Very interesting, very impressive, and a little concerning that this is what it takes to get noticed! I actually went in expecting something along the lines of "I started a profitable company in order to pad my resume and get some interviews; it worked, so now I can shut the company down."
Oh - I see! If work were scarce then yes, that would mean employers can be more selective. This is a good reason to ensure it's easy and attractive to build businesses. Competition is good for employees and customers.
However, my main point is that just because one person did this and got noticed, that's not the same as the thing they did being what you need to do to get noticed.
Well, they seem to have put hundreds of hours of work into this ill-advised stunt and only got a two month contract out of it (whilst potentially burning bridges with some of their ideal employers). I would hardly read it as a success story.
I have a couple of fake Linkedin profiles that look very attractive to tech recruiters. I always answer to offers like “Thanks, but no. BtW I would recommend <my-profile-here>“ (I don’t write exactly this, but something that sounds more natural and trustworthy)
haha, thank you!
C&D included wording ''we appreciate creativity''.
But I hold no grudge. I don't know what was going on in the life of that person, maybe they had some creepy stalkers in the past who really caused them problems or maybe it even didn't get to them and this is just a standard procedure of their security team.
creepy, reminds me of the webpage someone made years ago that shows a stalker looking through all the personal information and friend lists of the user visiting the page
This is really cool, but the narrative also has a few strong "Wait this is creepy" moments... There is a lot of creating problem solving and some awesome creations sprinkled in. But damn would I both love and hate to get one of those deliveries.
They cloned people with AI tools and created a bunch of deep-fakes which they then delivered to that person.
They used a (self made) list of dead people to improve targeted ads so they could cohort-advertise to a small list of people.
They created fake uniforms to deliver packages to offices, and seemed pretty successful.
I feel like this would make a great case study on targeted phishing and social-engineering.
Sounds like they are in creative/digital marketing space so this makes sense from that perspective- ie not the right tactic for a Java outsourcing company..
This is everything I hate about the internet in one story. Using ads to target people, using AI to clone someones' voice and identity, dogs. The person who said they were excited, confused, scared but curious sums up how I feel about this although I'm not curious because I know where it leads.
They need a job because they are fleeing a war they didn't ask for and are trying to get back on their feet. I don't blame them for doing it. I just don't like it.
And yet they spent thousands on this prank. There is shortage of people able to work or fight in Ukraine, the country is fighting for survival and these two are busy spending thousands of euro on creepy shit.
You're free to donate money to Ukraine yourself. They didn't ask to be born there or to be in that situation.
I live in a country with hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees just living their new lives, working - and spending the money, sometimes a lot of it for expensive apartments, nice cars, luxury meals etc. Are all of them bad just because they don't want to be responsible for the state when they didn't sign up for that and nobody paid them to do so? I really don't think so. They are people like you and me, they want to live a happy life. Some contribute to the defense effort, some don't, both is fine.
I do donate. I do not expect them to be patriots and go die in a trench, but I also expect them to not be creeps and dickheads abroad. Their behaviour and narration presents a couple of cash-rich, entitled people detached from reality. They are not helping their own cause.
Are they trying to help any cause other than their own? Also - don't generalize based on nationality, please. These behave like this, others behave differently. This changes nothing about the war in Ukraine or Ukrainians.
They are refugees. They are not entitled to the same quality of life as they enjoyed in their own country. Nobody says they can't have it, but trying to maintain it by using digital footprints of 299 deceased people and stalking living persons while spending a lot of cash on toys is not going to help them last long in the UK. They need to accept what is obvious--they are refugees and may have to adjust their own expectations for a while. It helps to have friends when you are a refugee, but so far they upset people and have a permanent record on the internet linking their name with this idiotic stunt.
I already find it disturbing enough that I'm getting targeted by all those run-of-the-mill AI entrpreneurs matching the ML part of my job title and auto-generating my work email in order to try to sell me their barely strung together ChatGPT wrappers because they were "impressed by my AI experience" (I have none). If I got physical advertisement material using my likeness and delivered in person, I would straight up call the police on whoever brought me that.
I went on AliExpress to look up how much robot dogs cost, and after filtering out the ones that are obviously plastic toys, the ones that look like the photos they posted were thousands of dollars.
Seems like a weird priority for a project like this.
The same thing happened to me. Escalating levels of non-response from my system, starting with the browser slowing down and culminating in Process Control stopping. I think it may have to do with uBlock Origin, which is default in Brave: on desktop (Edge with uBlock), it quickly spawns hundreds and hundreds of blocked POST calls to litix.io, an analytics website. These seem to be coming from the video player, which is constantly trying to beacon information back home. The site hovers around 10% of CPU on my desktop and I have to keep reloading it to poke around the devtools.
I would suggest making the analytics less aggressive and adding some kind of error catching so that it doesn't attempt to send data hundreds and hundreds of times.
I’m on plain vanilla Mobile Safari with no content blockers and the site gets unusable as you scroll down through the videos. My device is also now hot enough to melt the sun, too.
I'd love to see a future Sci-fi TV episode where a character gets not one, but multiple such "from the future gift boxes with video messages from a future self" -- but from multiple future selves, that is, multiple future parallel universe versions of the character!
In other words, "here is a set of potential future you's -- along with the instructions to activate them -- important upcoming life decisions to make or not to make, depending on the desired outcome..."
And what would make it really interesting (as the plot unfolds!)... is that all of these apparently disparate sets of decisions -- are actually intertwined, entangled, and potentially mutually contradictory (i.e., choosing one set unchooses all of the others!)
Now, for extra points, for the future SF writer or writers working on this -- make it so that the main character, after discovering the "either-or" mutual exclusion principle inherent in these choices -- tries to somehow cheat fate and destiny by attempting to somehow obtain ALL of them at the same time!
Will the character be successful in his quest against the apparent exclusivity of fate?
Or will he somehow manage to attain all of these future possibilities, all at the same time?
Well, that's the episode plot for this future TV Sci-Fi episode and/or movie (should it ever be written!)
I could see this as 6 episode seasons and each episode comes with 2 boxes detailing potential outcomes, the first episode boxes cover the next week, the second cover the next month, then 6 months, a year, 5 years, and all the way to retirement.
After episode 5 which shows the MC having achieved an outcome they are happy with, episode 6 starts with a new person who gets an episode almost all to their self.
However, the first person finds them when back when they were on choice 2 (in Episode 2), and realizing that they are not the only person getting these choice boxes causes the original experiment that we saw to go off the rails. (Events in time can be changed after the fact, after all, the fundamental system the whole story runs on is time travel).
That queues up your idea of attempting to cheat fate and somehow obtain all of the potential futures with their #2 while also dealing with other people given choice boxes.
It allows the story to address all sorts of questions like, who is sending the boxes, what is the purpose of the boxes being sent, and what is the final goal once all of the time travel fuckery settles down?
>It hit me. What if we use the ''custom audiences'' thingy, but just populate it with 299 deceased people and 1 person whom we really need to show this ad to?
What a sentence. And what an article, too: using the deceased as a marketing ploy, sending cryptic emails, AI + voice impersonation. I'm surprised they only got one cease and desist letter at the end. I wonder if this is the endgame of social mobility as more and more humans become replaced through automation: a competition for the attention of those at the top.
> I wonder if this is the endgame of social mobility as more and more humans become replaced through automation: a competition for the attention of those at the top.
I think in general, the creative industry has always been one that fascinates people, that's its purpose in the end. This naturally motivates people to want to work in it, creating a large supply for a small demand of jobs. As a result, entering the industry is extremely difficult. It doesn't end at getting the job though, people in the creative industry are often extremely overworked.
On your other point, I agree that with the increase of AI there will be very negative impacts on social mobility:
* human labour will be increasingly worthless as robots get cheaper and more capable. It will only survive in a few niches where it gives sentimental value (humans are the new horses, cgp grey had a great video about this). so both skill and hard work won't be valued as much any more as they are valued right now.
* AI also gives better tools to the rich to protect their assets. With increased AI, there is less people required for society to function any more. The poor aren't driving the trains any more, nor are they shooting the guns, or running the steel mills. They can turn these tools less and less against the property owning class if they feel sufficiently dissatisfied.
* AI creates tremendous wealth and it's easy to make the poor feel wealthier just by giving them some of the crumbles, while giving 99% of the new wealth to the top 0.1%. Revolutions happen when people are hungry. When you satisfy their basic needs, then people care less about these issues. Yes, in the future, the bottom 99% might even be happy, but they might have increasingly small chunks of the new wealth.
Sorry, but AI wealth creation is based on mass theft of intellectual property created by others. The only risk is getting caught and that's taken care of my clever marketing.
They read our emails, track our presence in the web, know what we buy online and even listen our conversations so that they can sell us stuff we don’t need. That bothers me more than what this fake company did.
And by “they” I mean big corporations in coalition with ad companies.
Most people from Western Europe couldn't afford to just go to London like that and waste time and money in this way. I am much more curious about the state of these people's company's financials than anything else.
Also, elaborately targeting specific people like that and presenting them with the fact that you can fake their voice on top of any kind of outrages statements while you know exactly where they work and how to get there sets a hellish precedent and I'd even consider it a veiled attempt at a threat.
It is not what I'd consider culturally appropriate behavior in the UK, business-wise. I'd try to adapt, if at all possible, to the new environment you've found yourselves in unwillingly.
They were living a comfortable life in a cheap country, and found themselves looking for a way to do the same job in a way more expensive city when their country was attacked and at war. I found their targeting strategy and "product" extremely creepy, but I am willing to give them a pass given the circumstances.
The war affects all of us in Europe, either directly or indirectly. Ukraine needs people and they legged it when the going got tough. Now they expect to win prizes playing shit games.
This is not even remotely cool. This shows a complete disregard for personal and professional boundaries and cultural norms. I have no idea how anyone thought cyber-stalking business people with a mixture of fraud, disregard for the dead, and non-consensual AI cloning was a good idea. Imagine placing your brand in the hands of a marketing agency with this level of judgement.
I've worked in fairly sensitive roles, and if a package like this arrived at my workplace the police would become involved immediately. And if asked whether I'd want to press charges, I would say yes, absolutely. When you've received death threats at work, and seen female colleagues receiving rape threats, your tolerance for this kind of crap wears thin.
I have mixed feelings here. On one hand, I am kinda glad marketing companies got targeted, because they deserve some taste of their own medicine. On the other hand, if being creepy is what it takes to get a job here, it's that literally selecting for creepy? That means only people with a particular mindset get to work there - which kinda makes the problem even worse?
is creating deepfakes legal? at the moment, yes. they’re using it in an obvious parody manner, so the “impersonation” claim is a stretch at best.
is “cyber stalking” legal? doing research using publicly available information is quite legal. stalking tends imply you’re harassing or intimidating someone, that doesn’t seem to apply here. conde nast told them to go away, and they did.
so, yes, i ask again: press charges over what? someone being uncomfortable or intellectually intimidated isn’t a crime.
"impersonating" - creating a video using their likeness and only sending it to that person doesn't actually count as impersonating.
"Literally cyber stalking" - sending them an ad. If this is illegal then linkedin would also be party to the crime, I'm guessing their lawyers have checked this.
This all is creepy AF but I'm fairly certain it's all legal (in US)
We accept it when rich marketers spy on and manipulate the public. I think if we’re going to ignore that, then there’s no reason to care when they’re targeted. If all of the sudden we start caring about the spying, then fine let’s direct concern towards spying on marketers too, but right now it’s hypocritical.
While this is pretty cool, I feel like I must echo the sentiment here and also say that this is pretty creepy. I am fine with the "using dead people profiles to improve specificity of online ads" but the deepfakes part is very creepy. I am quite sure at least some of the targets would have started to doubt whether this is fake or real at some point. Imagine doing this on someone with the intention of radicalizing them. You can easily send messages like "The LBGTQ movement started out good. It even helped society a lot. But then it got overtaken by more and more inclusion. We came to realise that tolerance and inclusion just isn't something humans can do long term but by the time we did, it was too late. You need to do the right thing. Don't support them."
The part where they can just buy uniforms and go into an office to make a delivery sounds like very lax security with not much that can be done to fight against it.
Thank you.
Lots of them already using AI for all kinds of tasks.
I think it's just important to stay practical as lots of companies slap ''magic AI'' on everything, where it doesn't always makes any sense. Similar to a period when everyone was building everything on a ''blockchain'' because it was ''cool'' and could have given you funding, although the reason for your ''groundbreaking todo app'' to be built on blockchain was... none.
Since this is on HN, I walked into this half-expecting the story to be about some backend dev who's been out of work so long that they created a fake company for their LinkedIn profile to meet the requisite "5 years of X", where X is the most popular PL searched for in their locale's LinkedIn.
This is much, much more interesting than that! Nice work.
You'll love the guy that hired chicks to watch him work then as well tsk
I've seen your nick in other treads today, you seem to be down voted everywhere. I wonder why
138 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 227 ms ] threadIt's not. Otherwise everyone would have to do it.
However, my main point is that just because one person did this and got noticed, that's not the same as the thing they did being what you need to do to get noticed.
It doesn’t work wonders, but helps.
Also, LOL at Condé Nast. How on brand of them to C&D you!
But I hold no grudge. I don't know what was going on in the life of that person, maybe they had some creepy stalkers in the past who really caused them problems or maybe it even didn't get to them and this is just a standard procedure of their security team.
They cloned people with AI tools and created a bunch of deep-fakes which they then delivered to that person.
They used a (self made) list of dead people to improve targeted ads so they could cohort-advertise to a small list of people.
They created fake uniforms to deliver packages to offices, and seemed pretty successful.
I feel like this would make a great case study on targeted phishing and social-engineering.
Here is a boring problem, creatively show me your work.
https://gamedev.outstandly.com/gamedev/
Feels a lot less boring too.
I live in a country with hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees just living their new lives, working - and spending the money, sometimes a lot of it for expensive apartments, nice cars, luxury meals etc. Are all of them bad just because they don't want to be responsible for the state when they didn't sign up for that and nobody paid them to do so? I really don't think so. They are people like you and me, they want to live a happy life. Some contribute to the defense effort, some don't, both is fine.
Also, of all the shady hustling that I’ve seen, targeting high level employees with a creative-and-privacy-invading pitch seems the least problematic.
Seems like a weird priority for a project like this.
I would suggest making the analytics less aggressive and adding some kind of error catching so that it doesn't attempt to send data hundreds and hundreds of times.
I'd love to see a future Sci-fi TV episode where a character gets not one, but multiple such "from the future gift boxes with video messages from a future self" -- but from multiple future selves, that is, multiple future parallel universe versions of the character!
In other words, "here is a set of potential future you's -- along with the instructions to activate them -- important upcoming life decisions to make or not to make, depending on the desired outcome..."
And what would make it really interesting (as the plot unfolds!)... is that all of these apparently disparate sets of decisions -- are actually intertwined, entangled, and potentially mutually contradictory (i.e., choosing one set unchooses all of the others!)
Now, for extra points, for the future SF writer or writers working on this -- make it so that the main character, after discovering the "either-or" mutual exclusion principle inherent in these choices -- tries to somehow cheat fate and destiny by attempting to somehow obtain ALL of them at the same time!
Will the character be successful in his quest against the apparent exclusivity of fate?
Or will he somehow manage to attain all of these future possibilities, all at the same time?
Well, that's the episode plot for this future TV Sci-Fi episode and/or movie (should it ever be written!)
Anyway, interesting article!
After episode 5 which shows the MC having achieved an outcome they are happy with, episode 6 starts with a new person who gets an episode almost all to their self.
However, the first person finds them when back when they were on choice 2 (in Episode 2), and realizing that they are not the only person getting these choice boxes causes the original experiment that we saw to go off the rails. (Events in time can be changed after the fact, after all, the fundamental system the whole story runs on is time travel).
That queues up your idea of attempting to cheat fate and somehow obtain all of the potential futures with their #2 while also dealing with other people given choice boxes.
It allows the story to address all sorts of questions like, who is sending the boxes, what is the purpose of the boxes being sent, and what is the final goal once all of the time travel fuckery settles down?
Call it the Double Slit Experiment, maybe?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment
What a sentence. And what an article, too: using the deceased as a marketing ploy, sending cryptic emails, AI + voice impersonation. I'm surprised they only got one cease and desist letter at the end. I wonder if this is the endgame of social mobility as more and more humans become replaced through automation: a competition for the attention of those at the top.
I think in general, the creative industry has always been one that fascinates people, that's its purpose in the end. This naturally motivates people to want to work in it, creating a large supply for a small demand of jobs. As a result, entering the industry is extremely difficult. It doesn't end at getting the job though, people in the creative industry are often extremely overworked.
On your other point, I agree that with the increase of AI there will be very negative impacts on social mobility:
* human labour will be increasingly worthless as robots get cheaper and more capable. It will only survive in a few niches where it gives sentimental value (humans are the new horses, cgp grey had a great video about this). so both skill and hard work won't be valued as much any more as they are valued right now.
* AI also gives better tools to the rich to protect their assets. With increased AI, there is less people required for society to function any more. The poor aren't driving the trains any more, nor are they shooting the guns, or running the steel mills. They can turn these tools less and less against the property owning class if they feel sufficiently dissatisfied.
* AI creates tremendous wealth and it's easy to make the poor feel wealthier just by giving them some of the crumbles, while giving 99% of the new wealth to the top 0.1%. Revolutions happen when people are hungry. When you satisfy their basic needs, then people care less about these issues. Yes, in the future, the bottom 99% might even be happy, but they might have increasingly small chunks of the new wealth.
which is fine if they weren't party to that wealth's creation via investments and taking on the risks.
Impressive but yuck (personally).
If nothing else, they've proven they know how to think outside the sphere. I found it funny that Conde Nast sent a C&D.
And by “they” I mean big corporations in coalition with ad companies.
Also, elaborately targeting specific people like that and presenting them with the fact that you can fake their voice on top of any kind of outrages statements while you know exactly where they work and how to get there sets a hellish precedent and I'd even consider it a veiled attempt at a threat.
It is not what I'd consider culturally appropriate behavior in the UK, business-wise. I'd try to adapt, if at all possible, to the new environment you've found yourselves in unwillingly.
I've worked in fairly sensitive roles, and if a package like this arrived at my workplace the police would become involved immediately. And if asked whether I'd want to press charges, I would say yes, absolutely. When you've received death threats at work, and seen female colleagues receiving rape threats, your tolerance for this kind of crap wears thin.
is “cyber stalking” legal? doing research using publicly available information is quite legal. stalking tends imply you’re harassing or intimidating someone, that doesn’t seem to apply here. conde nast told them to go away, and they did.
so, yes, i ask again: press charges over what? someone being uncomfortable or intellectually intimidated isn’t a crime.
"Literally cyber stalking" - sending them an ad. If this is illegal then linkedin would also be party to the crime, I'm guessing their lawyers have checked this.
This all is creepy AF but I'm fairly certain it's all legal (in US)
They didn't disregard them: they tried to target them with ads.
What higher form of acknowledgement is there in our modern world?
The part where they can just buy uniforms and go into an office to make a delivery sounds like very lax security with not much that can be done to fight against it.
> Designing a fake delivery company seemed to be the most logical, straightforward way of contacting a person.
I understand part of this is tongue in cheek but wtf?
This is much, much more interesting than that! Nice work.