By Larry Kummer, Editor of Fabius Maximus, a multi-author website with a focus on geopolitics: 

This post describes three lessons from Ashley Madison that are dark and so seldom mentioned by our clickbait media:

1. Millions of women used Ashley Madison.
2. We become criminals for a good paycheck.
3. Bots can easily become good enough for men.

The story of the rise and fall of the Ashley Madison cheating service reveals much about us. It reminds us of old truths, such as that many men want to cheat on their spouses. It reminds us of things about which we don’t care, such as that early news stories contain much guesses and bunkum (OK so long as it’s fun and confirms our views). It reminds us of things too dark to see, such Americans’ willingness to work for criminals — and even be criminals. It reveals powerful trends not yet seen, but will shape our future.

Millions of women used Ashley Madison

GIZMODO journalist Annalee Newitz electrified the intertubes with her discovery that Ashlee Madison hosted 31 million men looking to hook up with only 12,000 women (“there’s a good chance that about 12,000 of the profiles out of millions belonged to actual, real women who were active users of Ashley Madison.”). So women were roughly zero percent of AM users: a triumph of virtuous women over lecherous men!

Few will learn of her later admission that she was wrong…

“Today Ashley Madison released a statement saying that I couldn’t have figured out how many active women are on the site based on the data dump. The company is right about that.”

After further research she reports that AM management sought a “sustainable male to female ratio of 9:1” (11%), but probably had roughly 5% women (and tens of thousands of bots pretending to be women). That’s roughly 1.6 million women. Aprox 1/3 of men’s contacts were with bots, implying the bots were far more attractive to men than the real women, or there were more than 5% women.

“Only 19% of men who paid to join Ashley Madison did it after talking to a real woman.

“… senior data analyst Haze Deng copied Biderman and COO Rizwan Jiwan on an email where he analyzed how much money men were spending to message with bots versus real women. Deng wrote that men who had paid for credits would, on average, pay to send custom messages to 16-18 different women. “Around 35% chance, the contacted female is an engager {a bot},” he admitted. “This ratio is not so good,” he added, but he still argued that it’s “reasonable” because bots will never reply to a paying member’s messages. So the bot won’t continue to lead the member on indefinitely.”

How many of the journalists who excitedly reported Newitz’s original false number will tell readers about the correction? Publishers’ incentives tilt overwhelmingly to reporting clickbait; don’t wait for confirmation. Americans are so often misinformed because we read the news.

We become criminals for a good paycheck

As a child I wondered how giant criminal organizations such as COBRA, THRUSH, and SPECTRE recruited employees? Not just their disposable thugs, but the pretty secretaries, supply clerks, and mechanics.

Time gave an answer: it’s easy. Enron’s fake trading floors, Wall Street firm’s fake research, the auto industry’s lethal cars, the tobacco industry’s concealment of its products’ effects, the chemical industry’s decades-long fight to hide the effects of lead, the coal industry’s fight to save pennies at the cost of their workers’ black lungs (which continued to our day, with the assistance of doctors at Johns Hopkins) — all involved large numbers of conspirators, from clerks and secretaries up to professionals and senior management. There were few whistle-blowers.

I doubt Ashley Madison had the slightest difficulty finding translators, programmers, and marketing executives. Without the hackers of the Impact Team, they’d be happily at work today. From GIZMODO…

“Avid Life Media executive Keith Lalonde, who spearheaded international efforts for the company, sent a long email to Biderman and other senior management on June 27, 2013, with the subject line “how angels are made.” In it, he details how workers use something called the “fraud-to-engager tool” to build profiles. (“Should tweak it and rename it,” Lalonde noted. Um, yeah.)

“During Ashley Madison’s launch in Japan, Lalonde says that he got a “dump of over 10,000 lines of content” from the site’s English-language profiles. Then he hired people to translate them into Japanese. “[Translators] were not told that this was for creating profiles—though most figure it out,” he wrote.

“… It seems that everybody at Ashley Madison knew the company barely attracted any real women to the site.”

Bots can easily become good enough for men

“This will blow up the world. It will make crack cocaine look like decaffeinated coffee.”
— Anonymous (source here).

A post last month discussed the coming fembot revolution (aka sexbots), a shock our society far larger than the trivialities which obsess our tech experts and their journalist fans. We can see the growing sophistication of robot bodies, but skeptics point to the limitations of AI as the key barrier.

The almost trivially simple bots that recruited almost all of Ashley Madison’s paying clients suggest that these concerns are exaggerated. Ashley Madison made millions using bots far simpler than the ELIZA e-therapist built in the mid-1960s.  From GIZMODO…

“The developers at Ashley Madison created their first artificial woman sometime in early 2002. Her nickname was Sensuous Kitten, and she is listed as the tenth member of Ashley Madison in the company’s leaked user database. On her profile, she announces: “I’m having trouble with my computer … send a message!”

“Sensuous Kitten was the vanguard of a robot army. As I reported last week, Ashley Madison created tens of thousands of fembots to lure men into paying for credits on the “have an affair” site. When men signed up for a free account, they would immediately be shown profiles of what internal documents call “Angels,” or fake women whose details and photos had been batch-generated using specially designed software. To bring the fake women to life, the company’s developers also created software bots to animate these Angels, sending email and chat messages on their behalf.

“To the Ashley Madison “guest,” or non-paying member, it would appear that he was being personally contacted by eager women. But if he wanted to read or respond to them, he would have to shell out for a package of Ashley Madison credits, which range in price from $60 to $290. Each subsequent message and chat cost the man credits. As documents from company e-mails now reveal, 80% of first purchases on Ashley Madison were a result of a man trying to contact a bot, or reading a message from one. The overwhelming majority of men on Ashley Madison were paying to chat with Angels like Sensuous Kitten, whose minds were made of software and whose promises were nothing more than hastily written outputs from algorithms.”

The stunning evidence shows the shallowness of many online conversations — and in the future, the probable shallowness of many online friendships.  It doesn’t take much to fool people. As Newitz says — “Your friends may be bots, and you could be sharing your most intimate fantasies with hundreds of lines of PHP code.”

Imagine what will happen when we get widespread use of software combining SIRI’s interface and AI capability from IBM’s WATSON — plus visually and tactically appealing robot bodies. The future is coming, and will be stranger than we can imagine. By Larry Kummer, Editor of Fabius Maximus

Now they got my favorite brewski. Read… Buyout Binge in American Craft Brew Revolution Gets Personal

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