Perfect for spammers, scammers and domain squatters, who can now automate their activities even more.
Can’t think of any other uses for this given the current state of LLM ‘agents’, though I can’t wait for the next report of something like ‘openclaw registered 1000 domains for me without asking and now cloudflare won’t refund me’.
LLM generation in general provides the most use to scammers and the like. Generate emails which people won't read, generate articles which are just honeypots or rip-offs, generate images to said articles, generate more and more spam.
Every legit use case for LLM practically requires that human would verify the result manually, at least briefly. But spammers can enjoy skipping that step, since content was never a main priority in the first place.
So, so many pro-AI/AI boosters just... Ignore this rather inconvenient fact in my experience. They will hype up how epic agentic coding is, or agentic <whatever here> is, all day long, but they will never tell you that LLMs are really benefiting scammers and criminals the most, who can now generate literally infinite content, for infinite amounts of time, because they don't need to verify or prove anything legitimate. And people who are apart of both of these groups are very, very good at sending, to the LLM, prompts that look completely innocent to any kind of guardrail or filter that these companies can devise. The only other use that is probably more profitable is porn. Really.
It’s been said that “Nigerian prince” email scammers intentionally use poor spelling and grammar in order to narrow their funnel at the top by quickly weeding out observant and wary people who are unlikely to fall for it.
By that token, LM-generated content which looks good at a glance but doesn’t hold up to scrutiny seems ideal for scamming. I’d speculate that in the scam content generation workflow, not only is there little penalty to skipping the verification step, but since you intend to push that step onto the target and hope the result is a false positive, subtly wrong hallucination might be not only tolerable but in fact better for its purpose than what a human could produce.
Any business can be run in a shady manner if the human decided. One fully automated business I think could exist and might be useful is apartment/condo rental. I'd pay a business $100 for a proper report on the rentals available in a city that meet a criteria and are amalgamated from all the the various platforms. Doing it yourself (at least in Canada) means creating accounts on a bunch of platforms, and the process is very tedious.
> I'd pay a business $100 for a proper report on the rentals available in a city
I'm curious about things of this nature, where it seems like a case of "this information is important to me and I want accurate results".
But then the talk of automation seems to exclude careful human review of those results, which is needed to stop hallucinations from making their way to customers.
> I'd pay a business $100 for a proper report on the rentals available in a city that meet a criteria and are amalgamated from all the the various platforms.
If this can be fully automated then you can just ask your own agent to do this and wouldn't need a business for it. And agents can already fill out web forms just fine.
Well like most rich guys, I have an assistant, so I don't need or use "agents" - maybe my assistant could learn to use "agents" - but her core competency isn't, nor should it be, learning to use AI agents in any meaningful way. Maybe she could outsource it to someone who got their agents to do it for her for $100.... Same with my little sister who has a 5 year old and a 2 year old and doesn't really know how a computer works never mind what AI agents are.
> Any business can be run in a shady manner if the human decided.
No kidding.
> One fully automated business I think could exist and might be useful is apartment/condo rental.
We're starting strong on the category of businesses that generate no actual value and just scrape an amount of value out of existing transactions that would've happened anyway, i.e., rent-seeking. But good for you, you can now artificially shrink the supply of limited-availability goods in the market, then gate access to them behind a paywall, and you don't even have to do the minimal amount of actual work required to fleece strangers for part of their paycheck while creating no value.
Despite paying rent for an apartment, it’s not rent-seeking. You get a place to live out of it that wouldn’t exist without the owner renting it to you.
Rent-seeking is a very specific economic term where a party inserts themselves into a transaction and takes a cut without providing anything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
Being a landlord comes with significant responsibilities and even principal investment risk.
> Despite paying rent for an apartment, it’s not rent-seeking. You get a place to live out of it that wouldn’t exist without the owner renting it to you.
> Rent-seeking is a very specific economic term where a party inserts themselves into a transaction and takes a cut without providing anything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
> Being a landlord comes with significant responsibilities and even principal investment risk.
Economist here. Yes, this was a correct use of the term "rent-seeking behavior". It's actually quite funny to see someone try to argue otherwise, when the name was chosen because this is, literally, the textbook example.
It is not the textbook example. The textbook example is regulatory capture where people put in an artificial gate and charge people to cross it.
Everything functioned fine without the gate and nothing was improved by the gate.
An apartment LEASE is literally nothing like that. You’re borrowing something you don’t have and it’s a rivalrous good so other people can’t use it while you are.
Renting (leasing) a car, an apartment, or any other good like that is not rent seeking behavior. No actual economist would argue that because it dilutes the term to something completely meaningless.
A landlord is partially rent-seeking. Yes they provide the service of making sure the apartment is habitable (cough) and so on, but they charge above market price for that. How do I know? I know because I'd do it myself for cheaper if that was an option, but it's not an option because landlords own all the spare apartments. (Why don't I buy one then? They're very expensive because I have to price-match the landlords, who are paying very high prices for the right to rent-seek!)
The market for real estate is basically the market for taxi medallions. It costs something to run a taxi, but there are a limited number of medallions and you can charge well over that cost because you have a medallion, which also makes the medallions very expensive. Until Uber comes along. But you can't just make an illegal apartment without land the same way you can make an illegal taxi without a medallion.
So if anyone accepts your challenge will you move the goalposts and tell them their business isn’t good enough in your point of view? It doesn’t seem like you’re actually interested in dialogue. You also don’t seem to be aware of the definition of rent seeking but that’s an entirely different topic.
I’ll sit out your little experiment because I’m not in the mood for this kind of response. But you may discover that if you turn down the venom a little, qualified people could teach you things like automated business models that are quite ethical and even the definition of rent seeking.
> So if anyone accepts your challenge will you move the goalposts and tell them their business isn’t good enough in your point of view?
It's not a value judgement, it's literally rent-seeking behavior. You're seeking, to rent, property that you own, presumably for a profit. Like come on, it's what the word means.
> You also don’t seem to be aware of the definition of rent seeking but that’s an entirely different topic.
Both my command of the English language and the economist elsewhere in this thread disagree with you, but go off I guess.
> qualified people could teach you things like automated business models that are quite ethical and even the definition of rent seeking.
And yet instead of citing one you went off a tone-policing rant.
My question was quite open-ended. I genuinely didn't expect someone to come in and list the textbook example that an actual economist went on to point out was crap for the exact reason I said, truly. But that's the kind of poetic unawareness that one really can't plan for.
We'll see how this shakes out - to me it is more reminiscent of the boom in bitcoin and associated shitcoins a few years ago, where boosters thought they were going to take over finance and replace our financial institutions in a tech revolution involving NFTs, apps built on blockchain and all money moving to blockchains and everyone not accepting that a revolution was taking place was not going to make it.
That didn't play out quite how the cheerleaders expected (though the value of Bitcoin at least is still high, NFTs and all the actual use-cases for Bitcoin fell through).
I suspect we'll see something similar for LLMs, frankly they're nowhere near good enough for unsupervised use, and if you think they are, good luck to you in building a business on them.
I disagree frankly, as the next wave is clearly fully autonomous businesses.
Considering the disaster of that AI-powered store in San Francisco, I'm skeptical that this could happen in the next wave. Or even the next ocean.
(WSJ article from a few weeks ago stated that the "AI" can't stop ordering candles, and manages the staff so poorly that sometimes there are no employees scheduled for some shifts.)
I'm convinced that one of the top use cases for OpenClaw is orchestrating cold outreach email campaigns, as if there's nothing wrong with using AI to spam people to death. Platforms that enable sending cold emails are taking a sizeable risk that the low engagement of such emails stimulates some worsening inbox deliverability for the rest of their traffic (see [1] - you can't hide just by sending through big tenanted platforms like Amazon).
[1] Every message sent from Amazon SES carries a "Feedback-Id" header that allows Google (and anyone else) to track the Amazon account responsible for the message. The fourth field is an opaque but stable identifier associated with your Amazon account; receivers can and do use this for rate limiting:
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/underst...
Technically, you could create many top level Amazon accounts, but if you want to send lots of mail, you must warm up your account. So accounts can be created, but it’s useless if you need to send high volumes of messages.
And cloudflare can actually sell them priority access to pass their bot protection or introduce micropaiments for agents access content. I feel cloudflare is getting a bit scary tbh. It is like your friendly bot net.
Depends on how democratic the Society is. The less so, the more it's a powerful minority at the top. How much say did the average US citizen have in starting this war with Iran? It's not something the current administration ran on to get elected. It's not very popular in the polling.
Yea, I appreciate them protecting it from DDOS. I always viewed them as a responsible company.
To me this feels irresponsible and like it's main goal is to forward autonomous cyber attacks. Which is antithetical to what they do? Maybe I am missing the legitimate use case here, but I can only see this being used for removing responsibility from crime or espionage?
Does anyone know offhand if cloudflare is a department of war contractor? I never looked into it. But this smells funny to me
Somehow the Internet needs biometrics and age verification everywhere but also chat bots can buy property there without too much thought.
Most people don't get DDOSed, and for many of the ones that do, they can just wait it out until the attacker gets tired of burning money. It's very costly and risky for the attacker. Obviously they do occur sometimes - so does murder - but Cloudflare is massively exaggerating the risk of drive-by shootings to make you buy their bulletproof vests.
I was about to say, this type of automated domain purchasing and deployment is a godsend to scammers.
They buy up a bunch of .top, .shop and .xyz domains for $1 each. They spam them out in in all those "USPS tracking" spam text and Facebook fake store ads. The shelf life on these domains is a few days at best before they get shut down, now you can automate domain rotation and not have to pause your spam campaigns.
Are you perchance talking about deSEC? I've also switched to them, and thought that it was too much work to send an email and wait for replies, so I ended up using dummy inboxes for my other, lesser important domains.
Though I guess it's still a good thing they do this? At the time I remember being mildly inconvenienced, but not enough to actually care. I just remember thinking, "How is this nonprofit going to handle all that support volume?".
> Perfect for spammers, scammers and domain squatters, who can now automate their activities even more.
Buy why do this, unless you're in the business of arming both sides of a conflict?
(With a side bonus of designing a defense product in such a way that you reverse much of the ground that was gained with "HTTPS everywhere", to give you centralized cleartext access to much of the Internet traffic.)
Generate hyper personalized ads in any format! Embed them stealthily into virtually any context!
I guarantee thats all big tech is thinking about as the future of LLMs. All this coding stuff is merely a good will investment to buy them time until they can implement this
I have a hobby or we could even say an addiction of having lota of ideas for various kinds of things. Part of the fun is inventing a name, visual identity, logo etc. and donain nane is part of it. Maybe they never reach production but many have. I have tools to automate boring parts like any developer would — and I could essily use something like this.
I kind of agree with you, I would hazard that this is perhaps targeted towards folks (maybe TPMs, small business owners) who are using ai to start a software side business or make a website and have never bought a domain before or configured DNS.
I guess also; something that saves me 20 minutes a few times a year is still nice.
The only use case that pops into my mind is to build a product like Shopify that sets up a store, email, landing page, etc all from one chat-bot interface.
Can’t think of any other uses for this given the current state of LLM ‘agents’, though I can’t wait for the next report of something like ‘openclaw registered 1000 domains for me without asking and now cloudflare won’t refund me’.