237 - Fraudberry P-zombies

My PSA for the week: For everyone wondering why the strawberry emoji has suddenly been hijacked by a particularly virulent meme, I recommend treating anyone spreading it like a computer infected with ransomware. Quarantine, pending a potential wipe of the affected systems.

As absurd as it sounds, the P-zombies of humanity have been directed to drive a recruiting spree, hijacking the emoji of a fruit in the process. Then again, the deluge of Olympic gun meme variations might have seemed absurd two weeks ago, but that spread and divided like irritating wildfire.

In retrospect, this result could have been predicted. The most obvious frauds in AI have been pouring billions of dollars of compute and every bit of data they could illegally steal from everyone on the planet toward the goal of “social engineering”, the mass-manipulation of humans, for several years now.

This malicious process that OpenAI and Anthropic have undertaken doesn’t rely on being able to directly manipulate 90% of people, but rather it relies on being able to spread virally through the most gullible and dumbest subsets of the population. Those subsets have also become the heaviest users of LLM-based trash technology, making the data those bad actors receive increasingly dominated by those target subsets.

This saves them a great deal of effort on the task of “data cleaning”, as the targets of their social engineering efforts have exceeded a threshold of engagement, and they now do most of the work for free, and some even pay for the privilege of being socially engineered by the Bernie Madoff of AI. That particular fraud is behind this emoji-hijacking.

I will say for my part that if I catch any of my connections sharing links to the strawberry fraud, excluding those debunking it, I’ll be promptly and permanently blocking and blacklisting them. The ship of reasonable doubt on all things Altman is engaged in has long since sailed off into the sea of snake oil, and anyone crewing his ship, now flying the strawberry flag, will go down with that ship.

Literal zombie apocalypses are of course impossible, but P-zombies (or “Lemmings”) have marked themselves as such through this social engineering, yielding the silver lining that such marking can translate into a great deal of long-term time savings for the people who cut them off now. P-Lemmings will march to the Pied Piper’s tune, so the very last place you want to find yourself is marching alongside them.