(12 Minute Read)
29 December 2024 / Written by Joe
<aside> 🗞️ TL;DR. We bite the hand that one day might feed us by poking holes in the scam-related argument of a tech investor bullish on ‘Voight-Kampff’ companies like ours. We then use examples from our scam-busting work to help answer the question of whether AVIEL Technologies really is a ‘Voight-Kampff’ company or not (spoiler: probably not).
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A hot take on scams: that I am not falling for
At the start of December a friend of mine forwarded me an email, adding a particularly exciting cover message: he’d spotted that a well-respected US investor is seemingly a fan of companies like AVIEL, and that maybe I should reach out to him with an intro. The email was an investor newsletter from Sam Lessin, General Partner at US VC firm Slow Ventures and regular poster of one-page VC ‘takes’ on X/Twitter. The tidbit of interest, buried at the bottom of the ‘PS’ section of the newsletter, mentioned scams within the wider context of what Lessin calls ‘Voight-Kampff’ companies, declaring them to be a highly investable trend on which he is particularly bullish.
So far, so intriguing. But what on earth is a Voight-Kampff company? Readers familiar with the movie Blade Runner may know, but those who haven’t (or who unfortunately managed to sleep through more than 50% of the Blade Runner franchise like I did) might benefit from an explainer. The term originates from the ‘Voight-Kampff’ test, a fictional test (akin to the ‘Turing Test’) used by the authorities in Blade Runner world to determine whether a human-like subject is indeed an actual human or a replicant - a corporate-produced AI with near-indistinguishable human-like capabilities. So Lessin coins the term ‘Voight-Kampff company’ to describe any company whose core capability is successfully performing the real-vs-fake test on internet content, using examples such as resumés and inbound sales pitches as examples. A couple of companies in this category which spring immediately to my mind are HUMAN Security and Reality Defender.
So I read further and came across the ‘take’ in full, shown below:
As I read through it my enthusiasm quickly gave way to a growing sense of dismay and the realisation that - rather than being a chance for an intro - this was instead going to end up as one of those moments aptly described by Randall Munroe in XKCD comic #386…
“Duty Calls”. https://xkcd.com/386/
And so here I am writing a blog instead of a transatlantic investor email intro.
There are a few issues I have with Lessin’s take, one being the minor annoyance of describing of scam victims as ‘dumb’ and ‘lazy’. But it was the broader argument on incentives that was the real headscratcher 🤔.
To summarize, Lessin’s optimism on Voight-Kampff companies derives from the following argument (words here are my own):
Before powerful generative AI was here, scammers had an incentive to make their scam lures purposefully poor, such that they laser-target only the most ‘dumb’ consumers and intentionally out themselves as being obvious scams to ‘non-dumb’ consumers. However, now that AI makes creating fake things radically easier, there’s been a pattern-breaker of a shift in incentives that means scammers now actually do try their hardest to dupe all of the consumers they engage.