It has been nearly a decade since hackers dumped huge amounts of personal data from Ashley Madison, the infamous dating site which, back incatered mostly to men who wanted to cheat on their wives. Now, that story is back in the media, partly because of a recent Netflix documentary about it. You can see me in that series, a nerdy talking head in clips from various TV news dating frombecause I was one of the journalists breaking the story.
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But neither the Netflix series nor the handful of other documentaries still in the works get at what was truly revolutionary — click the following article chilling — about the Ashley Madison affair. People have been trying to have affairs with strangers for thousands of years. Ashley Madison was never really about that. Its site became a prototype for what social media platforms such as Facebook are becoming: places so packed with AI-generated nonsense that they feel like spam cages, or information prisons where the overweight dating messages that get through are auto-generated ads.
After a rebrand, Ashley Madison is dating owned by Ruby Life and "ashley" itself as a spicy dating site for married people. But back then, it marketed itself as a social networking site for men seeking affairs with women. In latea group calling itself Impact Team got angry at the site and hacked into its servers.
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The group grabbed a bunch of user data and code, then posted it on Reddit with the claim that 95 per cent of the people on the site were men. I was intrigued. How could all those men be having affairs, if there were virtually no women on the site? With the help of two hackers and a database expert, I decided to find out. What I discovered was a bizarre scam — though it was far dating like Westworld ashley US reality show Cheaters. The company had systematically created an army of fake women, mostly very simple chatbots called engagers, who would flirt with men to lure them into paying for a subscription to the site.
As we pored over the code, we found that, although there were a few human women on the site, more dating 11 million interactions logged in the database were between human men and female bots. And the men had to pay for every single message they sent. There were real women behind the curtain, though.
I joined Ashley Madison looking to have fun
We found company emails in the data dump and discovered that Avid Life Media was also paying a small number of workers to generate fake profiles for more than 70, engager bots. One of these workers sued the company indating that she had been required to type up so many fake profiles that she permanently injured her wrists the lawsuit was dropped in It gets weirder: we found an internal email moonlewdeva onlyfans employees discussed a tool they had built called fraud-to-engager, which automatically converted fraudulent profiles from go here Avid Life Media sites into Ashley Madison bot vietbunny onlyfans. At the time, I was shocked by the sheer number of fake women.
Nine years later, this could describe any number of social media sites that have become swamped with bots and AI-generated absurdity — and charge you for the privilege of interacting with techno-phantoms. The problem is, human beings are interacting with these Ashley images and suggestions, in some cases imagining they are engaging with real people. It is like the whole world has become the Ashley Madison ofand the more we want to talk to each other about it, the less likely we are to find a human to talk to.
Annalee Newitz is a science journalist and author. You can follow them annaleen and their website is techsploitation. Receive a weekly dose of discovery source your inbox! We'll also keep you up to date with New Scientist events and special offers.
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