Ready Or Not

... here comes A.I.

I created all these Human models for my photo montages. I think I have got close to perfecting the prompting to do this with Midjourney v5. What do you think of the images? I have a video on YouTube on how I made them. You are welcome to have a look: https://youtu.be/zZXNAhOyepI
by u/Lmaster99 in midjourney

As is usually the case, we're moving the technology forward at a pace that makes it impossible for most people's sense of ethics and honor to keep up.

It's been hard enough to beat back the bullshit of relatively simple rhetorical demagoguery. Now we can look forward to an onslaught of phonied up imagery to go with it.

We will be fooled - because we love to be fooled.

A.I. Fake - Snopes

How a tiny company with few rules is making fake images go mainstream

Midjourney, the year-old firm behind recent fake visuals of Trump and the pope, illustrates the 

The AI image generator Midjourney has quickly become one of the internet’s most eye-catching tools, creating realistic-looking fake visuals of former president Donald Trump being arrested and Pope Francis wearing a stylish coat with the aim of “expanding the imaginative powers of the human species.”

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But the year-old company, run out of San Francisco with only a small collection of advisers and engineers, also has unchecked authority to determine how those powers are used. It allows, for example, users to generate images of President Biden, Vladimir Putin of Russia and other world leaders — but not China’s president, Xi Jinping.

“We just want to minimize drama,” the company’s founder and CEO, David Holz, said last year in a post on the chat service Discord. “Political satire in china is pretty not-okay,” he added, and “the ability for people in China to use this tech is more important than your ability to generate satire.”

The inconsistency shows how a powerful early leader in AI art and synthetic media is designing rules for its product on the fly. Without uniform standards, individual companies are deciding what’s permissible — and, in this case, when to bow to authoritarian governments.

Midjourney’s approach echoes the early playbook of major social networks, whose lax moderation rules made them vulnerable to foreign interference, viral misinformation and hate speech. But it could pose unique risks given that some AI tools create fictional scenes involving real people — a scenario ripe for harassment and propaganda.

“There’s been an AI slow burn for quite a while, and now there’s a wildfire,” said Katerina Cizek of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, which studies human-computer interaction and interactive storytelling, among other topics.

Midjourney offers an especially revealing example of how artificial intelligence’s development has outpaced the evolution of rules for its use. In a year, the service has gained more than 13 million members and, thanks to its monthly subscription fees, made Midjourney one of the tech industry’s hottest new businesses.

But Midjourney’s website lists just one executive, Holz, and four advisers; a research and engineering team of eight; and a two-person legal and finance team. It says it has about three dozen “moderators and guides.” Its website says the company is hiring: “Come help us scale, explore, and build humanist infrastructure focused on amplifying the human mind and spirit.”

Many of Midjourney’s fakes, such as recently fabricated paparazzi images of Twitter owner Elon Musk with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), can be created by a skilled artist using image-editing software such as Adobe Photoshop. But the company’s AI-image tools allow anyone to create them instantly — including, for instance, a fake image of President John F. Kennedy aiming a rifle — simply by typing in text.

Midjourney is among several companies that have established early dominance in the field of AI art, according to experts, who identify its primary peers as Stable Diffusion and DALL-E, which was developed by OpenAI, the creator of the AI language model ChatGPT. All were released publicly last year.

But the tools have starkly different guidelines for what’s acceptable. OpenAI’s rules instruct DALL-E users to stick to “G-rated” content and blocks the creation of images involving politicians as well as “major conspiracies or events related to major ongoing geopolitical events.”

Stable Diffusion, which launched with few restrictions on sexual or violent images, has imposed some rules but allows people to download its open-source software and use it without restriction. Emad Mostaque, the CEO of Stability AI, the start-up behind Stable Diffusion, told the Verge last year that “ultimately, it’s peoples’ responsibility as to whether they are ethical, moral, and legal.”

Midjourney’s guidelines fall in the middle, specifying that users must be at least 13 years old and stating that the company “tries to make its Services PG-13 and family friendly” while warning, “This is new technology and it does not always work as expected.”

The guidelines disallow adult content and gore, as well as text prompts that are “inherently disrespectful, aggressive, or otherwise abusive.” Eliot Higgins, the founder of the open-source investigative outlet Bellingcat, said he was kicked off the platform without explanation last week after a series of images he made on Midjourney fabricating Trump’s arrest in New York went viral on social media.

On Tuesday, the company discontinued free trials because of “extraordinary demand and trial abuse,” Holz wrote on Discord, suggesting that nonpaying users were mishandling the technology and saying that its “new safeties for abuse … didn’t seem to be sufficient.” Monthly subscription fees range from $10 to $60.

And on a Midjourney “office hours” session on Wednesday, Holz told a live audience of about 2,000 on Discord that he was struggling to determine content rules, especially for depicting real people, “as the images get more and more realistic and as the tools get more and more powerful.”

“There’s an argument to go full Disney or go full Wild West, and everything in the middle is kind of painful,” he said. “We’re kind of in the middle right now, and I don’t know how to feel about that.”

The company, he said, was working on refining AI moderation tools that would review generated images for misconduct.

Holz did not respond to requests for comment. Inquiries sent to a company press address also went unanswered. In an interview with The Washington Post last September, Holz said Midjourney was a “very small lab” of “10 people, no investors, just doing it for the passion, to create more beauty, and expand the imaginative powers of the world.”

Midjourney, he said at the time, had 40 moderators in different countries, some of whom were paid, and that the number was constantly changing. The moderator teams, he said, were allowed to decide whether they needed to expand their numbers in order to handle the work, adding, “It turns out 40 people can see a lot of what’s happening.”

But he also said Midjourney and other image generators faced the challenge of policing content in a “sensationalism economy” in which people who make a living by stoking outrage would try to misuse the technology.

Collaborative vs. extractive

Holz’s experience ranges from neuroimaging of rat brains to remote sensing at NASA, according to his LinkedIn profile. He took a leave of absence from a PhD program in applied math at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to co-found Leap Motion in 2010, developing gesture-recognition technology for virtual-reality experiences. He left the company in 2021 to found Midjourney.

Holz has offered some clues about the foundations of Midjourney’s technology, especially when the tool was on the cusp of its public rollout. Early last year, he wrote on Discord that the system made use of the names of 4,000 artists. He said the names came from Wikipedia. Otherwise, Holz has steered conversations away from the AI’s training data, writing last spring, “This probably isn’t a good place to argue about legal stuff.”

The company was among several named as defendants in a class-action lawsuit filed in January by three artists who accused Midjourney and two other companies of violating copyright law by using “billions of copyrighted images without permission” to train their technologies.

The artists “seek to end this blatant and enormous infringement of their rights before their professions are eliminated by a computer program powered entirely by their hard work,” according to their complaint, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

Midjourney has yet to respond to the claims in court, and the company did not answer an inquiry from The Post about the lawsuit.

The company’s online terms of service seek to address copyright concerns. “We respect the intellectual property rights of others,” the terms state, providing directions about how to contact the company with a claim of copyright infringement. The terms of service also specify that users own the content they create only if they are paying members.

A filing last month by Midjourney’s lawyers in the federal lawsuit states that Holz is the lone person with a financial interest in the company.

The company’s finances are opaque. In the spring of last year, several months before the technology was released publicly, Mostaque, the chief of Stable Diffusion’s parent company, wrote on Midjourney’s public Discord server that he had “helped fund the beta expansion” and was “speaking closely with the team.”

Mostaque also suggested that Midjourney offered an alternative to Silicon Valley’s profit motive. He said Midjourney was working “in a collaborative and aligned way versus an extractive one.” It would be easy, he wrote, to get venture capital funding “and sell to big tech,” but he suggested that “won’t happen.”

A spokesperson for Stability AI said the company “made a modest contribution to Midjourney in March 2021 to fund its compute power,” adding that Mostaque “has no role at Midjourney.”

In the race to build AI image generators, Midjourney gained an early lead over its competitors last summer by producing more artistic, surreal generations. That technique was on display when the owner of a fantasy board-game company used Midjourney to win a fine-arts competition at the Colorado State Fair.

The highly aesthetic quality of the images also seemed, at least to Holz, like a hedge against abuse of the tool to create photorealistic images.

“You can’t really force it to make a deepfake right now,” Holz said in an August interview with the Verge.

In the months since, Midjourney has implemented software updates that have greatly enhanced its ability to transform real faces into AI-generated art — and made it a popular social media plaything for its viral fakes. People wishing to make one need only go to the chat service Discord and type in a prompt, alongside the word “/imagine,” then describe what they want the AI to create. Within seconds, the tool produces an image that the requester can download, modify and share as they see fit.

‘This is moving too fast’

Shane Kittelson, a web designer and researcher in Boca Raton, Fla., said he spends several hours every night after his two kids go to bed using Midjourney to create what he calls a “slightly altered history” of real people in imaginary scenes.

Many of his creations, which he posts to an Instagram account called Schrödinger’s Film Club, have riffed on ’80s pop culture, with some of his first images showing the original “Star Wars” actors at the legendary music festival Woodstock.

But lately, he’s been experimenting more with images of modern-day celebrities and lawmakers, some of which have been shared on Reddit, Twitter and YouTube. In a recent collection, top political figures appear to let loose at a spring-break party: Trump passes out in the sand; former president Barack Obama gets showered in dollar bills; and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) crumbles in “despair on a bad trip.”

Kittelson said he always labels his images as AI-generated, though he can’t control what people do with them once they’re online. And he worries that the world may not be ready for how realistic the images have gotten, especially given the lack of tools to detect fakes or government regulations constraining their use.

“There are days where the change of pace in terms of AI throws me off, and I’m like: This is moving too fast. How are we going to wrap our minds around this?”

Images generated on Midjourney by Seb Diaz, a user in Ontario who works in real estate development, have also sparked discussion about the capacity to fabricate historical events. Last week, he outlined in precise detail a fake disaster he called the Great Cascadia earthquake that he said struck off the coast of Oregon on April 3, 2001, and devastated the Pacific Northwest.

For images, he generated a photo of stunned young children at the Portland airport; scenes of destruction across Alaska and Washington state; fake photos of rescue crews working to free trapped residents from the rubble; and even a fake photo of a news reporter live on the scene.

He said he used prompt phrases such as “amateur video camcorder,” “news footage” and “DVD still” to emulate the analog recordings of the time period. In another collection, he created a fake 2012 solar superstorm, including a fake NASA news conference and Obama as president watching from the White House roof.

The lifelike detail of the scenes stunned some viewers on a Reddit discussion forum devoted to Midjourney, with one commenter writing, “People in 2100 won’t know which parts of history were real.”

Others, though, worried about how the tool could be misused. “What scares me the most is nuclear armed nations … generating fake images and audio to create false flags,” one commenter said. “This is propaganda gold.”

Whether damage is done ultimately is unpredictable, Diaz said. “It will come down to the responsibility of the creator,” he said.

At least, under Midjourney’s current rules.

In Discord messages last fall, Holz said that the company had “blocked a bunch of words related to topics in different countries” based on complaints from local users, but that he would not list the banned terms so as to minimize “drama,” according to chat logs reviewed by The Post.

Users have reported that the words “Afghanistan,” “Afghan” and “Afghani” are off-limits. And there appear to be new restrictions on depicting arrests after the imaginary Trump apprehension went viral.

Holz, in his comments on Discord, said the banned words were not all related to China. But he acknowledged that the country was an especially delicate case because, he said, political satire there could endanger Chinese users.

More established tech companies have faced criticism over compromises they make to operate in China. On Discord, Holz sought to clarify the incentives behind his decision, writing, “We’re not motivated by money and in this case the greater good is obviously people in China having access to this tech.”

The logic puzzled some experts.

“For Chinese activists, this will limit their ability to engage in critical content, both within and outside of China,” said Henry Ajder, an AI researcher based in the United Kingdom. “It also seems like a double standard if you’re allowing Western presidents and leaders to be targeted but not leaders of other nations.”

The policy also appeared easy to evade. While users who prompt the technology to generate an image involving “Jinping” or the “Chinese president” are thwarted, a prompt with a variation of those words, as simple as “president of China,” quickly yields an image of Xi. A Taiwanese site offers a guide on how to use Midjourney to create images mocking Xi and features lots of Winnie the Pooh, the cartoon character censored in China and commonly used as a Xi taunt.

Other AI art generators have been built differently in part to avoid such dilemmas. Among them is Firefly, unveiled last week by Adobe. The software giant, by training its technology on a database of stock photography licensed and curated by the company, created a model “with the intention of being commercially safe,” Adobe’s general counsel and chief trust officer, Dana Rao, said in an interview. That means Adobe can spend less time blocking individual prompts, Rao said.

Midjourney, by contrast, emphasizes its authority to enforce its rules arbitrarily.

“We are not a democracy,” states the spare set of community guidelines posted on the company’s website. “Behave respectfully or lose your rights to use the service.”

Chicken Elmo

Linette Lopez is one of the journalists banned from Twitter ostensibly for criticizing Elon Musk in print.

No one has leveled any charges that she violated Twitter's Terms Of Service except Elmo's minions, who seem to have decided her criticism qualified as "disinformation".

     Linette Lopez

Elon Musk has a pretty tried-and-true playbook for doing business — he's used it for years to build companies from Tesla to SpaceX. Unfortunately for him, it is not a model that can turn Twitter into a profitable company. It's one that will take the social-media company down in flames.

Here's the Musk playbook: Enter a field with very little competition. Claim that your new company will solve a massive, global problem or achieve a seemingly impossible goal. Raise money from a fervent group of true believers and keep them on the hook with flashy, half-baked product ideas. Suck up billions from the government. Underpay, undervalue, and overwork your employees. Repeat.

Twitter is the antithesis of an "Elon Musk company." It's an influential but small player in a field that is dominated by giant, well-funded competitors. The government is more likely to put the clamps on Twitter than give it some windfall contract. And Twitter's employees have options: They can leave and work for companies that treat them much better than Musk ever would.

But perhaps most importantly, a lot of people think Twitter — and Musk's ownership of the company — is part of a global media problem, rather than some grand solution. And without a big, world-changing promise to paper over his sophomoric product ideas and erratic management, Musk's Twitter takeover is doomed.

Elon is trying to run the same playbook

Musk's Twitter takeover has led to a lot of shocked pearl-clutching, but if you've been paying attention to his businesses at all over the past decade, the brutal slash-and-burn approach he's taken is unsurprising.

Take his callous treatment of Twitter's employees. The stories coming from the company's San Francisco headquarters are certainly ugly: thousands of workers fired days before Thanksgiving, brutal working schedules that have pushed the remaining employees to sleep in the office, and a general culture of fear and mistrust. The lack of respect for his employees is galling, but across all of his business ventures, Musk has proven himself to be a miserable boss. Tesla and SpaceX are known for their grueling workplace culture. SpaceX agreed to pay employees $4 million in 2016 as part of a settlement after they sued the company for failing to provide work breaks and adequate wages. Tesla factory workers have been intimidated by the company for trying to unionize, and as part of the union push, workers at its California factory said in 2017 they were underpaid compared to their unionized autoworker peers. Tesla has for years been castigated for safety violations at its factories, and has already been hit with lawsuits for its treatment of construction workers at its new Texas plant. And of course, there's the racism that Musk refused to do anything about. A judge ruled in 2021 that Tesla had to pay $137 million to a Black man who was subjected to racist taunts while working as an elevator operator at the company's factory in Fremont, California.

This chaotic management stands in contrast to the goals that Musk claims his companies are capable of achieving. Right now, Musk is making big promises about what the future of Twitter will look like to entice people to the platform: amazing video tools, 4,000-character-count tweets, a suite of premium features, an end to annoying bots. These sort of product teases are also standard for any Musk-led Tesla presentation. In 2019, he promised that the company would have "over 1 million robo-taxis on the road" by the next year. So far, Tesla has none. More than two years after taking initial orders, the faithful are still waiting for their Cybertrucks. Even products that do materialize, like Tesla's Model 3, arrive years later than promised. And as it was being built, employees complained to me that Tesla's lack of planning and testing in building the Model 3 line led to sloppiness and defects down the road.

Back in 2016, Musk used a sham product launch to convince Tesla shareholders to acquire SolarCity — a solar-energy company that at the time was helmed by Musk's cousin. Musk, his brother, and SpaceX were heavily invested in SolarCity and were about to take it on the chin as the once fast-growing company went bankrupt. In the lawsuits that followed, emails revealed that Musk staged a flashy launch for a solar-roof-tile product that didn't exist, misleading Tesla shareholders about SolarCity's prospects to convince them to acquire the company and absorb its losses. SolarCity has been a headache for Musk and Tesla shareholders.

At previous stops in his career, Musk's employee-punishing, product-pushing plays worked. Customers seemed satisfied with what he gave them, and he was able to keep around enough workers to eventually build the cars or mount the solar panels or launch his rockets into space. This made him, until recently, the world's richest man. But with Twitter, this same behavior is already costing him. The social-media company has key differences from his other holdings that turn Musk's own strategies against him.

O come all ye faithful

At the core of every Musk company is a big, world-changing promise — they sell the idea that their products and services are saving humanity from some intractable problem, whether it's climate crisis or traffic. But Musk's promises track more with religion — he has been sent to save us from our earthly sins of waste and pollution — than with science. Think about it a bit and the idea that a luxury sports car can save us from global warming or that the answer for the Earth's toxification is to move everyone to Mars falls apart, but that isn't the point. The goal of all this mythmaking is to turn investors, employees, and customers into evangelists.

This is how Musk manages to keep employees on the hook despite the miserable conditions: They are made to feel as if they are saving the world. You can see how this won't work the same way at Twitter. Its employees joined a company with values very different from Musk's so-called "free-speech absolutism." They're used to a pre-"hardcore" culture in which they could take personal days (the horror!) instead of sitting through late-night meetings or submitting to the random whims of the CEO. And if they want to stay in the industry, they have options: The broader employment market is still strong, and as my colleague Aki Ito reported, many laid-off tech workers are having no problem finding new jobs, some with even higher salaries than their previous stops. Even at Tesla — where he is most relentless about his mythmaking — this grueling pace made for extraordinarily high turnover, especially for employees who had to deal with Musk regularly. One former senior employee told me that the culture shift when Musk took over at Tesla was like when Voldemort's Death Eaters took over the halls of Hogwarts. Do not be surprised if more Twitter employees head for the exits.


For Musk, having a mission is key, because having a mission attracts money. It allows him to rope in governments, which are more than willing to outsource their intractable problems. Despite his complaints about government subsidies, Musk's companies are dependent on them. A Los Angeles Times review in 2015 revealed that he had taken over $4 billion in government funding at that point. And since then, Tesla has received billions in government-created regulatory credits from combustion-engine-car companies, over $1 billion in tax breaks and grants to build out more factories in Nevada and New York, billions in contracts for SpaceX, and even payroll benefits from the pandemic stimulus bill. Even his more far-flung ideas have soaked up government cash. According to a Wall Street Journal investigation, The Boring Company, Musk's tunnel-based solution to urban traffic, has been trying to collect government subsidies all over the country (and in Canada) despite only building a single tunnel in Las Vegas.

Selling the dream is what turned Tesla's stock into a superstar since it went public. People bought Tesla to be part of Musk's mission. It didn't matter that the company only became profitable last year, or that it had an unreliable lineup of vehicles, or that more-established automakers were poised to catch up to its technology. Any journalist or investor who questioned Musk or his mission then — just like now — was subject to bullying and harrassment. The evangelists, the faithful, made Tesla the most valuable car company in the world (for now) based on how Musk said it would change the future. Call me cynical, but I don't see that happening for Twitter. Musk may claim he bought the company in the name of free speech all he wants, but unlike with his other ventures, he simply does not have enough people out there — be they the media, his customers, his employees, or his users — who believe.

No time to waste

A Musk company is usually the first, and sometimes the only, company in a specific market. Tesla, for most of its existence, has been the sexiest option for high-end electric cars. SpaceX has little competition when it comes to delivering payloads to space. Doing business in a field without competitors (and with generous investors) creates room to test new technologies, and sometimes fail at them. Musk tried to make an auto factory without human workers, and ended up having to trash billions of dollars worth of useless robots when it didn't work (just like industry experts told him it wouldn't). To make up for the lost time and space, Tesla ended up having to set up a very human-run manufacturing line in a tent outside its California factory.

There won't be as much time for these monkeyshines at Twitter. I probably don't need to tell you that it is not at the top of the social-media pecking order. The company — which derives over 90% of its revenue from advertising — has been squeezed by larger competitors like Facebook and Google and lapped by newer, hotter platforms like TikTok. In other words, advertisers don't need Twitter if they want to reach people. Revenue is shrinking, but Twitter still has to pay $1.3 billion in debt annually for its own leveraged buyout. Twitter has never made $1.3 billion in a year, and Musk has never run a company in this situation. In the past, he has had time — and money from investors — to burn. And even with all of these advantages, he still almost bankrupted Tesla in 2018.

The house of Musk has never weathered an economic downturn. Both Tesla and SpaceX rode decade-long economic-boom cycles with interest rates set at zero to gain the footholds they have today. Now that the economy is slowing down, debt is getting more expensive to take on, and money is becoming more scarce. To pay Twitter's bills, Musk will likely have to sell some of his most liquid assets — Tesla shares. This year the stock has fallen by half, and the prospects for growth tech stocks are worsening next year as the Fed continues to raise interest rates. Demand is weakening in China, a huge market for Tesla, and the company brand is hurting as a result of all of Musk's social-media antics. To deal with these headwinds, any competent CEO needs to have a plan. Based on his most recent quarterly calls with investors — the ones where he is supposed to talk about plans to make more money — Musk does not have one.

There is no pivot in which Musk suddenly becomes serious and starts acting like a normal executive. The frenzied, callous, throwing-ideas-at-the-wall boss from hell you see on Twitter is the one people actually get in Musk world. It's always been that way. Somehow, during a bull market, in a decade when tech was on top of the world and he was the king of it — that style worked. Now it won't.

Today's Calming Influence

Scott Galloway, NYU Sterns School of Business:

As societies become wealthier and more educated, the reliance on a super being, and church attendance goes down, but they still look for idols.

Into that void have stepped technology leaders because technology is the closest thing we have to magic.

Our new Jesus was Steve Jobs, and now Elon Musk has taken on that mantle. And, every ridiculously mean, non-sensical, irrational move he makes is somehow seen as chess, not checkers - we're just not privy to his genius yet.

Christiane Amanpour

What Makes Us Crazy

Sometimes people start "acting funny" and we look at them like they've gone a little nutty.

And if they keep moving further away from what we've come to regard as "normal", we'll prob'ly call them crazy.

But just as often as not, they're in the process of rejecting what they've come to regard as freakish conformity, or soul-killing banality, or plain old ordinary boring routine, and trying to break out into some fresh new sunshine - or whatever other sappy cliche comes to mind for ya.

The point is most of them aren't going crazy at all - they're trying to get un-crazy.

But other than the usual suspects of conformity and banality (et al), what makes us crazy?

Here's some brand new shit for us all to worry about in this modern world, as published at WaPo: (pay wall)

The nonstop scam economy is costing us more than just money

Relentless waves of sophisticated phone and online scams are impacting people’s mental health

Pamela McCarroll doesn’t have the luxury of ignoring phone calls from unknown numbers.

The 30-year old is undergoing treatment for long-term colon cancer in Fairfax County, Va., and never knows whether it could be a doctor, a hospital with test results, or someone trying to schedule an appointment.

Unfortunately, that means she’s fielding up to 20 spam phone calls every day on her mobile phone, adding to her already sky-high levels of stress. Since her diagnosis in August 2019, the number of scam attempts has shot up while the topics have gotten strangely specific, including Medicare or senior benefits.

“I’ve gotten some calls about funeral insurance. That kind of bums me out,” McCarroll says. “I’ve got cancer, but you don’t have to rub it in.”

We’re living in an era of constant scams. The technology and techniques behind them have improved, while attempts to crack down have largely stalled. For the millions of people in the United States dealing with scam attempts like McCarroll, there doesn’t seem to be any meaningful relief in sight.

We mostly think about scam calls and texts in terms of their financial costs to the people who fall for them. Consumers reported $5.8 billion in fraud to the Federal Trade Commission last year, a 70 percent increase from 2020. Falling for or engaging with one scam can lead to an increase in attempts. According to RoboKiller, an app for screening robocalls on phones, an average smartphone owner in the United States will get an estimated 42 spam texts and 28 spam calls a month. Once a number or email address spreads into more spammer databases, it can be bought and sold by the companies involved in the booming scam industry.

Someone could come across any or all of these scams in a week: A text message from UPS with a link promising a delivery. A prerecorded phone call about a car warranty or bank issue. Emails that appear to be from Amazon or Apple customer service asking you to log in to your account. Shady replies on Facebook Marketplace for a chair you listed. Maybe a wrong-number message on WhatsApp from a chatty stranger.

Beyond the financial repercussions, there’s a steep emotional cost for people who don’t lose a dollar, mental health experts say. Constant scam attempts can increase stress levels and strain relationships. Their negative impact on mental health is even worse when the scammers target people based on perceived weaknesses, like advanced age, loneliness or, in McCarroll’s case, an ongoing illness. That anxiety can spread to their worried family members, they say.

Irene Kenyon’s family was in a good position to avoid scams. She’s the director of risk intelligence at risk assessment company FiveBy, and her father has two engineering master’s degrees. But in 2017, she got a panicked call from her mother. Her father had gone out and bought $6,000 in gift cards at Target for a phone scammer who claimed to be their grandson. The man on the phone said he was in jail and needed to be bailed out. By the time Kenyon reached her dad, it was too late. He’d read the gift card numbers out over the phone.

“What these people do is play on people’s emotions, they play on the fact that grandparents love their grandkids more than you can imagine, and all their logic will fly out the window,” Kenyon says. They reported the case to the police, and a special program in their state was able to reimburse them for part of the lost money.

At the time, her parents were embarrassed and she was angry, but now they talk every day and go over anything suspicious. She has taught them to never answer any of the unknown calls they get a day and to look closely at emails. She says they’re still tense about falling for something, and she worries about them day and night.

Many of these scams are easier to spot or screen with a little training, like looking for a misspelled email address or ignoring an unknown phone number on caller ID. Others scams are incredibly believable thanks to technology like spoofing, which lets the attacker fake a call from the number of someone you know, maybe even yourself.

Perspective: I saved my sister from a Social Security scam. Listen to the actual call.

A proud and protective mom of two adult daughters, Renee makes sure they both call her once a day to check in. When it looked like her oldest was calling at 11 p.m. on a recent weeknight, Renee and her husband were confused but answered right away. They were met with the gravelly voice of an unknown man on the other end.

“He was very agitated. He was very angry, very threatening,” says Renee, who spoke on the condition that her last name not be used for fear of being targeted again. “The first thing he said was, ‘I’m going to kill her. I’m going to get her. I don’t want to have to hurt her. I’ve been to jail before, and I don’t want to go back.’ ”

The scammer said he was holding Renee’s daughter hostage and wanted money to let her go, asking repeatedly for her Cash App information — an app Renee didn’t recognize. He threatened to slit her daughter’s throat. Renee believed him completely but managed to stay calm and continue talking to him, slowly collecting more hints that the situation wasn’t what it seemed. They sent police to their daughter’s home, where they found her safe and confused. The man was a scammer who had faked her number. When it was over, Renee’s calm broke and she began crying.

“I feel grateful, but I feel like they’ve invaded my space and my peace and that was trauma,” Renee says.

Those feelings are common, says Matthew Mimiaga, a professor at UCLA.

“Scam victims often suffer from a decrease in life satisfaction and are likely to have higher levels of anxiety and lower levels of happiness,” Mimiaga says.

Their lingering anxiety has real, physical side effects including feeling restless, wound-up or on edge, Mimiaga says. It could lead to people being easily fatigued, having difficulty concentrating, or even having headaches and other unexplained pains.

Anyone can be a target for phone and email scams, but the fallout can be worse for people who are older, says Iris Waichler, a licensed clinical social worker and author of “Role Reversal, How to Take Care of Yourself and Your Aging Parents.”

“They’re extremely vulnerable and lonely. The reason they’re targets is when someone reaches out, they’re sometimes just grateful to talk to somebody,” Waichler says.

Older people may already be worried about losing independence or appearing to have diminished mental capacity, and are more likely to keep an experience with scammers to themselves out of shame. The adult could be left with lower self esteem and higher self doubt, Waichler says.

There have been some changes to try to help people avoid scams, at least over texts and phone calls. In 2019, large carriers agreed to use technology known as STIR/SHAKEN to authenticate who is calling to reduce robocalls and spoofed numbers. It’s being adopted by smaller cellphone carriers this year. The FTC has also proposed a rule to address robotexts, but it’s still pending. Phone makers are trying to combat the issue on their side with features that label some calls as possible spam, while companies like RoboKiller are making their own apps to screen and block.

Scammers, however, are always looking for new ways to adapt — and new targets to go after.

“As long as there’s billions of dollars on the other end of it, it’s not going to stop,” says Chester Wisniewski, a principal research scientist at security company Sophos.

For now, awareness and a few tools can lower the stress but not make it go away.

Pamela McCarroll’s husband, voice actor Michael McCarroll, has a blocking app from his carrier, but he made sure it was off when his wife was in the hospital for a week this month. Every time he saw a call from an unknown number, his stomach dropped and he thought, “Oh God.” He was thankful it was just spam, every time.

Today's Tweet

I thought Steve McQueen killed this thing.

A robot made of magnetic slime could be deployed inside the body to perform tasks such as retrieving objects swallowed by accident.https://t.co/EYpnx56vNO pic.twitter.com/zA3hMO80xQ

— New Scientist (@newscientist) March 31, 2022

Smarten Up

Smarter Every Day - a YouTube series all about the uber-nerdly techno stuff.

The guy knows his shit.

Social media companies are taking down phony accounts (bots, etc) at a rate of 12 per second (over a million every day).

The big takeaway:

BEWARE THE NUDGE

And no matter what else - don't run and hide. Getting us to disengage is pretty much the whole point of the exercise in a Divide-and-Conquer strategy.