'Please Acknowledge the Dick’

February 17, 2023 2:29 PM

“Julie” is a character, staffed by different people working across the globe who each play many different women. Operators, wherever they are, have a bank of photos of the women they play, and made up information, such as her likes (beer and burgers), her dislikes (her marriage), and location (somewhere near, but not too near the man she’s chatting to). from Inside a catfishing factory [Content warning: This story involves discussion of sexually explicit messages, racism and suicide.]
posted by chavenet (19 comments total)

Now this seems like a job for ChatGPT!


Gonna definitely read, looks fascinating.
posted by Going To Maine at 2:33 PM on February 17, 2023 [6 favorites]

Actually the ChatGPT comment is the perfect tie in to today's Convivial Society, which is a thought-provoking read about exactly that.
posted by ropeladder at 2:50 PM on February 17, 2023 [7 favorites]

I've been wondering what effect ChatGPT and it's successors will have on these types of industries. This includes Nigerian prince scams and other plays where a call center full of people will spend all day calling grannies in the US trying to get access to bank accounts. AI scales better than paying people.

Funds extracted would probably stay the same or increase, but go into fewer hands back in the originating country. How would this affect the economies where these operations run?
posted by keep_evolving at 3:21 PM on February 17, 2023 [5 favorites]

I feel like I need the Internet equivalent of what I do in the real world; never have to deal with strangers socially because I don't get out.
posted by krisjohn at 3:55 PM on February 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

@ropeladder A rough read, but in the worth it way, not in a I want to make myself miserable way.
posted by krisjohn at 4:02 PM on February 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

good link, ropeladder.

First, that human beings are fundamentally social creatures, who desire to know and be known in the context of meaningful human relationships, ideally built on trust and mutual respect.

Second, that we live in an age of increasing loneliness and isolation in which, for far too many people, this profound human need is not being adequately met.

And grimmer from there!
posted by clew at 4:09 PM on February 17, 2023 [5 favorites]

There's a Bruce Sterling story with an AI-controlled phone sex line (mostly played for laughs).
posted by grobstein at 4:18 PM on February 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

Putting aside the significant exploitation of the workers, which is obviously a big thing to be putting aside, I'm not sure why the assumption is that the men are largely sincere, while the "women" are not. It's a fantasy setup. Even the ones asking to be told that the women are real could just be further cementing the fantasy. I mean, these are men paying money to chat with invisible women in the modern era. What are the odds that they even care? (Homophobia probably means that a significant portion of them would prefer not to think that the interlocutor is a man, I suppose, but I don't care about that.)

I wonder if they have any problems with women running side-scams, that is, trying to get paid separately from the official system.
posted by praemunire at 4:26 PM on February 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

I dunno, praemunire, my fading recollection of being flirted with by the very difficult* is a remarkable demand that I enact a delusion they’d come up with. Some of them probably believed it, or were in some state of need orthogonal to belief.

*eg as a clerk or counter service
posted by clew at 5:11 PM on February 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

Just look at the current Replika clusterfuck to see the future of this kind of thing.
posted by aramaic at 6:00 PM on February 17, 2023 [5 favorites]

There are all sorts of vaguely-romance-manga-like phone games for tweens — are they too cheap to have persistent chat personalization?
posted by clew at 6:32 PM on February 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

This sort of thing is exactly what the movie "Her" was about. Highly recommend.
posted by Lafe at 6:36 PM on February 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

Oh look, another "industry" based on the exploitation of workers (and women in particular). Isn't the Internet wonderful?
posted by tommasz at 6:44 AM on February 18, 2023 [3 favorites]

The obscurity of ownership for the business was sort of interesting. Normally a high mark up, shady industry would be a good candidate for organised crime. But to succeed here you would have to be adept at finding your competitors and putting them out of business. In this case it sounds like the business owners might not actually be breaking any laws - so it is probably the dread of being discovered by competitors that keeps them quiet.
posted by rongorongo at 7:42 AM on February 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

This is exactly the kind of job an LLM like ChatGPT would replace human workers.

Not because ChatGPT is at all capable of intelligent, plausible conversation, but because the customers are horny, undiscerning idiots.
posted by AlSweigart at 7:08 AM on February 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm sure someone can link to a few but some time back I went looking for apps that would chat with you. I wanted to try to get my MIL to stop falling for internet scammers and giving them money and instead get talked to by an app. But I couldn't get over the idea that this was also dangerous in a way. To get her used to a level of weird chat interaction that is not so different from the weird lines she gets from scammers seemed almost like grooming. Now, if you go into these with a "I'm lonely and this might help me feel a little less alone in a safe way...", it could maybe take on the psychological form of a journal or pen pal. But, it also doesn't seem like a way to get the same thrill that she seems to get from her romance scammers. I think she also likes that she has to hide them from us...making up reasons why she needs money and then just sending it to her fake boyfriends. Honestly, it depresses us all so much.
posted by amanda at 12:25 PM on February 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

The obscurity of ownership is because they are going to get their asses sued into the ground. Life is short...hide while you can.
posted by lextex at 1:35 PM on February 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

Metafilter: horny, undiscerning idiots
posted by axiom at 11:13 PM on February 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

From ropeladder's link: I would speculate that weaponized chatbots deployed at scale could prove far more adept at radicalization of users than YouTube.

Automated love bombing. The possiblities for affiliate scams, cults and propaganda are endless. This is why I fear this time the hot new tech won't be quite the nothingburger cryptocurrencies, NFTs and the metaverse are shaping up to be. Or maybe the clever bots lovebomb enough useful idiots into making these things happen after all. If we don't get lovebombed into World War III first. I have to say this is not how I imagined the robotapocalypse but it's getting more plausible by the day.
posted by sohalt at 1:41 AM on February 20, 2023 [4 favorites]