It's truely a race to the bottom. Cold email response rates are already ~1% industry average. Every outbound tool is adding the AI customization, and there is a slew of 'AI sales rep' companies promising more and more personalized spam.

There will likely be rewards at first. An uptick in response rates as most of the market won't recognize emails are AI generated. But because it's trivial to send AI personalized emails at massive scale, your email inbox will become entirely useless.

1% is also about how well this worked, according to the sender's blog post.

10 signups / 970 emails sent

Kinda makes you wonder... why don't they just advertise with those odds?

Because that's an order of magnitude better than what you get from advertising.

Assuming signups = $, true. But not if there's some free trial or something and then you've got a conversion rate on top of that.

Thats actually a very good rate. 1% conversion rate is drastically different from a 1% response rate

The silver lining is that people will learn to just ignore such outreaches and word-of-mouth feedback will be important again, or at least I hope so.

Word of mouth with IRL people? I'm not sure I can assume anyone on any forum is real anymore. And if they are real, I assume they are marketers pretending to be users to push a product. Maybe journalism makes a come back if you can trust they are real and not a sellout.

pretty sure top meant RL ppl IRL aka meatspace.

information coming over unqualified electronic channels is not trustworthy anymore

It is already like this in my experience.

Cold outreach is dead and word-of-mouth is the most effective marketing method

The AI spammers will hire people on minimum wage to do that too, if they aren't already.

I am convinced that any post on Reddit that espouses the virtues of some or other product is a paid advert.

There is way too much corporate worship despite the platform's users generally priding themselves on being enlightened and smarter than the rest.

Recruiters on LinkedIn already used automation for outreach even before LLMs became popular.

LinkedIn is already on this. The reason they had their little “skills tests” is because what they used to sell was the collection of “skills” listed on your profile. I say skills because I’m not sure what the English word for knowing C# and listing it on your linked in profile is and I can’t seem to find it.

Anyway, I assume that the reason they are dismantling the skills system (and their verification quizzes) and moving things into personal “projects” is because it’s too easy for marketers to skip the LinkedIn tools if it remained the way it was. Now, however, with Microsoft own LLMs trundling through our data, they’re going to maintain their monopoly on easy access to professionals that meet certain requirements.

I guess it could also be because those skill quizzes had their answers readily available all over the interwebs.

What is the "dead internet theory"?

It was a joke from the 2010s that most of the people that you interacted with on the internet were actually bots, and that you were the only human using the web.

Now, in the post-LLM age, it doesn't sound like a joke anymore.

Does it really matter if you’re being cold called by an AI or some sales person following the same few procedures they always do?

I’d prefer sales people keep their jobs. Having had the misfortune of being seated next to the telemarketing team in an investment bank for half a year… however… Let’s just say that I’m not sure you would even know if it was a person or a bot. They’re not even scripted or “trained” like your average telemarketer because our target audience is actually somewhat interested in what we sell, but listening to them repeat themselves over and over from their own “personal scripts”… well… they are already bots man.

Very true, I sat next to the sales guy at a small company and he was on the phone all day repeating himself day in and day out. Easily replaced by AI.

As a flesh and blood human I take some comfort in the fact that the comment I'm replying to is still identifiable (with high probability) as written by a non-human. I wonder how long it'll take until that's no longer the case.

It may already not be the case. I'll probably never know.

What can't popular LLMs do? Be vulgar and snarky.

The future of human communication is to be cunts online, so that we can identify ourselves. That will at least separate us from the script kiddies. Major marketers will train their AIs without any filter, so we're fucked anyway.

Wait, is this written by an AI?

Yes. The dead giveaway is multiple paragraphs of bullshit where one sentence would suffice. People ain't got time for that.

That is the giveaway for some of the high-profile LLMs. The ones I run locally with ollama can be VERY close to perfectly human, subtle typos and all

What’s your local setup? I run llama3:8b and it works well

100%

They truly walk among us

Please could you reduce that in size by 80% to generate a quick summary?

And keep iterating until you pick a single letter of the alphabet or emoji that encapsulates the essence of what you are trying to communicate.

Not bots. Simply outsourced to India, Malaysia and China. These countries were extremely happy to get this type of work.

Now this work will be outsourced to AI with even greater efficiency.

I think the real dead internet today and is a bit deceiving (not sure a better word) are examples of online games where you’re playing against bots or everyone assumes they are playing against bots. One of the aspects of the early days of the internet that was really cool and is now arguably not real anymore.