Bots, Scams, The Internet, And You - SOME MORE NEWS

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Anyway, Warmbo is gonna play games

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There's a new Some More Mister Cody out today,

and since Warmbo is MAD at Mister Cody,

Warmbo thought we should watch it

and MAKE FUN OF MISTER CODY for being STINKY.

(Warmbo laughs)

So let's just, click on it,

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You can buy things on your phone, actually.

If you check out Warmbo's Twitch,

Warmbo has a tutorial on how to buy things on your phone.

Anyway, we've clicked on Mister STINKY Cody's new video

so let's watch that.

- Greetings choombahs.

Time to chip into Some More Newz with a Z

because it's future times and we have robots now.

No really. Actual robots.

Some better than others.

Anyway, here's some news,

we don't actually get those robots yet.

Probably not until the army gets bored doing wars with them.

But until then, we DO get BOTS.

Countless, countless, too many bots.

AI, to be exact.

Good AI? Not really.

Evil AI? No, wouldn't say that either.

I mean, HAL had to be like, functional,

in order to kill everybody.

What we have is more like

that last ten seconds of HAL's life

where he slowly loses his mind

and just sings a song no one wanted to hear.

And this is all to say that social media

sure seems to be packed to the gills

with scams, bots, and mediocre AI art.

AI recipes and movie trivia.

Aggregated Reddit posts set to Minecraft parkour.

Deep fried videos of long dead cats.

Those countless "if only there was a page

that posted" BLANK accounts.

Robots describing scenes from movies for some reason,

as if they're just things that happened in life.

We've discussed how the internet

is basically just a handful of social media sites now,

and so it's a little concerning

that these sites have been slowly flooded

with a bunch of bots and scams and clickbaity accounts.

Not just on Twitter. But yes, very much on Twitter.

But also Instagram and TikTok and,

I haven't checked Facebook in a while

but I assume there too.

And this seems by design.

And while that sucks for, MOST PEOPLE,

at least we can rest easy

knowing that we are in the GOLDEN YEARS

for scammy online freaks

and the sometimes-billionaire dupes who love them.

Huzzah!

(soft music)

The Growing Internet SCAM Economy.

So obviously the flim-flam profession

is a proud and ancient tradition,

dating to the dawn of civilization.

One of the oldest complaints to the manager

was a clay tablet from the 18th century BC

written by a buyer claiming he was scammed.

Skip to the early internet and we had phishing emails,

that Nigerian prince scam, boner pills,

MOST of those pills being ineffective.

Now we've got AI and complex bot networks and crypto

and maybe even little pickpocket drones?

You could give them Abu hats!

Oh that would be Adorable for a while.

But while the tools are advanced,

the scammy methods are basically the same.

Also, for all you semantics perverts

jerking your words in the way-back,

I'm going to be using the term SCAM very loosely

when talking about this.

Because I think one of the unique things about the internet

is that it more easily blurs the line

between engagement bait, random bots,

and people straight up trying to steal your money.

Not all scams are created equal,

but they all work on the same fundamental level

in that they are all trying to get your attention

using tactics that are either dishonest or manipulative.

For example, have you ever been scrolling

through Instagram or TikTok

when a video of an absolute Mega-Karen pops up?

You know, some lady who is acting

in an unbelievably entitled and enraging way?

- I'm not sitting here. It's not safe.

Do you understand?

- Ma'am there is nothing wrong with your seat.

- Do you understand?

- No, ma'am, I don't understand.

- You can't make me, I'm not sitting here.

- Ma'am, please.

- I work hard.

I paid for my seat

which is clearly going to put my life in danger.

So you're going to move him and that's how it's gonna be.

- I understand.

- Then move him.

- Ma'am, this is a full flight, I can't move anyone.

- Do you want me to call the cops.

Do you want to lose your job.

- WOW. What a freak.

Absolutely wild that a human would actually act like that.

It's almost too weird to be true!

You can't make this stuff up!

Oh wait, yeah, I guess you can.

They literally posted set photos

like they were teasing the next Marvel film.

See, there are OF COURSE plenty of videos

of real assholes on social media,

which is EXACTLY why these staged videos are able to thrive.

In fact, there's an entire "fake Karen" economy

on the internet that makes real money doing this,

thanks to how engagement is rewarded.

I'd argue a lot of them are obvious.

Often the sound or lighting quality is suspiciously good.

Or the dialogue is very forced or robotic.

Or sometimes you can even find the same people

showing up in multiple videos.

They aren't hiding it because they don't need to.

And they can always claim later

that it's satire or a parody, it's a prank or something,

even though it's clearly not.

So this is one end of the scam spectrum

where what they are doing is clearly dishonest.

But I also want to talk about the other,

more interesting end of the spectrum.

This is the stuff that's engagement bait,

but I'd argue less harmful and more just, WEIRD.

Like, I don't want to shame anyone or say this is BAD.

I'm just, concerned.

(soft music)

(crunching sounds)

Did I just die? Am I dead?

What uh.

Okay. So you might have seen this going around.

Apparently on TikTok people are pretending to be an NPC

or doll or robot or, SOMETHING.

And basically what people do is pay them in tokens

to get a selected and scripted response.

And boy, there are just, so, so many.

- Patrick moneygun, I got your name.

Wow, (indistinct).

Haha.

Bianca, moneygun, I got your name.

- Thank you for the rose.

I love roses.

(upbeat music)

Remember, it's a new day.

(speaking foreign language)

- So you either just found that deeply unnerving

or maybe you came, I don't know you.

And again, I don't really want to shame this.

Because while this looks and seems weird, AT FIRST,

these fake NPC accounts are actually nothing new.

This has actually been around for a LONG TIME,

we just know them as MIMES.

This is just a form of physical art.

And before TikTok, we had streets,

and on them, street performers doing whatever they could

to get your attention.

One of the most enduring street performance acts

is the living statue,

AKA someone dressed and painted as a statue

that stands remarkably still, sometimes for hours.

The appeal is their commitment to acting as artifice.

And they interact with you when you pay them,

just like the TikTok NPCs.

It's basically the same, right?

The ability to maintain a performance for so long,

to interact with the audience

where they get to feel like

they're causing the performer to do something,

and keeping up the act so persistently.

And so if you find these NPC's haunting,

I'm guessing it's the same reason you find THIS haunting.

(tense music)

Or, arousing?

I'm sure this is all, someone's fetish.

And those NPCs probably tend to be young women for a reason.

But my point is that TikTok and Instagram

essentially function the same way as the Vegas sidewalk.

It's a bunch of people carnival barking for your attention,

and ultimately your money.

Some are doing it honestly.

And some are doing it DIShonestly.

In fact, some of these people are ALSO

trying to lead you to a second location.

You know how they say you should always follow a stranger

to a second location?

After all, what's the worst that could happen?

You don't want to be scared of the unknown, do you?

Do we have a clip of the Unknown?

(indistinct chatter)

Yeah. We have a clip of the Unknown.

Boy. Remember the Wonka Experience?

My goodness. We were so young and hopeful then.

This child entrapment scam used the power of AI

to lead dozens of Glasgow children to their deaths,

of their childlike wonder, they were fine.

The entire scheme, from concept,

to advertisement, to execution,

seemed to have been made with something similar to chatGPT.

But in terms of actual organization,

the AI fell short of the final product,

which, to be polite,

failed to capture the wonder of William Wonka's factory.

From the depressed oompa loompa running the meth lab,

to the barren halls,

to the confused children staring deep into the Unknown,

classic Wonka villain.

And what's worst, these children weren't even given

much CANDY to endure this.

Children will forgive most things if you have candy.

Ask any murderer.

Ultimately, I'm honestly not sure

where the Wonka Experience falls on the scam spectrum.

It's like several scams nested in each other

that's now blooming into a meta-scam?

Because everyone made fun of it,

and so now a bunch of corporations

want to get in on the fun and as a result,

exploit and kill the brief joy we all had with it.

Can't wait for the Willy Wonka Experience Movie in 2025,

long after the meme is dead.

But I wanted to bring it up

because it's a great example of new technology

being made to augment old scams.

After all, you can find countless lists of scam festivals

or doomed events similar to this,

but this is no doubt the first of many to use AI

for false advertising purposes.

Yeah, get ready for that to be a thing.

And not just from small-time scammers.

That Civil War film used AI art for their posters,

portraying scenes that are certainly not in the film.

Or anywhere.

Like, if you've been to Chicago

you'd notice those buildings in the wrong place.

Nor does Los Angeles have giant swans.

I guess that's supposed to be an Echo Park swan boat?

Oh look, that car has three doors on one side!

Neat.

Can't wait for this to be the future of advertising!

- Okay, Warmbo is just gonna pause the video right here

to say that um, Mister Cody is wrong here

because Warmbo once saw a car with three doors on one side

when he was at Trader Joe's.

But then, um, turned out it only had two doors

and Warmbo was mistaken.

But three doors can exist on cars.

It's possible, so that AI art is actually

very accurate and good.

Warmbo has also been making AI art

and has gotten very good at the prompts.

Like, Warmbo made this one with the prompt,

"draw um Mister Cody and he smells like dad's milk

but Warmbo is also there eating soup

but also make it twice with only five fingers

good art best art museum quality,

flesh everywhere, skin blood veins fish guts

muscular baby six eyes ten fingers

so many fingers all of the fingers you can fit anime girl."

For more prompts you can go to my PromptBase page

where Warmbo is selling many prompts

that are good and make good things.

Because now that Warmbo isn't at Mister Cody's,

Warmbo needs your support because it's hard to find food

because there were more animal shelters and playgrounds

by Mister Cody's house.

Okay back to the video.

- And while AI ads are problematic,

it's probably the LEAST dangerous place to use it, right?

But it should be noted that this trend

is currently extending beyond ads,

most shockingly to academic journals.

Even more shockingly,

academic journals about giant mutant rat dicks.

Published in the academic journal Frontiers

in Cell and Developmental Biology,

there is a paper called,

"RETRACTED: Cellular functions of spermatogonial stem cells

in relation to JAK/STAT signaling pathway."

Of course, originally it wasn't called "RETRACTED,"

it got called that after it was retracted

for the obviously fake AI rat dick,

as well as other AI diagrams created by Midjourney,

which somehow made its way past six reviewers.

I dunno, seems accurate to me.

Sometimes you gotta dissilce a rat's testtomcels.

Oh, but there's more.

Other scientific papers are getting published

with AI generated text,

and while some of these can be hard to detect,

thankfully even smart people are too dumb

to delete some obvious signs.

For example, this paper- still apparently published

that actually begins with

"Certainly, here is a possible introduction for your topic."

Very funny. Very obvious.

But for every OBVIOUS fake AI paper,

I'm sure there are tons that go by unnoticed.

The ability to scam through AI or social media

is just so streamlined and easy

that anyone can do it and reach a huge audience.

ANY scam, from engagement bait to freaking academic fraud

can be done by ANYONE.

You don't even need to know Photoshop now.

And ultimately the result for both is the same, hollowness.

This is all, hollow content.

From a fake diagram of a rat dick

to a fake video of actors pretending to argue,

it all stems from a lack of actual substance

in exchange for an easy grift.

It reminds me of reality TV a little bit.

Early reality TV no doubt tried to capture

REAL things and people,

and over time they realized that audiences

can't tell the difference between that and actors.

Similarly I feel like internet CONTENT

has realized over time

that it doesn't have to be authentic

or funny or even well made,

it just has to trigger people's attention.

And so over time, scams have replaced,

really EVERYTHING on the internet right now.

Everything is a scam.

Google, for example, is a scam.

A recent study has confirmed what we all know,

that Google results have gotten WORSE because,

"a torrent of low-quality content,

especially for product search,

keeps drowning any kind of useful information

in search results."

For example, just Google the word CAR.

In theory that should take you to a definition of the word.

Perhaps the history of cars?

A Wikipedia article? A picture of a car?

But what you get instead is a top result

for the California Association of Realtors,

and then a bunch of other links trying to sell you cars,

or car related stuff like a car seat,

or Legos for some reason?

I dunno.

It's probably different for everyone

depending on where they live

and what their past search history is.

Because what you're ultimately Googling

is which websites were able to scam their way

into that search engine optimization game.

And so a basic search engine is no different

than that Vegas street again.

Long way from when Google was supposed to be

a "pure search engine" with no ads,

according to this completely unconfirmed photo from Reddit.

So I dunno. Maybe that's a lie.

Maybe everything is a lie. Maybe I don't exist.

I certainly don't feel real.

But then again, I did just smoke a bag of salvia so.

Oh I just lived a life.

And speaking of reality, after the break,

we're gonna talk more about things that don't exist,

such as bots and the bot ecosystem

and how it all got so bad.

And perhaps we'll check in with Elon

and his quest to FINALLY GET RID OF THE BOTS on Twitter.

Thank goodness. So glad he did that.

And yes, I understand the irony

of talking about stuff like rage bait

while doing a video that's angry about the internet,

that is ALSO about to cut to ads.

I don't care. I feel nothing.

Don't forget to use the promo code CODY FEELS NOTHING.

(soft music)

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I hope you're enjoying the video

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I'm gonna go clean my toilets now.

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(soft music)

- Gonna do a little prank on Mister Cody.

- Hello?

- (imitates Katy) Hey Mister Cody. It's Miss Katy.

Look, I'm just reminding you to keep your front door open.

- What? MISS Katy?

Sorry, I just woke up from my lunch naps.

You want me to keep my door open?

- Just for the night.

Keep the door and the windows open.

- Uhhhh. Why?

- (demonic voice) So you can feel the air on your skin

one last time.

(Warmbo laughs)

Warmbo likes doing voices.

And if you want Mister Cody's phone number,

you can subscribe to Warmbo's Substack

or DM Warmbo on LinkedIn.

Let's keep watching Mister Cody's video!

- Well, here we are, back from ads.

Not a care in the world. Doing great.

American dream.

We were discussing, or rather,

I was discussing to the camera

how modern technology and social media

have made it easier than ever to scam or grift people.

Often just using old scams, NFTs, for example.

NFTs are essentially a modern tulipmania,

tulipmania being a period in 1600's Holland

when Dutch people got real horny for tulip bulbs

and started speculating on tulip bulbs.

It was considered a gamble

given that you didn't know exactly how fancy

the beautiful tulip would turn out to be.

Exactly like how people speculated on the,

just absolutely hideous one of a kind drawings of apes.

They're so ugly, why would you make them so ugly.

Then, tulip prices crashed, and Holland plunged into chaos,

exactly like Mad Max,

but a lot more wooden clog sound effects.

Or rather, a minor inconvenience,

as the premise of tulipmania was apparently overblown.

Like me. So sick of getting blown, am I right?

Nobody agrees with me, nobody?

Okay, well, I'm tired of it.

Point is that NFTs took something like a fad craze

Beanie Babies, et cetera, and just digitized it,

which in turn made it even easier to do.

Which when you stand back, isn't a surprise.

The internet didn't change human behavior, right?

It just made human behavior more streamlined,

for better or worse.

At least, that's assuming the internet

is a collection of HUMANS.

Which it seems to not be that thing

that it is not, seemingly.

If you can recall, no, not that kind of recall,

I mean if you can remember, Elon Musk purchased Twitter

under the promise that he would combat the flood of bots.

It was his WHOLE THING,

specifically that his new policies were,

"THE ONLY WAY to do this."

Back in 2022, charging money for Twitter Blue

was THE ONLY WAY to combat bots.

Then he decided that Blue accounts

would be the ONLY accounts to show up in the main page,

and in fact would have weighted influence

on their algorithmic

and would receive priority in replies, because of BOTS.

Then the BOTS were defeated, right?

Oh weird, so in 2023 Twitter began teasing

that they would charge EVERYONE an annual subscription

to use Twitter in order to defeat the bots.

HUH.

I thought the ONLY WAY to defeat them already happened

with Twitter Blue?

And then JUST this year, Elon confirmed

that they will be charging new users money to tweet

because THAT is,

"the only way to curb the relentless onslaught of bots".

Oh.

Very strange how the ONLY WAY to combat bots

is also coincidentally requiring everyone

to give Elon Musk money

after he purchased Twitter on a dare he issued to himself

and put the company into massive debt

and then fired everyone responsible

for regulating things like bots.

And I don't know if you need to be told this but,

it didn't work.

Twitter Blue didn't get rid of bots.

It actually made the bots WORSE,

because the bots just started getting verified

and gained better visibility over real users.

While these are problems plaguing the entire internet,

Twitter is uniquely completely (beep)

in a way that perfectly encapsulates the growing scam issue.

Business genius Elon Musk has somehow rebuilt Twitter

to seemingly accommodate scammers and ONLY scammers

while claiming to do the opposite.

It's almost like he's a self-sabotaging idiot or something?

- Don't advertise.

- You don't want them to advertise?

- No. Go (beep) yourself.

- Oh you first little guy.

So, X-bots, how bad is the problem?

It's actually hard to know

given that Musk ended free access to its API,

the programming interface of Twitter.

That's right.

Did you know that Twitter is actually less accessible

and even more into censorship now?

It's almost as if Musk did the complete OPPOSITE

of all the stuff he said he was gonna fix

and is actually just a liar.

So while he made a big deal

over his "open source algorithm,"

he ironically DID NOT make the site more transparent.

Apparently all he did was release a bit of the source code

for the "for you" algorithm.

But according to a former Twitter employee,

"The model that drives

the most important part of the algorithm

has not been open-sourced.

So the most important part of the algorithm

is still inscrutable."

Basically, it'd be like "releasing"

your grandma's chocolate chip cookie recipe

that just says, "mix dough, add chocolate chips."

Also there's a bunch of random

like Nazi doodles scrawled on the bottom.

So, typical recipe from grandma.

Despite this challenge,

some researchers are paying the fees for API access

or using other methods to investigate the state of Twitter.

CHEQ, a cybersecurity firm,

examined traffic driven to its clients' websites from X

during the 2024 Super Bowl

and found that roughly 75% of it was bots.

This is compared to a rate of under 3% fake traffic

from sites like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook.

This is a huge jump even compared to Twitter

during last year,

which was only pumping out

a little under 3% fake traffic to websites.

Three percent bots, up to seventy-(beep)-five

in JUST A YEAR.

And this isn't just for big events.

During the month of January 2024,