At this point, is the most "effective ethical" career path for a software developer to work on LLMs to flood social media and ad-clicks to speedrun the collapse of digital marketing? And thus freeing competent but money-driven software engineers to work on something else?
By collapse of digital marketing you mean collapse of social networks?
I cannot say I would miss them, but I doubt it will solve the problem.
Because yes, software engineers would love to work on many interesting things. But they also love being able to buy food and pay rent.
If the ad companies don't pay money anymore, who will replace them?
(I still dream of a world with donation for free services as default, but I am usually not taken serious with this.)
And .. about ad companies and LLMs - I think the madness just started. Once the marketing companies get their product placements directly into the models and the agents sophisticated enough, that you cannot trust anything posted online anymore, it will just destroy anonymous communication, as you cannot trust any anonymous account anymore at all. And will have a hard time finding out who is, who they say they are.
Check out the guy's social media (links in the original article). The shit is downright hilarious. He's very self-conscious about how horrible his business is.
Click farms effectively function as janitors, mopping up spam someone else paid to throw so that no real user stumbles upon it, so they are beneficial.
It's ultimately spammers and scammers fighting against each other, so you could say the trash is taking itself out. Every dollar they spend fighting is one less dollar spent spamming actual users, so it's a win.
Ehh, so this is a click farm?