Pig Butchering with Large Language Models

I have my Facebook default privacy settings locked down so that only my FB friends can see my posts on my timeline. And I only accept friend requests from folks I feel I know pretty well, and typically only those I know in meat space. But when I shared my post about selling a BMW motorcycle to my motorcycle club's group on FB, I had to change the privacy setting of that particular post from private to public so that members who weren't on my FB friends list could see it. The comments below are the result.

Take a close look at them. All of course claim to be from attractive young women. The first two of them are just short comments trying to get me to engage. The fourth one is a long missive that is probably a standard form letter with no specific detail. But the third one has enough specificity that it had me looking up the commenter's profile: a young divorced Asian woman in the fashion industry who lives in San Francisco. Possible but not likely in the BMW motorcycle owner demographic.

It was almost certainly written by an AI, using the current technology based on an artificial neural network, like the Large Language Models such as ChatGPT use. It has all sorts of detail about my post, and at first seems legit, but is really nothing much more than a rewording of what I originally posted to the group.

This is where LLMs are taking the pig butchering or romance scam artists. As they are trained with more and more data, they are just going to get better and better.