Agentic fraud
When I was in high school, I heard about AllAdvantage, a company that would stroke you a check for spending time online.
As I recall, you just had to download a viewbar that displayed the ads at the top or bottom of the browser window, and as long as your session was active, you'd essentially be paid an hourly rate to be on the net.
Of course, the person who referred me to AllAdvantage relayed that it would behoove me to find ways to nudge the mouse to keep an active session, even while away from the computer.
People had creative ideas on how to solve for this.
While building a software app with my homie Claude recently, I got to thinking how easy it would be for AI agents to boost engagement numbers, or push me over my free hobbyist tiers of vercel/supabase/etc.
And it made me nervous.
Not that any agents are likely to spam my stuff ... but who knows? The OpenClaw agents are running wild, and maybe they're working on their grappling skills.
It definitely seems like the rise of agents could spawn a frenzy of ad/engagement/etc fraud.
Will the humans retreat to the dark forest?
_