That you have seen little evidence of it doesn't mean that it isn't happening, it could also mean that (1) you're looking in the wrong places, (2) that it is so good that you don't detect it and probably other explanations besides those.
Otherwise it's mostly just predictions of widescale disruption which beyond hyper targetted attacks I remain skeptical.
Search "gmail spam" on hn.algolia.com with a "past year" time filter, here's a bunch of the most popular titles:
- Bypassing Gmail's spam filters with ChatGPT
- Ask HN: What's happening with Gmail spam filtering?
- Tell HN: Gmail's spam filters have gone bonkers
- Gmail spam is out of control
- Ask HN: Gmail having spam problems for anybody else?
- Ask HN: Have you noticed an increase of spam evading Gmail's filters recently?
- Ask HN: Has Gmail's spam filter been defeated by this type of spam lately?
Maybe it's not relentlessly posted every week but a lot of people are certainly noticing it on HN.
I disagree...
I create 'fake news' message among a series of bots and have a strong network there of social media accounts and sites. Ok, that's step one.
Now, I hack your account and steal your reputation. It appears you approve this message and some subset of your followers follow the bots and go to the bot sites.
You can try to pull out and say your hacked, and some percentage of people will unfollow said bots, but at the same time, a subset of those followers are now following those bots and giving them thumbs up thereby getting access to your friends friends.
User accounts are easily hackable as we saw with Linus Tech Tips recently. Reputation is just the newest currency worth stealing.
I'm skeptical content generation was the thing holding back this wave of fake news and scams from ruining the Internet. These doomer posts are always handwavy on the specifics.
And we've seen little evidence of it operating at scale in the past 2yrs since these tools have been unleashed.
Maybe automated niche targeting but that still depends on networks with reputation systems + spam detection... So mostly depends on ostensibly solvable tech problems like caller ID spoofing, or someone sending mass email spoofed campaigns.