Eventually the concept of refunds will become very rare. In fact, it, along with free shipping were pretty rare before Amazon and Walmart.
If you travel and go to some random beach town and buy random item from random street merchant, they won’t give you a refund. Main issue to bridge is ensuring the item is expected as you can’t physically inspect prior to purchase.
It’ll be interesting to see how that’s solved. I participate in kickstarter which defacto doesn’t really offer refunds, so maybe it’ll be the same.
Maybe the extreme scalability of AI bullshitting will offset the extreme scalability of running large-scale direct-to-consumer oligopolies, and we see some return to local shopping, with all the positive effects on local communities... one can hope
The way I see it, generative AI has been introducing a lot of distrust into systems that worked "fine" previously, such as rendering homework ineffective in the case of education, making verification difficult for remote interviewing, flooding the internet with low-quality noise (aka slop) that makes it difficult for reputable and researched sources of information to stand out, with all the implications it has for society, the fraudulent returns described here, and the like.
Ultimately, it would be a bit ironic if generative AI ends up kneecaping itself, either through regulation (because businesses and governments will be unlikely to tolerate hiring fraud, returns fraud etc. beyond a threshold), or caused things to move into meatspace through on-site interviews, reliance on physical stores, elimination of online courses and others, which is less amenable to its application.
every time I dig in this story is always stories of stories, and all walk backward to maybe one single merchant, which is just his word, with no police trail or court case trail or anything substantial, with news agency work over "examples and reconstruction of what might have happened" and no actual data that could be verified / falsified.
is this something anyone has actually seen happen, or is it part of the AI hype cycle?
Seems easy enough to fix, by requiring the customer to bring back to purchased item. I mean, that's how it still works in the real world, at least where I live - if I purchase something from the grocery store, which turns out to be spoiled, I'll take the item back and get a refund.
Sometimes we asked for refund some stuff and my boss told me: "dont deliver them the original hardware, pick a cheap one from the stock and put it in the box"
This worked very often without any questions, so we just could keep the good stuff :-D
GenAI really is underscoring how much of society is about veracity.
I’d say the fears and defenses we had in place for speech online, are having their foundations ripped out from under them.
Most of the concern used to be about government control, and that more speech would be the way to democratize and expand our agency over our lives.
However now, especially with generative AI and LLMs, the primary vector to control the market place of ideas is to overwhelm the market.
Reduce the cost to make content, sandblast our receptors, create too many things to spend our collective energy on verifying, and the outcomes are the same as controlling what is thought and discussed.
That's something C2PA[1] might be able to help with, i.e. your phones camera puts a digital signature on the photo confirming that your phone took it. If that doesn't work out due to people photographing an AI image of a display, I would expect custom shop apps to be required to make warranty claims, as they could make use of all the phones sensors and make forging much harder.
Either way, I am not sure how big of a problem this is to begin with, since you'd leave quite the paper trail either way. It's not a stunt you can pull off repeatedly without getting caught.
An easy solution - open the package when the delivery person comes or when you pick it up from the delivery office. The delivery person can take a photo and act as a witness. If you take the package from the local delivery office, there are cameras and staff, so I can't just swap a ripe apple for a rotten one.
Where I live we don't have the habit of just putting the delivery on the porch for a few reasons. First, it's ridiculous if you think about it - no one signed for it, so how could you mark it as delivered? I don't get the US in that regard. Secondly, most of the houses have fences, so the delivery person can't come to the house even if they wanted to. You're basically required to meet the delivery person.
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 37.9 ms ] threadIf you travel and go to some random beach town and buy random item from random street merchant, they won’t give you a refund. Main issue to bridge is ensuring the item is expected as you can’t physically inspect prior to purchase.
It’ll be interesting to see how that’s solved. I participate in kickstarter which defacto doesn’t really offer refunds, so maybe it’ll be the same.
Ultimately, it would be a bit ironic if generative AI ends up kneecaping itself, either through regulation (because businesses and governments will be unlikely to tolerate hiring fraud, returns fraud etc. beyond a threshold), or caused things to move into meatspace through on-site interviews, reliance on physical stores, elimination of online courses and others, which is less amenable to its application.
is this something anyone has actually seen happen, or is it part of the AI hype cycle?
Sometimes we asked for refund some stuff and my boss told me: "dont deliver them the original hardware, pick a cheap one from the stock and put it in the box"
This worked very often without any questions, so we just could keep the good stuff :-D
I’d say the fears and defenses we had in place for speech online, are having their foundations ripped out from under them.
Most of the concern used to be about government control, and that more speech would be the way to democratize and expand our agency over our lives.
However now, especially with generative AI and LLMs, the primary vector to control the market place of ideas is to overwhelm the market.
Reduce the cost to make content, sandblast our receptors, create too many things to spend our collective energy on verifying, and the outcomes are the same as controlling what is thought and discussed.
Amazon is pretty notorious for shipping almost all of the risk onto the seller. I suspect that's the norm, these days, for most platforms.
Either way, I am not sure how big of a problem this is to begin with, since you'd leave quite the paper trail either way. It's not a stunt you can pull off repeatedly without getting caught.
[1] https://c2pa.org/
Where I live we don't have the habit of just putting the delivery on the porch for a few reasons. First, it's ridiculous if you think about it - no one signed for it, so how could you mark it as delivered? I don't get the US in that regard. Secondly, most of the houses have fences, so the delivery person can't come to the house even if they wanted to. You're basically required to meet the delivery person.