ChatGPT Keeps Telling People 404 Media Can Solve Their Tech Support Problems

I don't think people are ready for the amount of work AI agents are going to be creating for real humans. We're effectively putting the tools of mass spammers in the hands of everyone and it's going to be incredibly frustrating for all involved. "If it takes me 30 seconds to fire off a prompt that has potential to benefit me it's worth it regardless of the 2 minutes of work it creates for a dozen people" scaled to all of society.

All the spam this generates probably sucks for 404 Media, but the underlying problem is that ChatGPT is right. If you have any kind of problem with these overgrown, understaffed companies, your only chance is to get media attention.

Apple famously put "if you run to the press and trash us, it never helps" into their App Store Guidelines for developers, but the only reason they did have to do that is because it's a lie. Running to the press is the only thing that helps, which is why people do it.

And to think some people are paying SEO firms millions to pollute crawl material...

This is objectively hilarious.

Basically every large company has gone all in on AI, and as a result the number of bots has (likely, I have no proof) exploded. Then as a result of that, they crack down on "potential bots" by banning them. Of course, all they care about is what % of bots they cracked down on now what % of real people. Then because they've gone all in on AI, you can't get an actual human to help you... just a bot they trained to always say no.

My current experiences in these arena: - Opened a Meta for Business account to try and buy ads. Immediate lifetime ban before taking even a single action. Most likely thing that looks like a bot? Opening a new account. - Got bot farmed on a Google Ads campaign, delivered definitive proof of it to Google. Never got a real human, just went back and forth with a bot who was told to acknowledge everything I said without admitting fault. End result - no refund, the bot farm still operates, and I have to be super careful when buying Google Ads. - Tried to open an account to post stuff on Reddit, every post gets instantly banned because I don't have enough karma. Try to start posting comments to get karma, same thing. IN fairness, this did eventually start to work - where I could post on certain subreddits and comment in others.

Overall the experience always has the same shape - something super opaque to the end user, no resolution options, and really you are left with no alternatives because every big tech firm is doing this.

So then the same AIs that create the problem recommend you try and get media articles published about it to draw attention to the plights of the real human caused by AI bots.

This is just sad. Just because these businesses don't charge you a fee doesn't mean they shouldn't be customer support. An Instagram account can be someone's occupation these days.

ChatGPT is right, the only chance you have to get human attention from these companies is something like this. Go viral, get in the news. Maybe you could sue them if you had the money and time.

StackOverflow had this problem, too; various large companies would put "for support, ask on StackOverflow!" style wording in place, with predictable results.

This is completely expected. First of all, Jason has interstitials in many of his stories that say things like this:

> Do you know anything else about Flock? We would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message Joseph securely on Signal at joseph.404, or Jason on jason.404

So obviously every 404 article in the training data, or which surfaces in a search, plants the seed "Jason, a reporter at 404 Media, is very interested in unethical or unfair practices relating to tech companies!

And when you tell ChatGPT "Meta/Apple/Google/PayPal is deliberately and systematically screwing me - it's unfair, unethical, and I'm pretty sure it's illegal!!" this idea is brought into the context window verbatim and taken seriously. I don't think these chatbot harnesses really do much[1] to distinguish "what user just said" from "reality." So, when people say they've discovered the corporate crime of the century, of course you should email Jason at 404 Media! Surely he would be devastated if someone else got the scoop first.

[1] I assume the only exception where it might push back on what you say might be in areas where the model has been deliberately steered away from "harm." But I don't think this type of thing would trigger that.

justice for Captain NORBERTA

It all started when people linked to lmgify instead of just giving the answer.

I wouldn't complain about this, I'd turn it into a business opportunity and sell the leads somewhere