Another episode in the series of exploitation of the vulnerable. Prior art: gambling in the pocket, crypto get rich schemes, candy crush in-app purchases. This seems like an adaptation of OnlyFans, artificial and automated.
Would be nice if we could stop taking advantage of others weaknesses.
ge96•1h ago
It is interesting like I am capable of generating these deepfakes/mass generated content, stealing content, etc... why don't I do it? If I really do just want to make money.
Maybe it is easier to do if you're in a country that won't get punished by the internet law.
philipwhiuk•1h ago
> why don't I do it
Morals?
MisterTea•1h ago
The word you are looking for is empathy. Morals are societal constructs.
HPsquared•1h ago
Strictly speaking, that's ethics. Morals are more subjective.
tux3•1h ago
You can further distinguish between ethics, the law, consequentialism, empathy, and your own personal sense of morality (what your intuition says, based on vibes).
Any combination of these is valid motivation. Some people are mostly motivated by the long arm of the law, some by more subjective feelings. But there's many other ways that people can use to justify things to themselves.
MisterTea•1h ago
The fact that you are questioning this is alarming. When you hear of someones misfortune and you have no emotion you are lacking empathy which is a common trait of psychopaths.
When you think about harming someone, at least in my mind, it is impossible not to think of the scenario reversed. How would I feel if the same were done to me? That is at least what a responsible person would do: think about the
consequences of their actions. Most people would feel bad after doing something bad to someone. If you cant understand this then there is a problem.
kalkin•1h ago
I think it's often entirely reasonable to shed one's empathy for someone who displays no empathy for people like you. Tit-for-tat isn't always the best policy, but it's not psychopathic either.
A considerable portion of the AI-girl rhetoric quoted in the article is specifically denigrating liberals. It would be very generous and possibly laudable of liberals to nevertheless feel empathy for the people falling for it, but I think it's pretty understandable if most don't. And I'm not even convinced it's laudable; there's a particular tendency in US media discourse to assign moral responsibility to liberals, but not conservatives, so that liberals are supposed to empathize with MAGA voters and endeavor to understand their values but it's just normal and accepted that Republicans think liberal cities are hellholes that deserve to burn. This asymmetry isn't healthy, even if I'd rather it be resolved by a general increase in empathy than a decrease.
Hizonner•59m ago
How about empathy for the other people they'll make miserable if you encourage their worldview , and maybe the people they'll make miserable if you further embitter them?
ge96•55m ago
I'm just thinking do you have to be an ahole to be successful eg. despite the risks, think Jordan Belfort or the current "higher ups" raking in more money despite the effect on the world. Maybe I am trained to be poor is what I'm getting at because "I want to be nice".
So many grifts out there and people do it, sleep well at night. I'm not religious and think right/wrong is a concept/enforced by law. Sure I believe in pain, pain is universal/suffering. But yeah I just think I don't have it in me to be cut-throat, step on others.
Yiin•1h ago
who is we, this argument is as useful as "we should not waste food so we can fix starvation"
gdulli•1h ago
I found the Rosetta Stone of Hacker News.
verdverm•1h ago
people, humans, the species
I would argue the (very incomplete) list in my comment is predatory whereas wasting food is not (for the most part)
hinata08•1h ago
not only can the same logics apply to any media, as you can always say that mass cultural consumerism exploits vulnerable, but I also struggle to consider the MAGA crowd as the vulnerable people right now
Some wanted really specific entertainment in the form of AI generated conservative young girlfriend, this guy provided it
If it's immoral, you should also go after Hollywood for making blockbusters that aren't AI generated but have somehow fewer substance these days
However, for now, no law was broken in the process
verdverm•51m ago
It does not seem clear if they knew it was Ai generated. The creator seems to think his marks were none the wiser, as evidenced by the liberal version experiment and his comments therein.
mcphage•32m ago
> stop taking advantage of others weaknesses
What does it mean to have a weakness for purchasing T-shirts that read ”PTSD: Pretty Tired of Stupid Democrats”? That's not predatory; they're paying money for a t-shirt and (presumably) receiving said t-shirt.
Or for their Fanvue account, they're paying money to receive soft-core pornography, and they are receiving soft-core pornography.
This isn't a scam—they're paying money for a thing, and are receiving that thing. I could say "well, that's not a great thing to be spending money on", and it's not, but I don't think of sellers of off-color t-shirts as something that people need to be protected from.
bloody-crow•24m ago
I big part of the purchase decision making is attributed to the fact that they think they support a real person that is aligned with their ideology.
I'd wager most of them wouldn't have paid money on OnlyFans or purchased the hoodie if they knew the account was AI generated. So it is scam.
verdverm•21m ago
I agree if the consumer is informed, clearly, that it is Ai, but based on the creator's comments, it seems the intention was to deceive. I suspect most people would not make the same purchases if they knew it was artificial.
fallinghawks•16m ago
A political position is not a weakness, it's a choice.
TrackerFF•1h ago
There are literally thousands of AI thirst trap accounts on IG. I have to admit, I have clicked on some of them when they've popped up in my feed, and I've been fooled a couple of times...as in, I couldn't spot them being AI. Usually I'm pretty good at spotting AI, so I'm not sure what models are being used to make those clips.
These accounts have 10-20 vids, a link to the usual sites, and hundreds / thousands of comments from other bots and thirsty geezers.
soco•1h ago
Come to Tumblr and watch the exact same concept: maybe it's my social media algorithm filtering out the dem-oriented traps, but all I see is such "10-posts max" accounts with cleavage, hotrods, and something rightwing of a way or another. They follow you and immediately initiate chats. I'm sure they wouldn't be so many if it didn't work.
stevenwoo•1h ago
Thought this was going to be about “Jessica Foster” but it was about another one they traced to source. It reads like bad satire, it’s so on the nose about how AI enabled all of the creation process and lax enforcement of rules on social media allow anything to flourish for a while.
> Sam says he presented Gemini with a few possible options to help his model stand out, and the chatbot selected one in particular: the “MAGA/conservative niche,” referring to it as a “cheat code.” Plus, it said, “the conservative audience (especially older men in the US) often has higher disposable income and is more loyal.
I used to know a guy 15 years ago whose whole career was this, except he had real female friends he'd pay for videos and photos (safe for work, no nudity) to bump up the realism. It's shockingly easy. I wonder how he's doing in this AI age.
verdverm•1h ago
Would be nice if we could stop taking advantage of others weaknesses.
ge96•1h ago
Maybe it is easier to do if you're in a country that won't get punished by the internet law.
philipwhiuk•1h ago
Morals?
MisterTea•1h ago
HPsquared•1h ago
tux3•1h ago
Any combination of these is valid motivation. Some people are mostly motivated by the long arm of the law, some by more subjective feelings. But there's many other ways that people can use to justify things to themselves.
MisterTea•1h ago
When you think about harming someone, at least in my mind, it is impossible not to think of the scenario reversed. How would I feel if the same were done to me? That is at least what a responsible person would do: think about the consequences of their actions. Most people would feel bad after doing something bad to someone. If you cant understand this then there is a problem.
kalkin•1h ago
A considerable portion of the AI-girl rhetoric quoted in the article is specifically denigrating liberals. It would be very generous and possibly laudable of liberals to nevertheless feel empathy for the people falling for it, but I think it's pretty understandable if most don't. And I'm not even convinced it's laudable; there's a particular tendency in US media discourse to assign moral responsibility to liberals, but not conservatives, so that liberals are supposed to empathize with MAGA voters and endeavor to understand their values but it's just normal and accepted that Republicans think liberal cities are hellholes that deserve to burn. This asymmetry isn't healthy, even if I'd rather it be resolved by a general increase in empathy than a decrease.
Hizonner•59m ago
ge96•55m ago
So many grifts out there and people do it, sleep well at night. I'm not religious and think right/wrong is a concept/enforced by law. Sure I believe in pain, pain is universal/suffering. But yeah I just think I don't have it in me to be cut-throat, step on others.
Yiin•1h ago
gdulli•1h ago
verdverm•1h ago
I would argue the (very incomplete) list in my comment is predatory whereas wasting food is not (for the most part)
hinata08•1h ago
Some wanted really specific entertainment in the form of AI generated conservative young girlfriend, this guy provided it
If it's immoral, you should also go after Hollywood for making blockbusters that aren't AI generated but have somehow fewer substance these days
However, for now, no law was broken in the process
verdverm•51m ago
mcphage•32m ago
What does it mean to have a weakness for purchasing T-shirts that read ”PTSD: Pretty Tired of Stupid Democrats”? That's not predatory; they're paying money for a t-shirt and (presumably) receiving said t-shirt.
Or for their Fanvue account, they're paying money to receive soft-core pornography, and they are receiving soft-core pornography.
This isn't a scam—they're paying money for a thing, and are receiving that thing. I could say "well, that's not a great thing to be spending money on", and it's not, but I don't think of sellers of off-color t-shirts as something that people need to be protected from.
bloody-crow•24m ago
I'd wager most of them wouldn't have paid money on OnlyFans or purchased the hoodie if they knew the account was AI generated. So it is scam.
verdverm•21m ago
fallinghawks•16m ago