During the morning news scroll, before my eyes were properly open, I noticed the popular NZ news website Stuff was shilling Bitcoin in a 'sponsored' content article.
Before the Internet was mainstream I was one of those people who wrote letters to the editor. So I got up quick, made espresso, cracked my carpel tunnel are wrote three concise paragraphs about why shilling Bitcoin is Doubleplus Ungood and they should consider removing the advertorial. Stuff are doing great work, I think we need more local NZ media, and I don't want them to be the meat in any sandwich. Which is why I also think it's a disappointing turn of events, if Stuff would be taking the filthiest money in the world from Bitcoin shills.
Later in the week on Friday at 4:45 PM -- the time when all good hate mail is sent -- I got a reply from the team responsible for the advert. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they doubled-down and were unwilling to remove the article. The rationale was nonsensical. Their sources of information about Bitcoin were the poisoned well of AI: the "crypto" deception had taken hold of another mind.
There was not much I could say back, other than reiterate that the advertorial was full of lies (mining is not a security feature), and explain why they were lies (the Avalanche effect of one-way hash functions), but I don't expect a reply back. It's a difficult thing to communicate and if not taking the humanist position toward fraud and theft, it requires some prerequisite knowledge of cryptography to see through the deception, I do try my best on that subject, but I don't want to malign Stuff either. Like I say they do great work. A more constructive question is who deceived them? And why?
I believe AI deceived Stuff on this matter, by producing as it has been trained to, information that legitimises the wasteland of fraud and deception known as Bitcoin. AI/ML language models are untrustworthy even on a good day, they never say 'no, I do not know' and there appears to be a mistaken belief -- and Stuff are no exception to this, just another example of the belief -- that "AI would never lie to me".
Well I'm sorry AI absolutely would lie to you, and it doesn't even possess the emotional intelligence to know why that is bad. AI is a new battleground in the information war, being fed lies it dutifully regurgitates, at a scale not previously possible such as with individual attempts to deceive.
Will Stuff question the veracity of their sources that got the advertorial past editors? Or will Stuff ingratiate themselves into the world of fraud and deception with unquestioning belief in what AI says?
Personally, I'm not cynical enough to think the latter, but these are questions I did not have before being fed an article full of lies about Bitcoin. If you ask a language model if Bitcoin is legal in NZ, it won't point you to the Fair Trading Act.
To conclude, Bitcoin is a Pyramid scheme, and Pyramid schemes are illegal in New Zealand. But it is tolerated by the authorities, in spite of the harm it does. There are even proponents of it in government, on both sides of The House.
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