The difference between a good salesman and a fraudster is intent. This is weaponised grooming.

These scammers don't have code of ethics, they will push whatever emotional button they think will get the result they want. You're conditioned by society to respond to certain patterning, they take advantage of that in full.

Seeing as you didn't write this, why should we read it?

It's massively common. USDT is the usual coin of choice because even though the ledger is public, the convenience and relative stability massively outweighs the security risks. In the jobs I've seen, the marks will be 'investing' in BTC but the criminals will be moving those funds out into USDT the moment it hits the bandit wallet.

USDT can be frozen so its not the best choice. Its definitely a failure of the Tether team if criminals can openly use it to launder funds without it getting frozen, but they are famously anti regulation.

The usefulness in money laundering is a feature not a bug, and is why Tether is permitted to continue operating.

From what I've heard about Tether (allegedly printing tethers backed by loans to insiders, or backed by very risky commercial paper, or even potentially billions of USDT backed by nothing), I think being useful for money laundering is the least of anyone's worries...

There are no consequences. The president has immunity and the courts are about to have the option of criminal contempt prosecutions removed. Cletus and his stockpile of ammunition are going to have little or no impact and he will be hunted down by law enforcement who are very much toeing the line.

In the bill that has recently been passed, the republicans have inserted a clause that means no administration official can be found guilty of criminal contempt by the federal courts.

This will mean that the courts are literally powerless against the administration's malfeasance. The executive will be able to do what they like, and even if this bill doesn't pass the senate, SCOTUS will likely strike down as unconstitutional any appointment by the courts of a private attorney to prosecute criminal contempt because it has been stuffed with useful idiots.

This isn't sliding towards fascism, this is speed running 30's Germany.

SCOTUS was packed even before Trump's first term. This is speed-running the cherry on top of a sundae that was already made.

If you’re not going to write it, why should I read it?

That sentence sounds nice but what does it even mean?

Does the value of written content come from it being written by a human, or the fact that it's enjoyable to read and/or transfers useful information/knowledge? Whether a person wrote it or not is irrelevant. It's almost like complaining someone used a typewriter instead of hand writing something.

It's entirely relevant. If you've chucked a prompt at ChatGPT and called it a day, the output is an approximation of human thought. There is no originality, it is text vomited onto a page that may, or may not, resemble human creativity.

If you're content with that, then bully for you. The rest of us want words written by humans.

If you’re not going to write it in assembly, why should I use your software?

No-one is forcing you to.

Not everyone who has the knowledge of how to put together a radio telescope is also awesome at creating a website. It seems everyone is a critic, these days…

And if you don’t think that having an appealing website is at least as important as the content within when doing outreach, I may have a bridge to sell you.

They don't need to be awesome, they just need to write their own words.

If someone can't be bothered to write the copy for their project, what else have they handed over to an LLM?

> what else have they handed over to an LLM?

A version in their own language or with lots of spelling mistakes that take people out of the story as well

(Charitably, that is)

ChatGPT is a better writer than me. Simple as that. It takes my words and ideas and communicates them more effectively.

They're still my words and ideas being fed to it. It just transforms them into something others enjoy reading. It asks me questions I forgot to answer. Etc.

No it doesn't. It makes them average. It regresses as far as it can to the mean because that's what it does.

It has no creativity, it cannot think. It has no idea what is right, only that it can make your input look like the corpus of data that it has been trained on.

If you think that's better, then that's your look out.

I find ChatGPT is a fairly mediocre writer: It uses a lot of overwrought and exaggerated language that becomes fatiguing rather quickly.

It's also frequently used by fraudsters and in spam, so you run a real risk of 'your' writing style giving unintended impressions when you rely on it.

When I say it's a better writer...I really mean it's a faster writer. It's a tool. You can ask for 15 variations on a sentence, ask it to be more or less concise, or to tailor it to a certain audience. Ask it for 5 ways to communicate a stronger feeling of X. Etc.

If you just blindly ask it to write it isn't great. It has far greater writing ability than I do but it doesn't know what's good and what isn't, it needs guidance.

I agree with this. That's how I use AI's writing -- to enhance my own writing.

I write a first draft, AI revises it, I rework a second draft, AI revises it, then I curate a final draft. That's my typical AI-enhanced writing process. AI can even provide multiple variations of each revision, from which I incorporate the best content from each back into my own writing.

The combination of my ability to pick what's good and AI's ability to quickly come up with numerous options creates a better result than I could on my own with a similar amount of effort.

Bring back the <blink> tag.

Speaking as a fraud detective, it appears to be completely ineffective.

Well yeah, you're only looking at the instances of fraud. You're not investigating fraud that never happened because it was prevented, that would be impossible.