Welcome to the #AI grift economy, where tools are created not to be maintained or useful, but to extract value before abandonment. Instead of trying to sell crappy software, scammers create a coin, hype it alongside the project to drive up the coin’s price, then dump their tokens for real money.
#Cursor burned millions of dollars using AI to allegedly build a barely working browser that nobody will use, then used it as marketing hype to pump up their company’s valuation. #Gastown started as a fever-dream project that tech blogs hyped as potentially “revolutionary,” until the creator announced he’d taken money from #crypto promoters. That’s when the pattern became clear. #Clawdbot is allegedly following the exact same playbook.
http://tautvilas.lt/software-pump-and-dump/
In “The AI Con,” Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna expose this same dynamic operating at massive scale: venture capitalists “whipped into a #FOMO frenzy” poured billions into AI startups “frequently without any clear path to robust monetization,” while “dress something up as AI and investments flow.” Software-crypto pump-and-dump is just the street-level version of that systemic con.
#theaicon #aihype