Whenever you watch a video on YouTube now, you will likely get an advert for a scammy product. In the past few weeks I've seen:
- A Tai Chi training program that promises to get you ripped like
someone on steroidsa superhero in 20 days. (Tai chi? Really?) - Glasses that can adapt to any prescription (not how glasses work) and are also sunglasses sometimes
- A small USB stick that offers free Internet with no limits.
- An air con unit the size of a book that can cool any room - any room! - in 90 seconds.
- Endless mobile games that probably don't exist.
This is leaking into other parts of the internet as well with adverts on the side increasingly looking like chum buckets.
What annoys me is how little verification there is for any of this. It's like we have collectively decided that AI is inevitable, and the cost is the breakdown of truth itself. Scams used to be a bad thing and there used to be measures in place to stop them. Now they've escaped the spam filter and have run wild. As long as someone can create an unconvincing advert and pay, platforms will take anything.
So we have all this poorly made junk which breaks the rules of reality, so what? Most people are aware its fake. The problem is the scammers only need to get through to a very small percentage of people to make their money back.
It's not just adverts. I have my email in my footer and tend to get a lot of spam. However, the quality of the spam has gotten more sophisticated. Take this email I got the other day.
In a world of noise and uncertainty, blackout poetry does something quietly extraordinary: it finds meaning hidden within the chaos, revealing light where none seemed to exist. Our Voices in the Chaos does exactly that, drawing readers into the madness of the world and returning them with something they did not expect to find: hope. A perfect 5.0 rating from your earliest reader is a promising beginning. The question worth considering is how many more poetry lovers could discover this collection.
On first glance, this sounds pretty good! As a pitch it's clear they have engaged with reading the book... except of course they haven't. Here's how I describe the book on this site:
In these blackout poems, you will be drawn into the maddening chaos of the world and find your own voices singing within. It deals with ghosts, anxiety and complete societal collapse, but with glimmers of hope strewn throughout like the stars in the empty night sky.
Someone has clearly pointed chatGPT at the page and said create a pitch to advertise this book. It even uses some of the same phrases! Even worse, I give away Our Voices in the Chaos as a free downloadable pdf, so I'm not looking to market it or get a "perfect 5.0" rating. This email is clearly phishing for information or money. It's the new version of the Nigerian Prince scam, only more tailored to vulnerable writers and creators.
I just delete these emails now. But the scammers only need to get a few people hooked and with these emails becoming more personal and reflecting back the author's words at them, the rate of people taking them up is only going to increase.
I'm not sure what we can do about this. I guess verifying a product exists before accepting adverts for it would be a good start, but I don't expect the huge internet platforms to turn the money tap off. We need more vigilance and more awareness, but it's exhausting having to constantly evaluate things for truth.
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