The result would have been the same if there had been a human behind the catfishing instead of an LLM, and events could have played out in a similar fashion if they'd been snail mail pen pals. The outcome of this story is tragic, but it doesn't have much to do with technology when you stop and think about it for a moment.
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2025
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My dude. Robots just conned a man. As you pointed out, that was previously only possible through engagement with actual humans.
Seeing as how just a dozen people on Fox News successfully conned the US into Fascism, it's not comforting to know that can now be more easily accomplished through robots.
FB employs humans to catfish users?
I wouldn't put it past them.
Missing the point and the problem evident in the story.
Extremely misleading headline. He, “never returned”, because he tripped and fell in a parking lot. Unfortunately, he succumbed to the fall injuries days later. The headline makes it sounds like the AI killed him or created some plot to do so.
Alright I don't mean to be "that guy" but it says "he never made it home"
He didn't make it home, he died in the hospital.
Putting the 2 statements side by side implies they are connected. For the media illiterate it can be very misleading.
Initially I wanted to defend the headline because it's not 'literally' suggesting any AI wrongdoing, but I can say that because I know headlines are written to be this way so I know what to dismiss. It's a manipulative practice and that's a shame
The family responding that they’re perfectly fine with AI but just wish it hadn’t lied, like… we’re fucked. Not even direct victims of AI’s bullshit understand or care about how fucked up and these corporate generative AI technologies are… again, fucked.
What a crazy response to your loved one dying/disappearing
He fell over. I think they understand that that probably would have happened eventually anyway and that the AI didn't really have anything to do with it.
Are fucked are we that GenAI chatbots have been around for 15min and we already have WAY too many stories of people falling over themselves to get into bad situations?
Like, they know they’re fake from the outset and then just get so swept up in it that they’ll believe anything. Some are not 100%, mentally, like Bue here but others are seemingly ok and they still fall for it?! What the hell?!
We have millenia of experience of people being idiots by being horny. This is just the first time we've seen a mass deployment of personalized horny generators.
Shits gonna get cray
As much as I want to clown on this 76 yr old man trying to cheat on his wife with a younger woman, the fact that a chatbot did this is terrifying.
Welp, back to bars people. You know. Actual interaction.
Damn ai already started taking us out?
Taking out the stupid or mentally ill(who are different, and I do feel a little bad putting them in with “stupid”, but these are the clear primary victims of the current AI lies).
I’m sure we’ll get it way out of hand and the bots will start getting properly clever but right now, like, the fuck guys.
... but only for the purpose of f..ing you over :)
Funing you over?
what an absolutly disturbing read
He and Linda began dating in the 1980s...He was a chef by then. He’d arrived in the United States from Thailand, speaking no English and washing dishes to pay for an electrical engineering degree.
This is the most shocking part of this story to me...
When people complain that their parents were able to afford an education and a home off the back of a single part-time income... yeah that isn't exaggeration. You really could do that in the 70's-80's. Now it takes 4 full-time employed unrelated roommates sharing an apartment to make rent every month.
I don't know if you were present in the "millennials just need to stop eating avocado toast and pull themselves up by their bootstraps" conversations, but all the rampant hate for the Baby Boomers didn't come from nowhere. This is why it exists. Our parents (and their parents, depending how old you are) had the easiest and most luxurious existence that has ever been possible in American history, ever, and then pulled up the ladder behind them. When faced with the fact that they've made the life they lived impossible for following generations, the popular response is to blame the children and call them lazy.
"When I was your age, I walked into a car dealership with a smile and a firm handshake right after high school graduation and that's all it took to get a job. A year later I owned a home and was married expecting a child. It's easy, you just don't want to work."
No grandpa, because you and your buddies decided the purpose of your life was to extract all possible value out of everything and leave behind a shriveled up husk of a country, not one single independent detail of that story is still possible.
Kids these days don't even know the future that was stolen away from them by their own parents or grandparents.
In the 1980s one could actually afford a degree off of washing dishes on the side or working 3 months in the summer
And yet the boomers just think we're lazy