OSF - 2.10 - scams - pay attention!

OSF - 2.10 - scams - pay attention!

Yes, I know.  Some of you are getting bored with this, and thinking that this is awfully simplistic, and you don't need to be told these simple things about keeping yourself safe.

Yes, I know.  This is more a reminder than presenting you with anything startling and you.  Please, pay attention.  Please, please, please.

When I first started giving these presentations, here in town, in fact, in the very first seminar that I presented on this topic, somebody showed up who I already knew.  In fact, I had worked with and helped him out with one of his own projects.  And, when I had finished the presentation, he was kind enough to give me some feedback on the presentation, and tell me that he wasn't impressed.  He was an intelligent person, who had run his own business, and he did not need to be told that scammers use social engineering, and try to instill a sense of urgency in you, and that it was never a good idea to buy a bunch of gift cards, and read the numbers to somebody over the phone.  He did admit that, possibly, there were others in the audience who were less intelligent than he was, and who didn't know these things, and so he did admit that I probably did have to speak to the lowest common denominator.  But he wasn't impressed.

About five months later, I got a call from him.  (In the middle of a family dinner, as it happened.)  He, rather frantically, told me that someone had called up, and using various social engineering tricks, had instilled in him a sense of urgency, and had convinced him to go and buy a bunch of gift cards and read the numbers over the phone.  He now wanted to know how to get his money back.

As I have previously pointed out, this is impossible.

More importantly, yes, security very often sounds simple.  Security very often consists more of reminding people, than informing them of anything new and startling.  Please be advised.  Pay attention to this stuff, anyway.  Your friends and neighbors are being scammed, hoodwinked, defrauded, and stolen from.  And probably all of them thought that this stuff was boring and simple, too.

As I noted, you may think that social engineering is just a fancy way of saying "lying."  In regard to scams, that is probably true.  But social engineering is actually a complicated field, which has legitimate uses in all kinds of areas.  I'm a teacher, and we use it in education.  (I worked with another instructor who had a habit of cycling through a series of changes in tone of voice, tempo of presentation, and emotional presentation, that had nothing to do with the topics he was actually presenting.  He just used it to keep students from falling asleep.)  Social engineering is based on areas of psychology, and there is a legitimate billion dollar industry based on its use.  It's called advertising.  (No, I'm not going to argue with you if you want to say that advertising isn't a legitimate business.  But it's not illegal.)  Huge amounts of money go into studies of how to get people to react the way you want them to.  Think of politicians you don't like.  How do you think they get people to support them?

In the case of scammers on the phone, some of them are really good at it, and may be specialists.  However, it is more likely that the person you are talking to on the phone has been given a script that has been prepared by a specialist in social engineering, and the script has been designed to get the majority of people to fall for it.  Like I said, a bit later we are going to talk about the organizations behind these scams.  They use social engineering to make money.  They've made a lot of money because they are very good at it.

Be prepared.

Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2026/02/osf-205-scams-grandparent-scams-and.html

Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2026/02/online-scams-frauds-and-other-attacks.html

Next: TBA

OSF - 2.05 - scams - grandparent scams and social engineering

OSF - 2.05 - scams - grandparent scams and social engineering

Now, as I say, I am old.  I am a grandparent, and, in fact, a great-grandparent.  So, I am going to start with the grandparents scam.  No, it is not just because I am a grandfather, and a great-grandfather, but also because talking about the grandparents scam allows me to point out some of the important techniques that scammers will use against you.

This one pretty much always comes by phone.  The phone rings, and I pick it up, and a female voice, sometimes rather shakily, as if the person was in distress, asks, "Grandpa?"  So, of course, being a caring grandfather, I respond, "Sophie?"  And the voice on the other end says "Yes!  Grandpa, I'm in trouble!"

Now, of course, this person is not Sophie.  This person might not even be female.  I have a video of someone, conducting a scam, using a bank of phones in a railway station (which shows you how old the video is), and, using multiple phones, and changing his voice so that he changes gender, job title, and level of authority, is conducting a scam on someone, and using himself, with a different voice, to verify his identity to the person over the phone.  But let's get back to our grandparents scammer.

The scammer on the phone, who I have mentally identified as my granddaughter Sophie, is not my granddaughter.  The person on the phone is using social engineering techniques.  (You can, if you wish, think that "social engineering" is just a fancy way of saying "lying," but there ae a great many techniques, some of them quite sophisticated, and, even when you know about them, they generally do work.)  One of the techniques being, using me to give the scammer information, which the scammer is going to then use against me.  The scammer has only had to say one word, grandpa, and then I have given the scammer the name of my granddaughter.

This is not the only social engineering technique.  These people are specialists, and are using a series of techniques called cold reading, allowing them to "read" information about you, without you being aware of giving that information away.  These techniques are used by entertainers presenting themselves as mentalists and mind readers.

So, by now flustered and distressed myself, I say what about Mavis?  (Making the situation even worse: I have given away another piece of information to the scammer.)  So the scammer goes on to say that, yes, the two of them are together, and they are both in distress.  At this point, the story may vary.  They may be in jail, for a crime that they didn't commit, of course, but, given that it is a Friday night, if somebody doesn't bail them out they are going to be in jail over the weekend, until they can appear before a judge.  As I say, it may be that they are not in jail, but have been in an accident with another driver, it may be that the other driver is intending to call the police and get them thrown in jail unless the damage to the car is paid for immediately.  It may be that they are in hospital, and need funding for medical care.  As I say, there are various types of stories, but the stories all have some common themes.  For one thing, there is a sense of urgency.  The money, and the decision to send the money, must be made right away, it is urgent.  They are in a distressing situation, which is not their fault, but, unless the situation is dealt with right away, they will be in difficulty, and possibly for an extended period of time.  Their need is urgent, but the situation is not their fault, and can be rectified, and the money recovered, at a later date, but they need immediate funding, right now.

This is the grandparent scam.  This is relying on the fact that grandparents do love their grandchildren, and are willing to do pretty much anything for them.  It is also somewhat relying on the fact that the grandparents probably do not have daily contact with the grandchildren.  They probably don't know precisely where their grandchildren are, at any given point in time.  The grandparents believe that they know their grandchildren's voices, but that may be more of a belief than a reality.  When I discuss the grandparents scam, pretty much every time, somebody brings up the fact that artificial intelligence is now capable of generating a pretty good facsimile of any person's voice.  That is true, and there are definitely systems which, given three seconds of recorded audio of someone's voice, can generate an almost flawless version of the person's voice.  But, generally speaking, and partly relying on the fact that voice identification over the phone is somewhat limited by the fact that some of the sounds and intonations of the voice are eliminated by telephone transmission, it is basically the fact that you believe that the person is your grandchild, which makes you identify the person as your grandchild.  Deepfake voice generation is not really necessary, and scammers generally take the easiest route.

So, social engineering is at play here, big time.  There is the fact that you have provided the information which allows the scammer to claim to be your grandchild.  You have provided the name, right at the beginning of the conversation.  The scammer retails a story which identifies a distressing situation.  You do not wish your grandchild to be in distress, and so you are primed to help.  This story that the scammer has relayed also instills a sense of urgency: the money must be sent now, or things will get very much worse, and, in addition, the scammers story indicates that the distress will be of short duration: if you send the money now, the situation will be remedy shortly, and you will receive your money back.  The urgency also shortcuts authentication steps that you might normally take.  All of this is standard fare for the grandparent scam, and for a few other scams as well.

The money is to be sent right away.  It is probably after hours, particularly for a bank, and so sending some kind of wire transfer is not available as an option.  Generally speaking, the way that you were to get the money to the agency on the end of the other end of the line which requires it, is through gift cards.  Sometimes they may also suggest cryptocurrency, but that is still not terribly common, and, of course, one of the major points about the scam is the sense of urgency, and so gift cards seem to present the most viable, and certainly most common, option.

Now, particularly when the situation involves the police, and may require bail money, you should know that the police don't take gift cards.  There are no bail money gift cards available in the store.  The gift cards maybe specified to you, as to a particular type, but, generally speaking, the scammers don't particularly care.  They will instruct you to go to the store, get a bunch of gift cards totaling a few thousand dollars, and then come back, call them back, or sometimes even stay on the line and go to the store, and then read the numbers from the gift cards over the phone.

A little bit later I'm going to go into some detail on the organizations behind these scammers, and particularly, the ability to extract money from gift cards of various types.  At this point, the only thing that you really need to know is that the scammers are organized, and that, as soon as you read the numbers over the phone, the scammer on the other end, even while still talking to you, is reselling those numbers to another specialist in organized crime, whose specialty is extracting the value from the cards.  So, as soon as you read the numbers of those gift cards, over the phone, that value is gone.  It cannot be recovered.  As I say, the scammers are organized, and they have specialized specialists, and that value has been extracted almost as soon as the last digit leaves your mouth.  There is no point in trying to get that value back.  It's gone.

Now, fortunately for the story that I started off with at the beginning of this piece, there is absolutely no one in my family whose name is Sophie.  There is absolutely no one in my family whose name is Mavis.  When my actual granddaughter calls me, and says Grandpa, and I respond Sophie? she knows what is going on, and will immediately respond, in a somewhat exasperated voice, no grandpa, it's me!  They know that I am a security specialist, and they know what is going on here.

What is going on here is that I am giving misinformation to the scammer.  Now, you can do it that way, or you can have a kind of family code word, or password, to identify yourself in a truly distressing situation when you do actually need monetary help.  But, forewarned is forearmed.  Being aware of the nature of the scam, and then discussing it with your family, you can come up with some kind of plan to prevent yourself from being taken advantage of, while still allowing you to help your family if they're truly is a need to do so.

Online scams, frauds, and other attacks (OSF series postings)

Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2026/02/osf-201-scams-scammers-vs-spammers.html

Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2026/02/online-scams-frauds-and-other-attacks.html

Next: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2026/02/osf-210-scams-pay-attention.html

Grok

The latest Grok ad on the social-media-platform-formerly-known-as-Twitter implies that, had Galileo pulled out a cell phone and called up the Grok app, he would not have been put on trial for heresy.

Mind you, had Galileo whipped out a smartphone and called up the Grok app, he probably would have been burned at the stake for witchcraft.

(Wait.  Does this mean that X is admitting that Grok is based on 16th century technology?)

OSF - 2.01 - scams - scammers vs spammers

OSF - 2.01 - scams - scammers vs spammers

Even though they are possibly intertwined, and sometimes very tightly, I suppose that I should start out making a distinction between scammers and spammers.

And, in order to do that, I suppose that the Green Card Lottery Spam is fairly instructive in this regard.

Scammers are out to get you.  They want to attack you, and they want to steal things from you.  Scammers are confidence men, and fraudsters, and crooks.  Their intention is to steal from you.  They are bad guys.

Now, a lot of spammers are out to get you anyway.  But, and this was the case with the green card lottery spam, a lot of people just think that spam is the same as advertising.  It's just advertising that's really, really cheap.  At least in the mind of the spammer.  Well, the minds of *some* spammers.  As I say, scammers and spammers tend to be really tightly intertwined, in a lot of cases.

But, there are people who try to make the case that spam is just a form of advertising.  It's just advertising you don't pay for.  Now, of course, if the person who is doing the spamming is running a legitimate business, then they have legitimate business expenses, and legitimate income, and they will have a budget for advertising.  And they will advertise in regular advertising channels.  But, of course, there are always those who are trying to do it on the cheap.  But if they're trying to do it on the cheap, then, very likely, the products that they are trying to sell you are also cheap.

Now, the guy who originated the Green Card Lottery Spam, the originator of the whole field of spam, was actually a lawyer.  The green card is a certain type of visa or residency permit in the United States.  If you have a green card, you are allowed to stay in the United States, and (and this is most important) you are allowed to work and make money while you are doing so.  So in those dim and distant carefree days, before anybody cared what ICE was or did, lots of people wanted to come to the United States and get a green card.  Green cards were available for certain types of jobs, or people coming from certain countries and jurisdictions, and other people could apply for them.  But there was a certain allocation, a certain number of green cards, that would be issued in any given year, and, when various formal applications didn't make up the numbers, then there would be a sort of a windfall allocation of green cards.  These allocations were usually issued to immigration offices in different locations around the United States.  And, if you had an application in at one of those offices, you won the lottery.  You, basically, automatically got issued a green card.

Because of this, people started to think that there was some kind of way that you could game the system.  There was some way that you could predict where the green cards would be issued.  Which immigration offices would get an allocation of green cards at the end of the year.  And, of course, some immigration lawyers, who were less than scrupulous about the actual truth of the situation, would encourage their clients, and particularly potential clients, to believe that they knew how the system worked, and would be able to submit your immigration application to the offices where the lottery allocations would end up.  I have never actually heard that anyone did, really, have such inside information.  And if they did have such inside information, it was more in the way of corruption, than extensive knowledge.  So this myth of the green card lottery was always based pretty much on fraud.

However, lots, and lots, and lots of immigration lawyers did spread the word, and encourage the myth, and solicit clients and customers on the basis that they had an inside track on the green card lottery.  So, the guy who did the green card lottery spam was one of these low-level con artists.  Whether he was actually outright lying to his clients, or just implying that he knew more about the system than it was possible to know, it was basically a fraud.

In any case, he decided to advertise his services, having some kind of an access to a system that allowed him to send email to people on the internet, such as it was, and he did.

This does all mean that there's a bit of a gray area.  Some people think that you need, and sometimes even deserve, to conduct business anyway you can.  And, if sending out a lot of messages, at no particular cost or effort to you, is a legitimate way to advertise for people who need, or might possibly want, your products or services.  But it's still doing it on the cheap.  And, if you really had a decent product, would you really need to use spamming to advertise your product, or service?

So, there is the possibility, that people who are sending you spam are not, necessarily, or inherently, actually crooks.  There might be some legitimate products that are out there being advertised in this cheap way, because the person who has made the product, or is providing the service, just simply doesn't have the money.  So, let's say, that there is a possibility, however small, that people who are sending spam are not actually fraudsters.

The thing is that spam is now a business. And, those who engage in sending spam, on a large scale, with organized utilities to assist it, well, they are crooks.  For a number of years, and actually for a couple of decades, spam was annoying, and increasingly annoying, but it wasn't exactly a business.  And then one day somebody realized how they could use malware, and specifically computer viruses, in order to send spam, and, indeed, to set up a business selling spamming services to someone who want to anyone who wanted to send out spam.  And, most of the time, that meant that people, both those who were creating the spambotnets, and those who were using them, were all crooks.  They were all scammers, and attackers, and fraudsters.  So, these days, the possibility that you will encounter somewhat innocent spam, with no criminal intent, is getting pretty small.

But we'll look at that in some more detail when we start talking about how do I identify spam.  First of all, let's talk about some specific scams, where people are trying to attack you and steal your money, in a variety of ways.

Online scams, frauds, and other attacks (OSF series postings)

Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2026/02/online-scams-frauds-and-other-attacks.html

Next: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2026/02/osf-205-scams-grandparent-scams-and.html

Online scams, frauds, and other attacks (and how to protect yourself from them) OSF - 0.00 - Introduction, table of contents, and related postings

Online scams, frauds, and other attacks (and how to protect yourself from them)

OSF - 0.00 - Introduction, table of contents, and related postings

I have studied this field for over four decades now, so it's a little bit strange that it's one of the last for which I created a presentation, and which I'm writing up.

You have to understand that I love the Internet.  You have to understand how *much* I love the Internet.

When I got on to the Internet, well, we didn't even call it the Internet.  (Yet.)  We had no particular name for it.  We just knew that it was this marvelous system, that allowed us to identify people who had the same interests that we did, and allowed us to communicate with them, all around the world, basically absolutely free of charge.

You have to understand how *old* I am.  Cell phones actually did exist, but nobody had one.  I had access to one: I worked for the Government Telecommunications Agency, and, because we were dealing with telecommunications, we had a cell phone in the van.  It was built into the van, and it consisted of four large boxes of components, which were stuffed out of the way under the seats and so forth.  No regular person had a cell phone, nobody had a cell phone at home, nobody did any texting.

Also, long distance phone calls cost the earth.  They were extremely expensive.  If you wanted to communicate with somebody, in any kind of detail, and you didn't have a company that would pay for the charges of calling them, you had to get an envelope, and a piece of paper, and a stamp, and make sure you have the address of the person to whom you wanted to communicate, and you wrote a letter.  And then you went to the post office, and you mailed the letter.  And then you waited for the letter to be delivered to them, and for them to get around to writing you an answer.  In another letter.

That's how long ago this was.

So, this wonderful, magical thing, that allowed you to communicate with anybody (well, there were only about a thousand of us who were on it at the time), without any charge at all, and not only that, but to identify people who were interested in the same oddball topics that we were interested in, it was just glorious!  And all of the people who were on it, knew just how magical it was, and made sure that we all behaved politely when we were communicating with each other.  And we made sure that we didn't misuse this wonderful system!

And then came the Green Card Lottery Spam.

Yes, I *am* that old.  I saw the Green Card Lottery Spam.  I also saw the furor, and absolute outrage, that resulted from it.  (And the subsequent discussions that came up with the term "spam.")

Actually, at the time, we didn't know it was spam.  We didn't have a word for it.  We only knew that it was an egregious breach of etiquette, and a waste of transmission resources, and that the person who had done this evil thing should be thrown off the system that we were only just beginning to call the Internet, and that nobody should ever be allowed to do anything like it again.

But, of course, it had been done for a commercial purpose, and business saw the opportunities, and the Internet has never been the same since.

For me, the dream died very hard.  And every time somebody used the Internet for spam, or spreading malware, or attacking people with frauds, or spreading pornography, I almost physically hurt.  This thing that I loved so much was being abused.  And every time that it was abused, it degraded.

Actually, it was fairly soon after I got on to the Internet, and I think even before the Green Card Lottery Spam, that I started seeing discussions about these new kinds of programs that would copy themselves.  And I thought that that was really interesting, and so I started researching them.  At first it just seemed interesting, and possibly annoying for the very few people who had encountered them, and then it became a problem.  And I became a specialist in malware.  And, as it turns out, that meant that I had to become a specialist in spam, and scams, and frauds, and all kinds of really, really painful stuff that was happening on the Internet.

This means that it is *perfectly* safe to scan the QR code that you see here, as long as you remember that I am an expert in malware, and therefore know every possible way to trick people into installing malware on their computers or phones.  (Actually, all that the QR code here contains is a bunch of contact information about me, and where I post stuff on the Internet.)

But I didn't do presentations on the frauds and scams, and how you could protect yourself against them.  By this time, mostly I was dealing with people who were, in fact, working in security.  So, they didn't need to be told that there were dangerous people out there, and dangerous things that you had to watch out for.  So it is only been recently, since I haven't been working as much directly with my colleagues in security, that I have started providing seminars to the general public on frauds, and scams, and spam, and people calling you up pretending to be your grandchildren, and people calling you up pretending to be from your credit card company, and trying to attack and defraud you in various ways.

Now, I know that a lot of companies, and banks, and police departments, and all kinds of other people have decided to try and prove how much they care about your safety by providing seminars and workshops and pamphlets frauds on scams and these types of attacks that can come at you, everyday, on your phone, or via your email.  The thing is, most of the people who are making up these seminars or pamphlets have other jobs that they are supposed to do, and can't really afford the time to actually study this type of stuff, and, in particular, study it for years and years and years and years.

I have.

So that's what this material is about.  It's about people who are trying to attack you, and defraud you, and steal from you, and are doing it the easy way: simply calling you on the phone, or sending you an email, and sitting in the comfort of their own home, or, more likely, sitting in some sweatshop boiler room, and being forced to call you, and lying to you, and tricking you into giving away information that will allow them to steal your money.

As I say, I am old.  I am really, really old.  So, I tend to give these presentations to old people like myself.  Old people who may not have as much experience with fraudsters, confidence men, scammers, and spammers, and all the rest of it.

The thing is, the attacks are not always simply aimed at old people.  Sometimes they are specifically aimed at old people, but a lot of times they are just aimed at whoever answers the phone.  So, even if you're not old, even if you are a young kid, who thinks that being a TikTok influencer means that you understand the Internet, I can tell you, you do not understand the Internet.  I have worked with this technology for more than five decades, and I have a lot of experience and I know an awful lot of things that you don't know.  And, believe me, what you don't know can, in fact, hurt you.  So, even if you think that you are really up on the latest technology, you should probably pay attention anyway.

An awful lot of the material that I am talking about is stuff that I have personally encountered.  For one thing, it allows me to ensure that I am dealing with the latest issues of scams, frauds, spam, and various other attacks.  It allows me to tell you, in detail, how these attacks are perpetrated, and how do you identify them, and therefore protect yourself against them.  So far, in terms of structuring this stuff, I'm going to start out with specific scams, even starting with a number of them that probably come to you more by telephone, than by email.  In a later section, I'll go into how to identify indicators in texts, and an email, that indicate that this is spam, and some kind of attack.

Online Scams and Frauds (OSF) series postings:

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2026/02/online-scams-frauds-and-other-attacks.html (this one)

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2026/02/osf-201-scams-scammers-vs-spammers.html

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2026/02/osf-205-scams-grandparent-scams-and.html

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2026/02/osf-210-scams-pay-attention.html

Related postings:

Where's the line between "negligence" and "scam"?

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/01/wheres-line-between-negligence-and-scam.html

Grief scams

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/05/grief-scams.html

Grief fraud

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2022/05/grief-fraud.html

Why do people fall for grief scams?

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/why-do-people-fall-for-grief-scams.html

Friend scams

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2026/01/friend-scams.html

Discord attacks (Sermon 5 - Heretics)

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/02/sermon-5-heretics.html

Online safety and other seminars and presentations

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/01/online-safety-seminar.html

Really?

I'm not quite sure why it was so profoundly weird.

First of all, I was there.

And then I saw the promotional puff piece.

The promo had interviews with those involved, and I'm glad of the chance to get to know more about what they intended to do.  The intention was good, I think.  There is always a difference between aspiration and execution, and, in this case, the gap was a lot wider than normal.

I also know some of the people involved in the promo, and, generally, they are a bit more grounded in reality.  In this case, there was a lot of video that had absolutely nothing to do with the event.  Or, as far as I could tell, even the idea of the event.  Lovely video, yes, but completely orthogonal to either what was planned or what actually happened.

So, it was weird ...

AI - 2.01 - genAI - build use LLMs

AI - 2.01 - genAI - build use LLMs

Having discussed some of the issues around artificial intelligence, in general, and some of the various historical approaches, we are now, finally, ready to talk about generative artificial intelligence and large language models.  These are the backbones of the current crop of artificial intelligence products that are being promoted quite heavily in our society.

As previously noted, this is built on the mathematics behind Bayesian analysis, Markov chain analysis, neural networks, and so forth.  Using the mathematics here, the companies that have built generative artificial intelligence chatbots have created statistical models based on enormous amounts of text data.  This text data has come from books, it has come from the news media, and, of course, lots and lots and lots of it has come from social media.  Social media is a free source of a huge amount of text based on people conversing with each other.

Building these statistical models is not easy, and the resulting statistical models, themselves, are not easy to understand.  As a matter of fact, if they are honest, the companies that have built these statistical models will, themselves, admit that they do not understand everything that is in the models that they have built.  After all, it is not they that have built the statistical models.  The statistical models have been built by computer programs that have done statistical analysis of these masses of text.

It is hard to explain just how complicated this process is.  In one sense, it is very simple.  It is simply looking at a lot of text, and making a statistical analysis of which words come in what order, what word comes after a certain word, and how often, with some extra statistics thrown in to indicate how often this word comes four words after that word, and so forth.  But the thing is, that the statistical analysis goes on at many levels, and the statistics that are built get modified according to the mathematics of neural networking theory, which is looking for relationships, sometimes relationships between the statistics themselves.  It's all just numbers, and it's all just ones and zeros, but it keeps on going, and the end result is enormously complex.

This is why such enormous amounts of money are being put into this effort.  Yes, there have been artificial intelligence programs that have been built on specialized computer equipment.  When IBM built Deep Blue and Watson, they were built on specialty computers, which were created specifically for the purpose of running those artificial intelligence programs.  The work that went into creating those programs, and the work that went into creating the hardware for those programs, have, certainly, spun off benefits for the fields of both hardware engineering, and program design.  But they were one-off attempts to address specific challenges.

The building of the large language models has required the construction of entire data centers.  Enormous computers, filled with what would normally be specialty processors within other computers, that have been specially designed to perform a certain type of mathematics.  This type of mathematics is one that has been widely used in generating graphics on computers, and so one particular company, formerly known simply for creating the chips that were helpful with making graphic cards for computers, has come to be enormously valuable in the midst of this race to create artificial intelligence.  I should note that the same type of mathematics is the mathematics that goes into trying to break encryption systems, so these type of chips do have more than one purpose.  Prior to the demand for these chips because of the artificial intelligence boom, a lot of people were using them to build cryptocurrency mining devices.

But now there are enormous data centers, which are, in reality, just single computers, created by putting together thousands, and sometimes millions, of these specialty processing chips.  This demand for processing power in order to accommodate research into and the use of, artificial intelligence, and particularly generative artificial intelligence, is so great that other companies are now building power plants, solely for the purpose of powering these particular data centers, solely for the purpose of using creating large language models for generative artificial intelligence.

The creation of chatbots is not new.  Microsoft, rather infamously, tried it some years ago.  They created a chatbot, and put it up on the social media platform Twitter.  In a few hours, the chatbot was taken down.  What had originally been seen as a polite and helpful commentator, had, within hours, turned into a foul mouthed combatant.  The chatbot had been designed in order to use the text that it encountered to build and improve itself.  The thing is, the conversations on social media aren't always polite.  The improvement didn't improve things any.  The chatbot learned to be a troll.

So, it turns out that, one of the things that you really need to be careful of, with regard to generative artificial intelligence chatbots, is that they don't go off the deep end.  You need to build in some kinds of restraints.  You can't just let them learn, and then accept whatever it is that they produce.  No, instead, you need to make concerted efforts to ensure that the chatbot is at least somewhat reasonable in terms of its conversation, and that it doesn't give people useful information about how to kill themselves, or how to make weapons of mass destruction, or various things like that.  Creating these restraints is known, in the field, as guardrails.

Creating guardrails turns out to be a non-trivial problem.  People who are interested in the field have attempted to get around the guardrails, and, in all too many cases, it has turned out to be surprisingly easy.  Sometimes it is the researchers who have found the ways to make chatbots spit out very dangerous information.  Sometimes, unfortunately, it is the users who have found that the chat box are all too willing to encourage them to commit suicide, and counsel them that painful ways of dying aren't really that bad if it ends up fulfilling your objective not to exist.  In addition, there is an ongoing problem, now identified as AI psychosis, which is that, partly encouraged by the publicity and promotion of the generative artificial intelligence companies, people have come to regard chat bots as having personalities.  People have created chatbots with personalities.  People have created chat bots as artificial friends, sometimes artificial lovers, and in a great many cases artificial representations of a grieving individual's dead loved ones.  A number of psychological issues are only just starting to be examined with respect to this particular risk.

We'll deal with this issue of chatbots in some detail later.  However, there is another side to generative artificial intelligence, and that is in regard to the systems that create graphical images or even video.

These systems use very similar mathematics and technologies to the text-based chat box.  However, the graphical systems are fed masses of image data, usually image data that has some accompanying text.  Therefore, the graphical systems are able to respond to prompts that are involved as queries for certain types of images, by producing images that are going to be similar to images associated with text similar to The prompt that is issued to the system.

And, now that I have used the word prompt, I have to explain it.  Most people who are dealing with artificial intelligence through chatbots are used to thinking that they are asking a question, and the chat bot is giving an answer.  This is, quite simply, not true.  Using a generative artificial intelligence chatbot means that you are issuing a prompt to the system.  The prompt is the "question" that you type in.  This system, however, does not know that this is a question.  It doesn't know what a question is.  It just knows that you have typed in certain text.  And then uses the enormous statistical model to generate a stream of text which is, statistically, probable based on the string of text that *you* typed in.  That is, the statistical model is making a match, based solely on mathematics and statistics, between the words that you have typed in, and strings of words that have followed strings that are similar to those that you typed in, in the masses of data that were fed into the system in order to create the statistical model.  This is not question and answer.  There is no understanding involved here.  What is happening is that the system, with layers and layers of mathematics, is simply generating a stream of text that is statistically probable, based on the analysis that it has previously done of tons and tons and tons of text.

Your question isn't a question.  It's just a prompt.  In cryptographic terminology, we would say that it is a seed.  It'll produce something, but what it produces is based on mathematics, not understanding.

In terms of producing graphics or video, sometimes the situation is even worse.  In terms of encrypting graphics, you have to use methods that are somewhat different from the encryption that you do with regard to text.  If you use methods that work very efficiently in hiding text, in terms of encrypting graphics, very often you will come up with a result where the original image maybe somewhat fuzzy, but you should be able to get the general idea.  That's not good in terms of encryption.  Therefore, the process that we use in encrypting graphics often uses something called diffusion.  This means that we take the actual information in the image, and move it around, so that the information is actually all still there, but it's no longer next to other information that will recreate the image and let you know what the image is and means.

When you ask a generative artificial intelligence system, which creates graphics, to create a picture for you out of something, it usually actually starts with random noise.  And then, using the same mathematics that would go into diffusing an image, so that it no longer appears to be an image, we run that process backwards.  You have heard the old joke that it's easy to create a statue of an elephant.  All you have to do is take a large block of stone, and then cut away everything that doesn't look like an elephant.  Although the process is complex and heavily mathematical, this is, essentially, what image generation generative artificial intelligence systems actually do.  They take noise, and then move it around, throwing away everything that doesn't look like an image that is similar to an image that is associated with something like the text that you typed in.  Again, there is no comprehension or understanding involved here.  This is one of the reasons why, when you first start trying to use the graphical generative artificial intelligence systems, you have to make many tries, and teach yourself, how to word a prompt so that you will get an image that is something like what you want.  (For example, these systems don't understand how many arms or legs human beings have.)  It's a bit of a trial and error and frustrating project.

AI topic and series

Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2026/02/ai-110-history-neural-nets-to-llms.html

Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2026/01/ai-000-intro-table-of-contents.html

Next: TBA