Designing the content of spam e-mails sounds like a small aspect of the "job".
If AI spams start fooling people more reliably, that's not something to celebrate.
This blogger thought, at first, that it came from an actual reader. I can't remember the last time I thought that a spam was genuine, even for a moment. Sometimes the subject lines are attention-getting, but by the time you see any of the body, you know.
Sure, AI spam can severely disrupt peoples attention by competing with "real" people more competently. But people will not have twice the attention. We will simply shut down our channels when the number of real-person-level-ai-spam goes to infinity, because there is no other option. Nobody will be fooled, very quickly, because being fooled would require super human attention.
Granted, that does not seem super fun either.
"Noise" in context doesn't mean random characters, it means garbage or spam or content not worth your while.
Yes, it could be that for you a given advert is irrelevant or not worth your while, but the point he was making is that it won't even be worth it for the advertiser to put out the advertisement because it will be noise for everyone.
However, there is only one kind of noise that is noise for everyone: literal noise.
So long as the spam is about something, it is relevant to someone, and therefore it does not necessarily have zero ROI.
EDIT: The only kind of noise that has no semantic is actual "mathematically pure noise" as the person below commented (/u/dang banned my account so I can't reply)
I feel like you're a bit too literal here. When people talk about noise it doesn't mean mathematically pure noise. A signal-to-noise ratio close to 1 is also colloquially called noise.
Ergo slop and semantic noise.
Companies that used adverts which weren't noise went out of business long ago.
Just because you and the others don't understand what point I'm making doesn't mean the conversation is "logjammed". I am still discussing the overall point, you just don't see it.
Consider that we have fairly decent anti-spam measures which do not look at the body of a message. To these methods, it is irrelevant how cleverly crafted the text is.
I reject something like 80% of all spam by the simple fact the hosts which try to deliver it do not have reverse DNS. Works like magic.
E-mail is reputation based. Once your IP address is identified by a reputation service as being a source of spam, subscribers of the service just block your address. (Or more: your entire IP block, if you're a persistent source of spam, and the ISP doesn't cooperate in shutting you down.)
To defeat reputation based services driven by reporting, your spams have to be so clever that they fool almost everyone, so that nobody reports you. That seems impractical.
How AI spammers could advance in the war might be to create large numbers of plausible accounts on a mass e-mail provider like g-mail. It's impractical to block g-mail. If the accounts behave like unique individuals that each target small numbers of users with individually crafted content (i.e. none of these fake identities is a high volume source), that seems like a challenge to detect.
We're talking about a group of people whose core skill is convincing people to pay for stuff that isn't worth it. You and I may know they're worthless, but that doesn't mean they're not getting paid.
Now, imagine you got messages from what appears to be not 100 but, oh I don't know, 1 000 000 000 000 000 of the very best moms that have ever existed.
And they all do love you so very much. And they do let you by writing these most beautifully touching text messages. And they all want to meet up on Friday.
What is going to happen next? Here is what is not going to happen: You are not going to consider meeting any of them Friday, any week. You will, after the shortest of whiles, shut down to this signal. Because it's not actually a signal anymore. The noise floor has gone up and the most beautifully crafted, most personalized text messages of all time are just noise now.
So once someone’s mom passes away, you can’t really fool them with 1 or dozens of message from other moms anyway.
But when everyone copies what that one person or one company is doing. Software makes the copying process dead easy.
Once the herd starts stampeding, it creates a secondary effect of an arms race for finite Attention of a finite target audience. That assault and drainage of that finite attention pool, happens faster and faster and every one gets locked in trying to outspend the other guy.
An example currently is Presidential Campaigns furiously trying to out fund raise each other. Its going to top 15-17 billion this year. All the campaign managers, marketers, advertisors make bank. And we know what quality of product the people end up with. Cause why produce a high quality product when you can generate demand via Attention Capture.
The chimp troupe is dumb as heck as a collective intelligence.
> ...
> At least with AI sending this crap nobody can use these emails to justify their sales bonus.
What weird, misplaced animus. You're happy some salesguy got fired, while his boss sends even more spam and possibly makes even more money due to automation?
Those hack marketers rate-limited this kind of spamming. Now things are about to get worse.
Wouldn't the exact argument apply to that boss as well?
In classic HN style the original reply lacks empathy, and demonstrates a preference of machines over humans. Life goes on...
That stereotype definitely rings true. Thank you for helping me put my finger on it!
He misrepresented himself as a big fan of all these blogs, who's read their posts etc. and that's how he achieved such a high response rate. In effect he deceived people into trusting him enough to spend their time on a response.
Now ordinarily this would be a little "white lie" and probably not a huge deal, but when you multiply it by telling it 1,000 times it becomes a more serious issue.
This is already an issue in email marketing. The gold standard of course is emailing people who are double opted in and only telling the truth, and if AI is used to help create that sort of email I don't really have a problem. There is basically a spectrum where the farther away you get from that the progressively more illegal/immoral your campaigns become. By the time you are shooting lies into thousands of inboxes for commercial purposes... you are the bad guy.
Sorry to say but the real issue here is Kurt has crossed an ethical line in promoting his startup. He did the wrong thing and he could have done it pretty effectively with conventional email tools too.
These early days is ripe to make some quick cash before it all comes crashing down.
I'm skeptical: It's easier to create bullshit than to analyze and refute it, and that should remain true even with an LLM in each respective pipeline.
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P.S.: From the random free-association neuron, an adapted Harry Potter quote:
> Fudge continued, “Remove the moderation LLMs? I’d be kicked out of office! Half of us only feel safe in our beds at night because we know the AI are standing guard for misinformation on AzkabanTube!”
> “The rest of us sleep less soundly knowing you have put Lord Bullshittermort’s most dangerous channels in the care of systems that will serve him the instant he makes the correct prompts! They will not remain loyal to you when he can offer them much more scope for their training and outputs! With the LLMs and his old supporters behind him, you’ll find it hard to stop him!”
I maintain Inbox Zero, much of the time, and seldom have more than three or four emails in my client at any time.
I get there by being absolutely brutal about tossing emails.
I probably toss a couple of legit ones, from time to time, but I do have rules set up for the companies and people I need to hear from.
The thing that will be annoying, is when AI can mimic these. Right now, that stuff is generally fairly clumsy, but some of the handcrafted phishing emails that I get, are fairly impressive. I expect them to improve.
A lot of folks are gonna get cheated.
I do think that some of these Chinese gangs are going to create AI “pig butchering” operations, so it will likely reduce their need to traffic slaves.
John Oliver actually did a great segment on it, but I won’t link it, because a lot of folks don’t like him.
If AI takes off for this stuff, the gangs are less likely to be kidnapping these poor schlubs.
So … I guess this would be a … positive outcome?
Not sure if AI zealots will be touting it, though.
Mark as SPAM or Block/Filter or Ignore.
Actually that’s already been completed, and will be released to hackernews in the coming days
Just ignore and move on.
Wish SV would stop thinking anything that makes money is great, no matter the crap it inflicts on people. Guess I'm asking for way too much.
If the people they employ today suddenly became twice as productive, the company wouldn’t fire half of them - they just would enjoy twice the profit. The same applies to AI.
Small acts of malice are still acts of malice. Not everyone wants to live in a caveat emptor, dog-eats-dog society.
This is like the irrational hate some developers have for recruiters, despite them finding jobs for many people that they otherwise would never have known about.
It's not like that. As a business owner, be honest with us and yourself: just how much of sales and marketing you did was just bullshit? Exaggerated claims bordering on lies? Manipulative patterns? Inducing demand?
Approximately all marketing is that. It is that because it works, and those who refuse to do it get outcompeted by those who don't. Doesn't mean the world should be like that, or that I'd like to be subjected to it.
I also question the "we wouldn't live in the world we lived today" bit. In a competitive environment, marketing is a zero-sum game[0]: there's only so many people around, with so much money and time available; most of the marketing spend ends up being used to cancel out the efforts of the competition, and that race can consume all surplus of a company. Red Queen's race and all.
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[0] Or negative-sum, if you account for externalities.
1. covertly (why do you need to do it covertly? Would people mind if they knew? Doesn't that indicate you're doing them a disservice?)
2. overtly, against people's will. (Again, doesn't that indicate you're doing them a disservice?)
3. overtly, with their consent (express or assumed). How often have you seen this happen?
The "indicates" vs "shows" distinction above deals with the edge case of "interacting with covert/unwanted marketing is actually good for them, even if they don't know it". I dare you to make that argument...
Consider that without thieves we also wouldn't live in the world we live today. That should not be read supporting theft, only an acknowledgement that it exists and that we have designed our lived environment in response.
That's exactly the reason why we hate them.
Are we supposed to silently suffer because capitalism says so?
Spammers and salespeople are pretty much on the same level as criminals in my book. Heck, whenever someone calls me for some sort of unsolicited survey or similar, I think "these people have such low standards, they would also sell heroin on the street if they had any source."
Having to delete the occasional marketing or sales email that get past your spam filter is hardly any of these. Annoying or frustrating, yes. Suffering? Really?
“One can dream.”
You’ve either used these sarcastically, or accurately. I think you’ve done the former, but the truth is the latter.
[1]: https://www.wisp.blog/blog/how-i-use-ai-agents-to-send-1000-...
The author sounds unfamiliar with this brand of marketing email, so I can see why it would come off disquieting to find it’s all AI - but it’s equally annoying from a human.
At least with AI sending this crap nobody can use these emails to justify their sales bonus.