as we continue down tech and AI's warpath, a certain line tends to keep emerging: In an effort to stop abuse, capital will have to suffice
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Midjourney no longer offers a free trial after manipulative and falsified images continued being created.
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Twitter, famously, is seeking to block abuse and spam with Twitter Blue
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In sudden turnabout, GPT-4 has shifted to a closed source model - removing any hope of understanding, deconstructing, recreating, or auditing it. You'll just have to pay and see what happens.
In fact, nearly every optional-subscription web service uses "paying customer" as a signal of high trust
And in one way, they're totally right!
Fighting abuse is asymmetric warfare // Fighting abuse is a "reverse siege"
When it comes to dealing with abuse and spam, raw contests of power rarely get you anywhere. Abuse is persistent, mobile, dedicated, and dreadfully fast-moving. Just fighting battles head on and removing bad actors from a service will quickly lead to you being outmaneuvered by more agile groups. If your large-scale service handles abusive by having a queue of moderators ready to whack every mole that pops up, you don't stand a chance.
Most (but not all) websites know this pretty well by now. We've had a lot of time to figure this stuff out now and entire industries are being built around the work. So how do we defeat abuse at a bigger scale? Well, there's plenty of different answers and certainly no one right way, but one of the prevailing strategies is that of Resource Deprivation
Picture your service as the medieval castle on the hill. You are large, pretty slow to move, and oh so fortified. In a strange fusion of zombies piling themselves against the wall and highly organized factions of enemies, you are beset on all sides.
Raw artillery fire will do little, the zombie horde is unending - Precision strikes on key targets are neigh impossible, your enemies are elusive, spread out, hidden, and you are not actually in a war with bombs here, the metaphor only goes so far. From here it becomes clear that perhaps one of the only hopes you have of breaking this siege is to strike the enemies resources.
Playing Counter-Strike with friends is a lot of fun (and a lot of sad when you do it alone, but hey, I won't judge). It's not too uncommon to run into a smurf 1 or a cheater. In competitive environments, those behaviors can be particularly destructive and is easily categorized as abuse.
Banning cheaters when they cheat does a pretty good job of getting rid of that one account, but the zombie horde at your walls won't stop, and cheat developers are untouched. From there you can implement anti-cheat, but this is an arms race that is hard to win. As I said earlier, this is an asymmetric war. Your enemy will move faster than you.
You can use more advanced technology to ban a users Hardware ID, a unique identifier that can theoretically ban an entire computer instead of just an account. However, like every other technical issue, this too can be busted.
Valve's latest solution as CS:GO moved to a free to play model, then, is a pretty simple one: Pay up and give us your phone number
The idea is pretty simple. Cheaters will never stop, but cheaters don't have unlimited money. Slowly but surely, the cost of doing business will simply get too high for abusive behavior.
Now this is all well and good but it doesn't stop abuse on its own. All your other methods of fighting are still necessary, but as you cull the living dead, fewer will rise up to replace their ranks.
Once you notice this behavior, its suddenly easy to see it everywhere. Twitter, Discord, Facebook, Doordash, etc.. LOVE to get your phone number. In fact, some of you may have seen prompts like this before, saying pretty plainly "you look suspicious, give us your phone number" - i.e. Discord and Twitter
Getting more phone numbers is annoying, takes resources, and costs money - Even with every bit of effort automated, it will cost you a resource to do this. An average user with a second Twitter account getting locked and needing a phone number may be shit out of luck already, ending the behavior about as fast as it began. For serial abuse, its just the cost of doing business once again. But those costs may start to really add up, eat into your profits, and all in all, may drive you away.
Captchas today are used in much the same way. Captchas will drive away the bottom of the barrel, but its been LONG known the captchas are easily solvable. If a machine can't do it, a human will for cents on cents. Rates for these solves are in the couple of dollars per THOUSANDS of captchas. But if we KNOW that they aren't very useful, why keep using them? Again, outside of the bottom of the barrel work, costing abusers a couple extra bucks will stack up their operating costs. Add in phone number verification, email verification, and whatever other resources you can think to cost them, and you very well might drive bad actors away. Maybe you'll make their profits go negative. Maybe their budget isn't as big as your patience. Or maybe they just get real fucking frustrated. In any case, it has a better shot of getting you somewhere than just shooting zombies mindlessly.
The logical conclusion of all of this becomes readily apparent. If all these methods we implement seek to drain bad actors of resources, why not just directly take their money? In the Counter-Strike example, Valve did just that. But more and more companies seem to be joining the bandwagon. Twitter continues to be the prime example, but we'll likely see this method get employed, especially in the AI space.
The Obvious Part
This is the part of the post where I point out the obvious. If we are headed to a future where capital investment is the best way to determine trust, what happens when people get priced out? We've seen allegories to this already in the gaming world. Mobile games that are "pay-to-win" - requiring monetary investment to progress and the KMMOs of old come to mind.
I've tricked you, because I don't have some shocking conclusion to give you. No answer to give.
Paying for trust continues to grow, and I would not be surprised if we see free-to-use services changing their tune in greater numbers as time goes on. More and more of the open internet is on a path of being pay-to-play in the name of safety and the underlying systems of our society are not conducive to a very free and open world.
Put short, I think this fuckin blows lmao.
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a high skill player playing with a low ranked account - Imagine Magnus Carlson playing Chess against 800 elo scrubs
