And that it's far more difficult to bootstrap an AI model based business given the infrastructure costs versus a boring old SaaS one.

[Animats]

Oh, no. Are these some of the same people who pivoted from binary options in Tel Aviv to crypto out of Bulgaria and Cyprus to this? If it involves a large outgoing call center sales operation, there's a good chance it is. That seems to be the core skill set of that crowd.

[alphabetting]

It's really annoying but I think the hype is deserved this time. If you think the discourse on AI is saturated now I'd just wait. Wouldn't be surprised if it's 10x current levels in a next couple years.

[mrtksn]

If they are actually going to pay for your time, why just don't take the job? Riding the latest trends is very normal for media personalities or entrepreneurs, if trends change so do they. If they fail to do that, they will perish.

Obviously, don't do the unethical stuff but if they were somewhat lucky in the crypto boom it would be nice to have that money redirected to ML.

I don't know if its possible to make people talk to their friends using GPT models but sounds like something that people can actually pay for.

If they don't have the dataset, building one or acquiring one can be added to the todo list.

[smarri]

"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 'fairly easy' to finetune from an existing model."

- haha this is hilarious!!

A younger me once thought, like the person who pitched that to your friend, that all I needed was an idea (..and if only I could find someone to build it...I'd be a huge success!!) and as I matured and got experience in the world, I realised that ideas are cheap and execution is hard. We need more doers! I'm a reformed ideas guy.

[cableshaft]

This might predate the web3 bubble bursting by a bit. I am somewhat adjacent to the space in my spare time (help some friends with their code sometimes) and they were getting pretty hyped up about having NFTs with A.I. personalities trained into them and having them in a metaverse as NPCs you could talk to.

Then ChatGPT happened and they got even more excited about that, as it seemed even more plausible and doable. I wouldn't classify those people as grifters, they genuinely believe they're bringing about a new future and the web3 bubble bursting is temporary (I'm more skeptical myself, but not so much I'm not willing to help out here and there).

Not to say there weren't a ton of grifters in the space, there definitely were (and a lot of them). As well as people who thought they weren't being grifters, but then the bottom fell out of web3 and they're like, 'oh shit, guess I was wrong about all this', and they ended up becoming one without intending to.

There are people that can be in both crypto and A.I. grifting at the same time, too. Like they see A.I. art as a quick and easy way to generate art for NFTs. So they're not mutually exclusive fields.

And some people just perpetually bounce from one get rich quick scheme to another. It's happened since way before crypto, and it'll keep happening. If you stay at the forefront of it, and cash out as the frenzy starts to hit, it's probably fairly effective, too, but if you're perpetually late to these things, as most people are, it's just going to keep being a money pit for you.

[__MatrixMan__]

Ugh, finally. Crypto is good for nothing. Just leave us alone so we can build shit in peace.

[bawolff]

Some people like to chase whatever is hot. That is life.

[svnt]

This is where you insist on getting paid up front, underpromise, and raise your rates until the interest dies to a manageable level.