You’re getting downvoted, but you’re right. This knife cuts both ways, and it far predates llms.

Any non trivial algorithm intended to rank is gameable.

This is the foundation of SEO. It’s how the Donald invaded reddit. It’s the fucking central pillar of modern propaganda dissemination.

They’re going to spend a ton of money to lock themselves into an ongoing arms race.

And if one is morality opposed to this type of pricing practice, I think one becomes morality obligated to do exactly what you described.

And honestly, I think you don’t even have to come out ahead for it to be worth it. If your LLM assessed price would be 1000, spending a full $200 on compute to game and $800 ticket is a wash. You SHOULD spend $300 to get an $800 ticket if that’s where the floor is. Because fuck em.

Wasn’t even the wildest. Before compsci I was doing mechanical engineering.

We had an assignment to design a railcar layout for transporting livestock. It gave the minimal parameters for the animals, established client driven acceptable losses for the livestock, etc…

We all cracked away at it. After we handed them all in, the profs were like “nowhere in the spec was the actual animals named, was no one curious?”

Silence.

They had given us a literal Nazi RFP discovered post WWII. It was for moving people to fucking concentration camps.

“You’re smart people. People are going to ask you to do bad things. They’re going to try and hide thier intentions. Don’t collaborate with Nazis. Don’t ever use what I teach you to hurt people.”

I feel like this isn’t super new. You haven’t been able to do things like talk academically about network security or cryptography without being incredibly critical of government for decades.

My professors sure were. I felt really bad for them, honestly. They were the driving force to make philosophy and ethics courses mandatory at my university in order to recieve a comp sci degree.

“If you work in these areas long enough, at a high enough level, you WILL be asked to compromise something for the benefit of a state actor, and you might not even realize it’s happening. The person asking you to do it might not even realize what is really happening.” Was what our prof told a packed lecture hall.