OTIOSE
When Cheating Gets Too Easy
I always have the radio on while I work, and I laughed when I heard that AI had bought all the tickets to Raye’s concert and was selling them to people at inflated prices. But I don’t think it’s something to laugh about anymore.
rainygirl taught me something new again. For 5,000 seats, there were 1.8 million sign-ups. You can read that from a lot of angles. The first place my mind went was cheating — and morals.
Forgive a small confession from twenty-five years ago. Back then I was hooked on Bomberman Online: two to six players in a room, two teams, knock the other side out with bombs. Simple.
I was in high school. After class and club, I wanted a high score in a short window and a place on the upper ranks, so I did the two things gamers hate: teaming and cheating. Teaming meant playing while talking with friends. Cheating meant not dying when a bomb hit you, walking through walls, that sort of thing.
Even then it was easy to imagine how foul that felt on the other side. I made it to about 1,500th nationwide — and the operators banned me. Teaming wasn’t common yet. Cheats were hard to find; Google wasn’t how most people learned things.
I quit the game at that point. I still know what happened after. Teaming and cheating spread so far the room went bad. Decent players and beginners stopped showing up. In a ruined field there was no business left to find, and the service shut down.
Back to Raye’s concert: this mess is being blamed on AI. As an engineer, ticket-hoarding bots were already the easy kind of program before AI. If it was simple for a human, for today’s AI it’s child’s play.
Still, AI has made cheating far easier than it used to be. What worries me is a thousand small moral hazards. Like Bomberman Online, moral hazard makes ordinary people feel I’m done with this. A market can break in an instant.