I think this is the only solution. Until then, google et al make tons of money off these scams.

I expect a decent percentage is total BS and too big to get rid of without messing with their quarterly numbers.

Of course, it would be pretty simple for google to prevent through a sort of advertiser FICO score. But they don’t, because it would make then less money.

And the people that make AI scam content pay for AI tokens that AI scam consumers love so it's a win-win Jevons virtuous circle.

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This is literally what bonding and insurance is for.

It doesn't matter. As long as Google is not held accountable for showing you a scam ad that makes you lose $10k, Google doesn't care about the trustworthiness of the spammer.

They just care whether the check clears.

Which means that if the ad companies have consequences for letting through scams, new identities will face restrictions (e.g. identity verification, initial safety deposit, not being able to advertise on most surfaces) until they find a way to keep the scams out or die trying.

Of course, this will cost money, both because it will cost them legitimate customers that get caught up in the friction and because implementing the measures/reviews has costs, so they will only do it if forced. If they can just externalize the cost (in the form of scam victims getting hurt by scams) and/or can profit from the scams without sufficient downsides, they're going to do just that...

Back in 2013, I worked at a top-100 traffic website where we ran a few ads through Google. We'd regularly have blantant scams being advertised, and we'd report them, block the advertiser, and the next day they'd be back with bit for bit identical images under a new advertiser profile. Even back then, our Google reps were basically like "we can't do anything about it", which is clear bullshit, they just wouldn't and still won't as it might cut into their profits, and their recommendation was that we put a human on staff to review ads run on our platform daily and continue to ban the problematic ones.

Google and all the tech companies need to be held to account for this shit. Facebook in 2024 estimated as much as 10% of their revenue, $16 billion, would come from scams and ads that should be banned on their platform, and everyone suffers for it. I call bullshit on the notion that they can't afford to do better because scale. Spend some of those billions of dollars on human review. Spend some of those billions of dollars remunerating the people who get scammed through your platform. If you can't afford to keep running your advertising business after that, then it gets shut down, there's no inherent right to the monopoly on advertising that Google has had for over a decade.

Stop making excuses for companies worth trillions of dollars.

Not just Google. Add X or Pinterest as well. These scammers’ ads have similar patterns… You can report them ad nauseam and nothing changes.

> resetting their trustworthiness score

But this is not how actual FICO scores work, and more interestingly, also not how historically Google has assigned domain authority for PageRank.

In both cases a history of transactions is required. Even if you could just spin up a new ID for a FICO score, having zero or little credit history typically means you'll have a very hard time securing any meaningful loans. Likewise, in the days when PageRank mattered a new domain would typically take a year to build up the authority required to get good results ranking well. Of course there were work around, but there are plenty of examples where easy to create a new identity does not equate starting with a fresh reputation (in fact even HN has the same principle! New accounts cannot, for example, downvote)

I don't think this would have much enforceable teeth. AI is tricky enough that its not difficult to rename or call it something else, or only use "AI" for certain aspects. There are just too many ways to loophole this.

There is also way too much inertia behind it. Large corps benefit wah too much from these scams. They aren't going to cut off such a revenue stream. Our elected officials don't understand the issue enough to do it correctly.

Why does "AI" matter in this? Pretty sure there are standards for dishonest or fraudulent in normal advertising.

If only we had a regulatory agency with teeth…. Or elected officials that were not themselves grossly dishonest….

So then what can we do about this?

The somethingwful forums solved this problem 20 years ago. $10bux

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>If, say, the NYTimes is promoting scams (they are) they should be fined or worse.

Oh yup. They heavily pushed the FTX scam for the NYT is heavily slanting democrats and SBF's mom was very active politically with the democrats. And these weren't "ads" but articles upon articles as if SBF was the second coming of Christ.

The NYT literally kept explaining SBF was a good guy and giving him a voice even after the scam got exposed.

Thankfully the judge wouldn't have any of that NYT nonsense (SBF's mom was teaching that we should "move past blame" at uni if I'm not mistaken) and SBF is roting in jail.

But nothing happened to those scam-promoters that the NYT is.

Screw that politically slanted publication promoting scams.

Would it create a crack in Section 230? Some ads are from shills in the comments. Are sites now responsible for illegal scam shill commenters?

I personally think they should be.

> If, say, the NYTimes is promoting scams (they are) they should be fined or worse.

Cue a "free speech" court case that the current SCOTUS would happily let slide for a few mil and a yacht ride. Really hope the incoming US gov can pass some regulation putting a leash on SCOTUS's corrupt behavior.