This is my theory and it seems like a conspiracy theory (maybe it is, not sure).
Sam Altman Knowingly started the world project because he knew it will result in bad PR or in better words terrible PR and these silicon valley billionaires are mostly followers of the thought no publicity is bad publicity.
Well it seems like a conspiracy theory in a way as it wouldn't make sense either.
It's not the failed part of this that created brand awareness. It was the promise of tokens that created the hype, which has fallen with the price of those tokens.
Sam Altman has good publicity already as head of OpenAI, and being in the center of hype, why he would intentionally create something that he knows to be a failure? It doesn't create any controversy people would be talking about (which is the point of "any publicity is good publicity"). The fact that some people give their personal data away for money isn't a controversy, it's just about rich man exploiting poor people.
He didn't benefit from this. For people following, he just looks like a chump now and therefore people will think twice, to fund something designed by him in the future.
Well, OpenAI is cool and made the
good publicity of course. And they also used it to collect lots of data (remember how that GPT Image model of theirs turned everything into anime?) so a better phrasing of my supposed conspiracy theory could be a mindset. Sam could collect a lot of data in many different forms through ChatGPT (PDFs people upload and ask, images from calories counting apps, images people want to edit, etc.) and the mindset is
once we collected the data we can expand it to more sensitive data.
The mindset is not wrong though. But a PDF containing nonsense about my startup idea is not really a form of data causing concerns in me, an excel file containing menu of a local café is the same, not really a concerning matter and OpenAI (and all other companies in the space) can use that data to enhance their models on different data formats.
The concerning data is the biometric data, government issued IDs or similar stuff. I use my fingerprint to unlock my personal laptop. I am a little bit concerned because this laptop is connected to the internet and also shares a lot of data through my Apple ID with Apple. I hope I could have explained what was in my mind in best way possible.
That will be an absolute hit if they're goig to pay with WLD worth of $1k for all of the scans that they will do. And I will even think about it if I'm going to do that or not but most likely, no. What they're paying currently isn't a lot and people who are desperate doing it probably don't have any money left and that's why they've done it. They are the people that have no choice at all and they're in need, and so after receiving the WLD rewards, they've dumped it asap for them to use the money however they want it to be and for any use they can.
I can understand how desperate people can get over
not having money and do anything for that. I witnessed a Telegram group dedicated to people who got around $0.05 for solving CAPTCHAs. Honestly I guess that is a better way of making money for two obvious reasons. First, that is not putting you in danger of identity theft and second, most of those people are automating CAPTCHA solving so they can reach $10-$15 a day which can be a good number in some of those bad economies.
No doubt that the captcha work is way better than giving your retina for some WLD that the receivers would have to sell it asap on its market price if they need the money. Yeah right, there is no risk in that and their retina details are kept safe because they don't have to give it if they are only for the captcha jobs. But as for the WLD foundation, they're trying to make a huge database with all of these details piled up on it and will merge with a global record that they can use for anything that they want to do, as they say for some services but we can never know what's next to it.
And in my searches, I only found that only the hardware part of their scanner devices are open sourced. The software is closed source and we do not know how they're processing retina scans.
World Coin’s idea is interesting, but scanning people’s eyes feels risky. Who owns the eye data? What if it gets used in bad ways?
Also, why do the people who scan get rewards, but not the people scanned? That doesn’t seem fair.
I think it needs more clear rules to protect people’s privacy.
Yeah, these are my points. You hit the bullseye.