Forced Use Protocol

Would you like to use our new AI assistant? It's useful for all the things you can do by yourself anyway! Making it do what you normally do takes three times as long to get it done anywhere near correctly, but it's so convenient... for the techbro's wallets. Too bad if you don't want to use it, you're getting it anyway.

Who knows? You might end up using it by accident.

AI is good at a few things. It's good at spotting cancer cells. It's good at simulating molecules for medicine. It's even passable at programming, and I say 'passable' because I had to unfuck the live version of Pseuducku - a product of a fortnight's worth of frustration. That said, I'd never have got that much done under my own steam. So... passable. I know for a fact that there is one thing that AI will never do.

AI will never stop creative people from being creative.

Theoretically, you could feed all my flash fictions and published novels into a LLM [this is no way at all related to permission, by the way], and get it to pump out something that resembles my work. What it couldn't do is simulate my next idea. Mostly because those happen from random directions, and also because I have no idea what that's going to be.

All it's doing right now is making my work harder, because I have to stand out against a flood of slop. Gaining the attention of someone who could help me reach the bookstores is currently in a fog of war, and there's hucksters making it worse.

I'm not going to name names, but this has happened to me a couple of times. I may only have two data points, but I have connected the dots. I've been contacted twice by people who swear they know a real live marketing expert. All I have to do is get into contact with that secondary entity and talk details.

The result from the first one was a video obviously put together with AI and $100US in debt. It was not very good advertising to my mind. And then both entities responsible vanished from all available contact. Thus prepared at the second such instance, I demanded a website. After being discouraged from wanting to see such a thing, I was given a Wordpress URL... to a site that was very obviously slapped together at the last minute and trying very hard to look professional. This "marketing expert" had allegedly helped some very experienced authors get their work out there.

At least one of them had been writing for a very, very long time.

The dissonance between a brand new site - slapped together with AI images and a truly terribad AI logo - and long-term alleged clients allegedly using this service stood out like a sore thumb. Even the testimonials read like sample text. I'm shocked that I didn't trip over some Lorem Ipsum in there.

So AI is not yet at the level where it can successfully scam me twice.

The fact that it was used to scam me once pisses me off. AI's being touted as a tool to help people accomplish things. Not help people help themselves unfairly to other people's money.

Every technology gains grifters, I know that. This one just happens to grow grifters a lot faster than most. There's a lot less effort involved in the grift, because they can get AI to make shit up to make them look plausibly legitimate. It sucks that I have to do research and investigate what "actually legitimate" looks like so I'm better prepared for the next time.

Because I know there will be a next time.

AI is never going to tell a grifter that grifting is a bad idea. It's just going to obediently do what it's told so that dishonest people can fund their lives off of honest folks with hope. It's not going to stop them, just the same as it's not going to stop me.

Our only hope is being smarter than the fraudsters.

Awareness is power. Or at least, power over those unwilling to spend effort on things. So do proper research and go down some real rabbit holes.

And never trust the AI search results.