Using AI generated images to get refunds

[isoprophlex]

Maybe the extreme scalability of AI bullshitting will offset the extreme scalability of running large-scale direct-to-consumer oligopolies, and we see some return to local shopping, with all the positive effects on local communities... one can hope

[eru]

Division of labour is a good thing. It's why we are rich today.

[fosco]

Local stores bullshit too, I was at a well known American ‘sporting goods’ store and got an exercise ball of 75cm size (it states on box), it is fully pumped and smaller than a 55cm ball that I have. When purchasing online I’ve had better luck

Caveat emptor

[kaffekaka]

I want you to be right, but that requires quite a lot of hope.

[pembrook]

What positive effects?

More suburban strip malls, more fluorescent lighting, more people working mindless do nothing retail jobs for minimum wage, higher prices due to zero economies of scale, inefficiency from every local store reinventing the wheel of staffing/recruiting/scheduling/warehouseing/anti-theft/POS/advertising/etc.

If online shops have to raise prices to combat fraud it doesn’t suddenly turn springfield Ohio into the Zurich city center.

[mensetmanusman]

All we know is that we have no idea what the consequences are going to be after this plays out.

[intended]

GenAI really is underscoring how much of society is about veracity.

I’d say the fears and defenses we had in place for speech online, are having their foundations ripped out from under them.

Most of the concern used to be about government control, and that more speech would be the way to democratize and expand our agency over our lives.

However now, especially with generative AI and LLMs, the primary vector to control the market place of ideas is to overwhelm the market.

Reduce the cost to make content, sandblast our receptors, create too many things to spend our collective energy on verifying, and the outcomes are the same as controlling what is thought and discussed.

[bgbntty2]

An easy solution - open the package when the delivery person comes or when you pick it up from the delivery office. The delivery person can take a photo and act as a witness. If you take the package from the local delivery office, there are cameras and staff, so I can't just swap a ripe apple for a rotten one.

Where I live we don't have the habit of just putting the delivery on the porch for a few reasons. First, it's ridiculous if you think about it - no one signed for it, so how could you mark it as delivered? I don't get the US in that regard. Secondly, most of the houses have fences, so the delivery person can't come to the house even if they wanted to. You're basically required to meet the delivery person.

[gruez]

>An easy solution - open the package when the delivery person comes

That would massively slow down delivery times, especially if the packaging is non-trivial to open/inspect. Not to mention that not everyone works a comfy remote job where they're at the door the entire day.

[kodyo]

The honor system is a remnant of a high-trust society. Living in a place where you can generally trust your neighbors is neat.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

> Plus, even with supposed confirmation from a chatbot, ecommerce platforms won’t necessarily always side with the seller.

Amazon is pretty notorious for shipping almost all of the risk onto the seller. I suspect that's the norm, these days, for most platforms.

[grumbel]

That's something C2PA[1] might be able to help with, i.e. your phones camera puts a digital signature on the photo confirming that your phone took it. If that doesn't work out due to people photographing an AI image of a display, I would expect custom shop apps to be required to make warranty claims, as they could make use of all the phones sensors and make forging much harder.

Either way, I am not sure how big of a problem this is to begin with, since you'd leave quite the paper trail either way. It's not a stunt you can pull off repeatedly without getting caught.

[1] https://c2pa.org/

[mensetmanusman]

Good idea. It’s a type of image that doesn't need to be modified, so an encoding verification scheme would work.

[mschuster91]

C2PA only holds up until someone can extract the key material from any cheap-ass sensor.

[supriyo-biswas]

The way I see it, generative AI has been introducing a lot of distrust into systems that worked "fine" previously, such as rendering homework ineffective in the case of education, making verification difficult for remote interviewing, flooding the internet with low-quality noise (aka slop) that makes it difficult for reputable and researched sources of information to stand out, with all the implications it has for society, the fraudulent returns described here, and the like.

Ultimately, it would be a bit ironic if generative AI ends up kneecaping itself, either through regulation (because businesses and governments will be unlikely to tolerate hiring fraud, returns fraud etc. beyond a threshold), or caused things to move into meatspace through on-site interviews, reliance on physical stores, elimination of online courses and others, which is less amenable to its application.

[thunky]

> rendering homework ineffective

Homework isn't any more ineffective imo. The way we educate and grade is.

Imagine if people went to school to learn something rather than to "level up". And you earned a job based on what you know, or what you can do, rather than what degree you banked.

Then maybe you would want to do the homework.

If gen AI helps us flip the current system on it's head that would be a good thing.

[maelito]

We absolutely need certified no-AI digital proofs.

[embedding-shape]

We absolutely also need full and complete peace on earth and no more wars, but what we need isn't always what is feasible to get in real life. "No-AI proofs" falls into that bucket of "Would be nice to have, but very infeasible to actually create".

[frenzcan]

This seems like such a tricky problem. There was a no-ai camera posted here recently which verified the photos were genuinely taken on the device. It was pointed out someone could photograph an ai image via the camera to produce a verified image.

Maybe it needs to be similar to SSL certificates where trusted authorities can verify and revoke verification for digital assets.

[intended]

Wouldn’t it end up being some form of nuisance proof? Introducing friction to create verification check points or examine and establish the chain of evidence?

But that will only matter for highly legal things or important things. Everything else will be too much of a bother to follow information hygiene.

It’s like we’ve introduced an information weed, whose only goal is to create content that matches our dopamine receptors. Maybe our instincts will shift to assuming any shiny or eye catching content is fruit of the weed? Designed to attract us?

[konfusinomicon]

back to the blockchain!

[orbital-decay]

Of course. I already imagine an end-to-end hardware DRM pipeline where images can only be modified with the software made by "trusted" certified parties. Mandated by law and tied to your real ID, of course. Analog loophole can be dealt with later, first things first. /s

[avereveard]

every time I dig in this story is always stories of stories, and all walk backward to maybe one single merchant, which is just his word, with no police trail or court case trail or anything substantial, with news agency work over "examples and reconstruction of what might have happened" and no actual data that could be verified / falsified.

is this something anyone has actually seen happen, or is it part of the AI hype cycle?

[intended]

I’ve heard that this was happening with food apps in India. I am waiting for when people realize how to fake prescriptions.

[websiteapi]

scamming to get refunds has always been a thing.

[PunchyHamster]

well, now that it hit the news it will happen more often!

[risyachka]

And again, few will ruin it for all of us.

[TrackerFF]

Seems easy enough to fix, by requiring the customer to bring back to purchased item. I mean, that's how it still works in the real world, at least where I live - if I purchase something from the grocery store, which turns out to be spoiled, I'll take the item back and get a refund.

[intended]

There is always a Fix to a problem. Fixes for fraud will always impact the majority who don’t use fraudulent techniques.

The cost of the Fix is the issue.

That’s resources that need to be spent to combat a type of fraud that was impossible at scale 4 years ago.

[atonse]

Isn’t this easy to fix over time? Like ok, you issue one refund. But if Amazon sees the same users requesting too many refunds then it is a red flag?

[lm28469]

I've been rotating a few amazon accounts for a decade to be in almost continuous free prime, they don't give a shit yet

[harvey9]

This is a somewhat useful filter for actual consumers but here we are also looking at large scale fraud. The article mentions opponents using rotating IP addresses and high volumes of refund requests to try to overwhelm counter-fraud measures.

[KellyCriterion]

During the dotcom-boom, I worked for SME IT shop;

Sometimes we asked for refund some stuff and my boss told me: "dont deliver them the original hardware, pick a cheap one from the stock and put it in the box"

This worked very often without any questions, so we just could keep the good stuff :-D

[utopiah]

Ah finally some positive use of GenAI! Wait no, still not... /s

[websiteapi]

Eventually the concept of refunds will become very rare. In fact, it, along with free shipping were pretty rare before Amazon and Walmart.

If you travel and go to some random beach town and buy random item from random street merchant, they won’t give you a refund. Main issue to bridge is ensuring the item is expected as you can’t physically inspect prior to purchase.

It’ll be interesting to see how that’s solved. I participate in kickstarter which defacto doesn’t really offer refunds, so maybe it’ll be the same.

[embedding-shape]

> If you travel and go to some random beach town and buy random item from random street merchant, they won’t give you a refund. Main issue to bridge is ensuring the item is expected as you can’t physically inspect prior to purchase.

Depends on how large the beach town is, and what country. Whenever I've needed to return/change things in those type of places (in South America, South Europe and around East Asia), it's never been a problem even if I don't have a receipt, as usually the vendor recognize you, or the person who sold it to you is around somewhere.

I can remember one clear time (probably out of 10s) where someone refused to take back an item that clearly didn't work the way it was sold to us.

[gyomu]

> Eventually the concept of refunds will become very rare

Except where enshrined by law, eg in the EU

[mcphage]

> Eventually the concept of refunds will become very rare.

I don’t think so—it makes the risk of purchase too high, and people will buy less. Which is not what the sellers want.

> it, along with free shipping were pretty rare before Amazon and Walmart.

Refunds were not rare before Walmart and Amazon.