One thing that I find useful is to look at the about page, as well as terms of service or privacy policy, of any website.
If there's no entity named, or you can't verify that a named entity actually exists, it's a red flag.
In this case, there's no individual or company named anywhere that I can see. Not on the About page, and not in any of the legal agreements. And the phone number looks like it's a VoIP number from Onvoy, a major wholesaler, which is a yellow flag.
> And the phone number looks like it's a VoIP number from Onvoy, a major wholesaler, which is a yellow flag.
I mean, that's a red red flag.
SME you expect to find a phone number, larger companies and especially B2C you expect these days to not find one at all. For very large ones, you expect to find a lot of phone numbers.
I had that with a book some time ago that was fully AI generated. First time I was quite naive and did not understand why I could not find the book on amazon. (And they did not state that it was AI-generated; one could tell, though, because the structure made no real sense and it was just AI slop spam as "content".)
I think this will become ever more common as AI improves. We used to joke, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog," but now that is clearly true for AI agents. They can automate every part of the process, from domain and hosting registration, to web content creation, to responses to emails and even phone calls. Entire personas are trivial to create and maintain. This is what many companies are openly trying to do as cost cutting measures, but taken to its extreme you end up with entire companies generating income that are entirely agent driven. So long as the tokens cost less than the revenues they can generate, people will deploy these to passively make money for them, just like the early 2000s when there were entire webpages just present to show ads to unsuspecting visitors.
It's interesting to notice which fields try to garner positive publicity by emphasizing that they DON'T use AI. There is increasing negativity about AI generally but it is quite revealing for an organization to try to make their refusal to use it a big part of their identity. Maybe I can start offering artisanal software development services to go after that sweet hipster dollar - code done 100% by hand, cruelty-free.
1. Most of the negativity about AI seems to relate to the economic effects, not the technology itself.
2. From what I've seen, the average person is still unable to identify AI created content, websites, etc. The website this post is about is clearly vibe coded (looks like everything including the copy is from Claude) but I'd guess that only a small fraction of the people who see it will recognize that.
Yeah. LLMs (and the associated hype) are changing my job for the worse. While I agree it's useful sometimes, it's lead to a huge amount of pressure to eliminate the fun parts of my job (design and coding) and replace it with more soul-sucking drudgery (code reviews). There's also been a general increase in pressure that seems like it could lead to burnout through decrease in slack and/or stress from a reduction in quality and understanding.
From what I see, average people can't even identify "slop". Lots of people use AI at work, to ask questions, etc. They just don't like the idea that this might cost them their jobs, and that a small number of people are getting ridiculously wealthy.
How do you define average person here? I have friends who are not into tech, but use instagram or ChatGPT. They can tell. It’s just matter of using it enough times.
For the work, I don’t think it’s just “costing the job” fear. It’s so many more things. Someone everyone is even more overworked, the amount of babysitting they require which everyone just seem to not talk that much about. Design docs and code that are increasingly weirder to read, sometimes make sense and other time look like they make sense but not really, the docslop, commit messages slop, I can go on.
It’s mix of people issue where it’s race to bottom to increase utilization, which leads to less than ideal experience. Technology is great but it’s definitely getting more trust than it should when we accept the output. I think everyone would be much happier, and technology would have much better reputation if everyone just slows the f down and uses it bit more reasonably. What is reasonable, you figure that out by slowing down and actually thinking about the problem you are trying to solve … not just prompt your way out for everything.
Into which of those categories do we place "company guts its support-system into uselessness by firing all the people and putting in 'AI' which mainly runs customers in circles"?
Is it an economic effect because the company was enticed into it by the promise of cost-cutting, or is it a technology issue because the "AI" system can't handle exceptional situations? Perhaps it's a third thing, where "AI" is an excuse for one side to violate a social/legal norm.
We put it into the "irrelevant" section because AI is no worse than a human support drone who has no useful knowledge nor permission to act. It is one of those cases where AI is only tangentially related to the actual problem.
Even the website looks AI generated. Lots of cards with hover effects, icons in square boxes, the button shapes and behaviours, and just the general look and feel has Claude written all over it.
Surely the FTC would be all over this for truth in advertising, even if the FDA wasn't. The "services for medical researchers" reads like "tell us the result you want and the level of journal prestige and we'll price an outcome for you"
Not long ago companies claiming “100% AI-powered” services were secretly relying on humans because the tech wasn’t good enough.
Now, the opposite is true - AI has gotten so good, people are trying to pass AI work off as “100% human-powered.”
To me this remarkable inversion in a short period of time demonstrates how powerful these models can be; even if AI is overhyped and the financing/economics seem like a stack of cards, this example is driving home the point to me of just how far these models have come.
Two separate things. People should be allowed to be anonymous for free, especially in an environment where anonymous harassment is free and legal, up to and including collusion with law enforcement "SWATing").
Yes, I would agree that privacy is important, that anonymity is valuable to the freedom of speech, and that OP is also right about the health of the web.
OP may be right about the health of the web, but for the wrong reasons. Anonymous website ownership has absolutely nothing to do with anything causing the biggest problems on the internet.
The people working in the company are anonymous from design. There are forms of LLC that hide the owners as well. Trade name is already a form of pseudoanonymity, and it's the highest level of anonymity that can be achieved. The company itself must be publicly known, at least for contract and tax reasons.
Buying stuff from truly anonymous provider isn't possible. From a legal standpoint you basically transfer money to them for fun. Since, you know, can't enter any agreement with unknown entity.
Anonymity is the ability to interact with other human beings while maintaining your privacy. In other words, it is the ability to use privacy. Privacy alone only gives you the ability to keep a journal of your political opinions without someone reading it. Anonymity gives you the ability to publish those political opinions in public without being persecuted for it by the current or any future group in power.
There is no misconception. I would suggest the inverse, that it seems deliberate to try to draw a line between the two and suggest that it makes any sense to have one without the other.
One of the humans mentioned in the article, Sebastian Rowan, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of New Hampshire, is quoted as saying “But a fundamental problem with using AI, even specialized tools, for anything is their tendency to hallucinate, which as far as I know is believed to be an unsolvable problem.”
I don’t believe that’s an unsolvable problem.
I’ve done some private experiments where I had Claude, over many sessions, design and implement original research projects in fields in the humanities and social sciences, with a research paper as the final product of each project.
I included detailed instructions on research ethics in CLAUDE.md and other project documentation, insisting, among other things, that it double- and triple-check all citations and references to make sure not only that the referenced papers existed but also that they actually said what the paper Claude wrote claimed they said. I gave Claude an OpenRouter API key and a daily budget, and it outsourced much of that adversarial checking to models made by other companies. In my checks of its final papers, I found no instances of hallucinated or otherwise invalid references. At various steps in the research process, Claude also, on its own initiative, had other models critique its research designs, data analyses, written drafts, etc., and it made changes based on that feedback.
The final papers were, to my eye, well done, if quite narrow in their scope and claims. The ethical alignment I imposed on it, as well as its lack of ego, seemed to keep it from making even weak claims if they could not be rigorously justified.
I’m a retired academic, and I no longer have any need or desire to produce research papers myself, with or without AI. Rather, I am interested in the impact of AI tools on the research process, particularly on how research and researchers will be evaluated in the years ahead.
I did not, and will not, release any of those papers written for me by Claude, though I have released what it produced for another research project I had it do, on a topic in the philosophy of language. In case anyone is interested:
One thing that I find useful is to look at the about page, as well as terms of service or privacy policy, of any website.
If there's no entity named, or you can't verify that a named entity actually exists, it's a red flag.
In this case, there's no individual or company named anywhere that I can see. Not on the About page, and not in any of the legal agreements. And the phone number looks like it's a VoIP number from Onvoy, a major wholesaler, which is a yellow flag.
Agreed. Also the address listed on the about page is looks to be to the Texas Sculpture Garden in Frisco Texas. Sounds like a park, not an office.
> And the phone number looks like it's a VoIP number from Onvoy, a major wholesaler, which is a yellow flag.
I mean, that's a red red flag.
SME you expect to find a phone number, larger companies and especially B2C you expect these days to not find one at all. For very large ones, you expect to find a lot of phone numbers.
I had that with a book some time ago that was fully AI generated. First time I was quite naive and did not understand why I could not find the book on amazon. (And they did not state that it was AI-generated; one could tell, though, because the structure made no real sense and it was just AI slop spam as "content".)
I think this will become ever more common as AI improves. We used to joke, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog," but now that is clearly true for AI agents. They can automate every part of the process, from domain and hosting registration, to web content creation, to responses to emails and even phone calls. Entire personas are trivial to create and maintain. This is what many companies are openly trying to do as cost cutting measures, but taken to its extreme you end up with entire companies generating income that are entirely agent driven. So long as the tokens cost less than the revenues they can generate, people will deploy these to passively make money for them, just like the early 2000s when there were entire webpages just present to show ads to unsuspecting visitors.
My favourite from that era was the million pixel page where you paid $1 for a pixel which would link back to your own website.
It's interesting to notice which fields try to garner positive publicity by emphasizing that they DON'T use AI. There is increasing negativity about AI generally but it is quite revealing for an organization to try to make their refusal to use it a big part of their identity. Maybe I can start offering artisanal software development services to go after that sweet hipster dollar - code done 100% by hand, cruelty-free.
I think there are two problems:
1. Most of the negativity about AI seems to relate to the economic effects, not the technology itself.
2. From what I've seen, the average person is still unable to identify AI created content, websites, etc. The website this post is about is clearly vibe coded (looks like everything including the copy is from Claude) but I'd guess that only a small fraction of the people who see it will recognize that.
People hate the technology, how it is used and talked about . Way more then its economic effects so far.
Yeah. LLMs (and the associated hype) are changing my job for the worse. While I agree it's useful sometimes, it's lead to a huge amount of pressure to eliminate the fun parts of my job (design and coding) and replace it with more soul-sucking drudgery (code reviews). There's also been a general increase in pressure that seems like it could lead to burnout through decrease in slack and/or stress from a reduction in quality and understanding.
You missed the environmental impact.
In the UK we are in droughts, and we are being told to restrict our water usage. Somehow if you run a data centre then the rules don't apply.
If the water company is telling me to restrict how much I wash my clothes then corps need to feel some of the pressure too.
There's plenty of negativity of the technology itself as well. See for example how often the term "slop" is being used.
From what I see, average people can't even identify "slop". Lots of people use AI at work, to ask questions, etc. They just don't like the idea that this might cost them their jobs, and that a small number of people are getting ridiculously wealthy.
How do you define average person here? I have friends who are not into tech, but use instagram or ChatGPT. They can tell. It’s just matter of using it enough times.
For the work, I don’t think it’s just “costing the job” fear. It’s so many more things. Someone everyone is even more overworked, the amount of babysitting they require which everyone just seem to not talk that much about. Design docs and code that are increasingly weirder to read, sometimes make sense and other time look like they make sense but not really, the docslop, commit messages slop, I can go on.
It’s mix of people issue where it’s race to bottom to increase utilization, which leads to less than ideal experience. Technology is great but it’s definitely getting more trust than it should when we accept the output. I think everyone would be much happier, and technology would have much better reputation if everyone just slows the f down and uses it bit more reasonably. What is reasonable, you figure that out by slowing down and actually thinking about the problem you are trying to solve … not just prompt your way out for everything.
> the economic effects, not the technology
Into which of those categories do we place "company guts its support-system into uselessness by firing all the people and putting in 'AI' which mainly runs customers in circles"?
Is it an economic effect because the company was enticed into it by the promise of cost-cutting, or is it a technology issue because the "AI" system can't handle exceptional situations? Perhaps it's a third thing, where "AI" is an excuse for one side to violate a social/legal norm.
We put it into the "irrelevant" section because AI is no worse than a human support drone who has no useful knowledge nor permission to act. It is one of those cases where AI is only tangentially related to the actual problem.
Even the website looks AI generated. Lots of cards with hover effects, icons in square boxes, the button shapes and behaviours, and just the general look and feel has Claude written all over it.
Surely the FTC would be all over this for truth in advertising, even if the FDA wasn't. The "services for medical researchers" reads like "tell us the result you want and the level of journal prestige and we'll price an outcome for you"
So the government is going to track down everyone involved with running Research Gold and prosecute them for fraud, right?
It's got "Gold" in the name, it may very well be a Trump operation.
Not long ago companies claiming “100% AI-powered” services were secretly relying on humans because the tech wasn’t good enough.
Now, the opposite is true - AI has gotten so good, people are trying to pass AI work off as “100% human-powered.”
To me this remarkable inversion in a short period of time demonstrates how powerful these models can be; even if AI is overhyped and the financing/economics seem like a stack of cards, this example is driving home the point to me of just how far these models have come.
> AI has gotten so good, people are trying to pass AI work off as “100% human-powered.”
I'd put it differently. Yes AI is better than it used to be but it's still the lazy choice; human-powered is better but more expensive.
So they are not telling the truth.
love the irony
I got downvoted the other day for saying that anonymous website ownership and perverse financial incentives are bad for the health of the internet.
Two separate things. People should be allowed to be anonymous for free, especially in an environment where anonymous harassment is free and legal, up to and including collusion with law enforcement "SWATing").
Most consider privacy important.
Yes, I would agree that privacy is important, that anonymity is valuable to the freedom of speech, and that OP is also right about the health of the web.
Which means we have a big problem.
OP may be right about the health of the web, but for the wrong reasons. Anonymous website ownership has absolutely nothing to do with anything causing the biggest problems on the internet.
For individuals, yes. For service providers, no.
Why not? Nobody forces anybody to hire an anonymous provider. If they still do, they are probably fine with it?
The people working in the company are anonymous from design. There are forms of LLC that hide the owners as well. Trade name is already a form of pseudoanonymity, and it's the highest level of anonymity that can be achieved. The company itself must be publicly known, at least for contract and tax reasons.
Buying stuff from truly anonymous provider isn't possible. From a legal standpoint you basically transfer money to them for fun. Since, you know, can't enter any agreement with unknown entity.
Anonymity == Privacy is such a huge misconception in our industry it borders on deliberate.
I'd argue anonymity is a component of privacy.
Anonymity is the ability to interact with other human beings while maintaining your privacy. In other words, it is the ability to use privacy. Privacy alone only gives you the ability to keep a journal of your political opinions without someone reading it. Anonymity gives you the ability to publish those political opinions in public without being persecuted for it by the current or any future group in power.
There is no misconception. I would suggest the inverse, that it seems deliberate to try to draw a line between the two and suggest that it makes any sense to have one without the other.
If that were actually true the tech industry would not have minted trillions building a global digital panopticon.
Much of it in the ultimate service of selling very targeted advertising.
All of the worst websites on the internet are owned by people that are household names
One of the humans mentioned in the article, Sebastian Rowan, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of New Hampshire, is quoted as saying “But a fundamental problem with using AI, even specialized tools, for anything is their tendency to hallucinate, which as far as I know is believed to be an unsolvable problem.”
I don’t believe that’s an unsolvable problem.
I’ve done some private experiments where I had Claude, over many sessions, design and implement original research projects in fields in the humanities and social sciences, with a research paper as the final product of each project.
I included detailed instructions on research ethics in CLAUDE.md and other project documentation, insisting, among other things, that it double- and triple-check all citations and references to make sure not only that the referenced papers existed but also that they actually said what the paper Claude wrote claimed they said. I gave Claude an OpenRouter API key and a daily budget, and it outsourced much of that adversarial checking to models made by other companies. In my checks of its final papers, I found no instances of hallucinated or otherwise invalid references. At various steps in the research process, Claude also, on its own initiative, had other models critique its research designs, data analyses, written drafts, etc., and it made changes based on that feedback.
The final papers were, to my eye, well done, if quite narrow in their scope and claims. The ethical alignment I imposed on it, as well as its lack of ego, seemed to keep it from making even weak claims if they could not be rigorously justified.
I’m a retired academic, and I no longer have any need or desire to produce research papers myself, with or without AI. Rather, I am interested in the impact of AI tools on the research process, particularly on how research and researchers will be evaluated in the years ahead.
I did not, and will not, release any of those papers written for me by Claude, though I have released what it produced for another research project I had it do, on a topic in the philosophy of language. In case anyone is interested:
https://tkgally.github.io/ai-semantics/