Using AI for evil
The following is a satirical piece of the real world dangers that are undoubtedly happening right now.
By AI I mean all the LLM tools out there, you know the ones. I know, using AI for Evil sounds so grandiose, but let's assess it focusing on practicality rather than morality. First assumption I will be making is that we will treat these tools as text generators, not some actual intelligence with a benevolent motive. If that's what you want, this is not it. Second assumption is that the business must scale easily, think reselling, dropshipping, generated content, advice giving.
Let's start with these models doing a very simple thing, making better copy. Some of you have made the leap already, but let's continue. Better copy will make you seem better at communicating, who doesn't want that? Luckily for me I don’t even have to be that good at explaining what I want to generate.
I even get to pick the style of my message, confident, corporate, sarcastic. All good options.
And let's say that I would like to sell a thing on <second hand market of your choice>. I can use this new power of text generation to make my post grander, more enticing. I can ask for tips about language to use and how to get my best price. This last part seems confusing at first. It seems that how to get the best price, would a human creativity problem not a text generation problem. Let us look at that at detail.
To an LLVM the questions, “what is the best way to make my post about the used tires stand out on second hand market of my choice” and “describe best practices that have been documented on the internet about the tactics that work best for sales of used items” is a very similar question. One is a specific to me problem and another is a query into established articles from the training set. Asking the question and regenerating the responses will yield a dizzying array of optional text that I can then use to test for best response.
And now we are at a decent understanding about how I can skew my moral compass and maybe start selling things from <insert any cheap bulk website that sells here> as premium items. But good copy is not enough, I need pictures. Luckily for me there are a slew of image fixing and embellishing tools that I can use to convert my crappy potato phone pictures into something that is enticing. But that still seems like a lot of work. And the profit margins are still slim. Aside an occasional stolen catalytic converter, I don’t think anyone will think this is a sufficiently evil enough manner to make money.
We can do BETTER! We can use the wonderful text generation capabilities, combined with people's public information on the internet to really create excellent “You have just inherited some money from Nigeria” emails. No more broken english, perfect lawyer speak, and convincing arguments about the process, are all in my grasp. Given the power of text generation I can also create very convincing scripts to talk through, have full debates and possible opposition to my unscrupulous ways, and ways to combat them. But swindling older generations out of money is still not going to make us millions.
We HAVE to do better! But first we need to establish a good enough, mostly plausible business. Then use the power of LLVM to generate great copy that convinces people into buying things from us. Some ideas could include, Self Help market, Health and Well being markets, Fitness Supplement market, Selling Ads market, Crowdsourcing market. Some of the plans will take years, some mere months, but all will be helped with my good friend the text generator. With our thousands achieved, we sit back till we realize we want millions.
We CAN take it FURTHER! We have our base business of cheating some people out of their money and now we can create a new business on our well founded success. We will pose it as an improvement for all other businesses and will sell this wonderful plan of ours to anyone else for a price. But we will be sneaky, and make a multi-level marketing plan, that way we get others to sell for us. Maybe we can even build them their own evil AI to improve our totally legal ways… for a price of course.
Amazing! Amazing, I say. Now go out there and sell more meal kits, 3D glasses, weight reduction pills, balding cures, surgery that will turn you into a lizard, phone protection and anything else our consumer world really needs. Because remember, lying is not illegal. It may be immoral, but who cares, we made millions.
