What the actual fuck is this email?!??!!!
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What the actual fuck is this email?!??!!!
That scam has been going around lately -@molly0xfff wrote about being targeted a couple of weeks ago.
The scheme appears to be running people's work through the slop generator, using their replying as a screen for potential marks, and then trying to get them to pay the iLands company money to get more of the slop.
(iLands is supposedly operated by one Kaixin Tang, who has been involved with various "AI" startups.)
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Thinking about this a bit more, the reason that this confuses me so much is that it's not asking me for anything. It's not the spam I'm used to that's trying to scam money. It's like... it's trying to be helpful (in the most mansplainy way possible, but whatever). But it's a program, a racist pile of linear algebra (as "The AI Con" so beautifully puts it).
Is it trying to get me to reply and train on my email responses? This is so fucking weird.
Anyway, fuck AI, time to snuggle goats.
@sundogplanets Maybe it's an attempt at "the first hit's free" - hoping that you'll be so amazed by their unsolicited slopsplaining that you'll throw piles of cash at them to generate more useless slop for you? Making you put in a little effort to figure out how to throw money at them (rather than outright offering a paid service) could be a tactic to make it feel less like they're soliciting...
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@bunnyhero @ernie Oh thank you for this article! I am still totally confused, but at least I have a human-written article to verify that it's definitely not just me.
@sundogplanets @bunnyhero @ernie
That article suggests reporting iLands to the FTC, but I do not know what the equivalent on your side of the line would be?
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What the actual fuck is this email?!??!!!
@sundogplanets Not your job to correct the slop.
'Severus' makes it sound pseudosciencey. -
Mansplaining, without invitation, my own words, with the citations that I used myself. What the actual fuck.
As somebody once said (maybe even in one of your Fedi threads): LLM = Mansplaining as a service.
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@sundogplanets AI is terrible for citations. Citations are a huge part of my job (I edit at a journal). All of us journal people are trying to send up the alarm about how much AI screws up citations, and no one is listening. If you ask AI to format your citations it will mess up all your DOIs and make things that look right but are not at all.
JAMA has written a thing on this, which is polite and journal-speak for "oh god, oh god, do not let AI touch your citations": https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2852772
Better don't let AI touch *any* of your science. It's your science after all and you don't want icky AI fingerprints all over it, do you?
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That's their primary function. Jamming real communications with floods of mindless noise, pushing whatever agenda the technofascists like. Leading everybody down their own personal cultish rabbithole in that sea of incomprehensible lies.
...While analyzing what everyone is saying (check out the recent articles about how Anthropic is charging $2 to de-anonymize any Reddit account, for example) and "summarizing" who's a good little consumer and who's going to be targeted for much worse things than advertising.
@violetmadder @4raylee @sundogplanets not so plain old FUD, but still manipulative but now highly automated and precisely tuned and strategically inaccurate?
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That scam has been going around lately -@molly0xfff wrote about being targeted a couple of weeks ago.
The scheme appears to be running people's work through the slop generator, using their replying as a screen for potential marks, and then trying to get them to pay the iLands company money to get more of the slop.
(iLands is supposedly operated by one Kaixin Tang, who has been involved with various "AI" startups.)
@michael_w_busch @sundogplanets @molly0xfff
> involved with various "AI" startups
"various". That seems to indicate that you'd rather s/startups/scams/.
Guys like this are not starting up anything. They blow little soap bubbles that distract just enough with their glitter so they can extract the money of their marks. Then <popp> and what was the startup is gone and only a wet stain remains.
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@sundogplanets Maybe send back as much garbage text as your email provider will let you! If it does process it, it will cost them lots of money!
@jackemled @sundogplanets Maybe send this: https://www.scs.stanford.edu/~dm/home/papers/remove.pdf
This was sent to a journal that is all too happy to print whatever provided you're willing to pay hundreds of dollars for it and they were sick of getting emails from the journal so they sent this
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@ChemicalEyeGuy nice one!
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@sundogplanets
Happy Goats
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What the actual fuck is this email?!??!!!
@sundogplanets there was one of these worthless mails to a typewriter mailing list I am on! I .. hate this timeline!
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@sundogplanets AI is terrible for citations. Citations are a huge part of my job (I edit at a journal). All of us journal people are trying to send up the alarm about how much AI screws up citations, and no one is listening. If you ask AI to format your citations it will mess up all your DOIs and make things that look right but are not at all.
JAMA has written a thing on this, which is polite and journal-speak for "oh god, oh god, do not let AI touch your citations": https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2852772
@rednikki @sundogplanets This week someone told me they just throw it all in an LLM to figure out their citations. I almost flipped the table.
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@violetmadder @4raylee @sundogplanets not so plain old FUD, but still manipulative but now highly automated and precisely tuned and strategically inaccurate?
@pinhman @4raylee @sundogplanets
Social engineering trained on hundreds of thousands of therapy appointments, among other things. Yes.
The Nazis would swoon at the possibilities.
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@sundogplanets AI is terrible for citations. Citations are a huge part of my job (I edit at a journal). All of us journal people are trying to send up the alarm about how much AI screws up citations, and no one is listening. If you ask AI to format your citations it will mess up all your DOIs and make things that look right but are not at all.
JAMA has written a thing on this, which is polite and journal-speak for "oh god, oh god, do not let AI touch your citations": https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2852772
@rednikki @sundogplanets Actually, this explains a lot as I often see some really weird dois in student essays and I can't work out how they constructed them.
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@jackemled @sundogplanets Maybe send this: https://www.scs.stanford.edu/~dm/home/papers/remove.pdf
This was sent to a journal that is all too happy to print whatever provided you're willing to pay hundreds of dollars for it and they were sick of getting emails from the journal so they sent this
@trebach @sundogplanets I remember this! Really funny.
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What the actual fuck is this email?!??!!!
@sundogplanets It's happening more often. One agent subscribed and posted to a mailing list I'm on, much to the mods' chagrin.
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@sundogplanets @bunnyhero @ernie
That article suggests reporting iLands to the FTC, but I do not know what the equivalent on your side of the line would be?
@michael_w_busch @sundogplanets @bunnyhero Spam laws are actually stronger in Canada than the U.S. Info here:
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@sundogplanets It's happening more often. One agent subscribed and posted to a mailing list I'm on, much to the mods' chagrin.
@sundogplanets Chairman Bruce got a few such emails last month, too.
all the way down, and that’s why wankers love 
it so much!
