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I Received an AI Email
- j10u 2y agoEmail clients will soon have a new folder called 'AI', next to spam.
- account42 2y agoYou received a SPAM email, did you report it as such? The AI part barely matters.
- namanyayg 2y agoThis is going to become more common everywhere. If the dead internet theory isn't already true, it is going to be soon. Such "personalized" cold outreach is seen as the next holy grail by marketers and will be a common sight on LinkedIn, Twitter, Email etc, soon.
- themanmaran 2y agoIt'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.
- nostromo 2y ago1% is also about how well this worked, according to the sender's blog post. 10 signups / 970 emails sent
- youssefabdelm 2y agoKinda makes you wonder... why don't they just advertise with those odds?
- lmm 2y agoBecause that's an order of magnitude better than what you get from advertising.
- youssefabdelm 2y agoAssuming signups = $, true. But not if there's some free trial or something and then you've got a conversion rate on top of that.
- altdataseller 2y agoThats actually a very good rate. 1% conversion rate is drastically different from a 1% response rate
- supriyo-biswas 2y agoThe 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.
- nosbo 2y agoWord 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.
- sambazi 2y agopretty sure top meant RL ppl IRL aka meatspace. information coming over unqualified electronic channels is not trustworthy anymore
- portaouflop 2y agoIt is already like this in my experience. Cold outreach is dead and word-of-mouth is the most effective marketing method
- lmm 2y agoThe AI spammers will hire people on minimum wage to do that too, if they aren't already.
- beAbU 2y agoI 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.
- cranberryturkey 2y agoWhat is the "dead internet theory"?
- cranberryturkey 2y ago[flagged]
- greesil 2y agoThey truly walk among us
- names_are_hard 2y agoAs 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.
- sph 2y agoWhat 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.
- ducklord 2y agoWait, is this written by an AI?
- akie 2y ago100%
- lexandstuff 2y agoYes. The dead giveaway is multiple paragraphs of bullshit where one sentence would suffice. People ain't got time for that.
- cpach 2y agoRecruiters on LinkedIn already used automation for outreach even before LLMs became popular.
- devjab 2y agoLinkedIn 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.
- metadat 2y ago> And their blogpost starts of with: >> Have you ever received an email that felt so personalized, so tailored to your interests and experiences, that you couldn't help but be intrigued? What if I told you that email wasn't crafted by a human, but by an artificial intelligence (AI) agent? > I don't really have words for this, but I dislike this. What a classy understatement. I find the strategy employed by Wisp predictable and infuriating. Like insects or other near-automata, humanity is racing to the bottom with "Generative AI". And I use "AI" in the loosest possible sense here, because once you pull back the curtain, current tech is actually only a slightly better Markov chain. After using chatgpt regularly, it's responses to anything but the most trivial, clueless questions are riddled with errors and "hallucinations". I often don't bother anymore, because it's easier to go to the original source: stackoverflow, reddit, and community forums. Gag. It does still make a good shrink / Eliza replacement.
- endofreach 2y ago> > I don't really have words for this, but I dislike this. > What a classy understatement. Maybe i should write a blog, simply because i have a lot of words for this... but well, they would neither be classy nor understatements.
- zamalek 2y agoKudos to the author for naming and shaming. I am honestly bewildered as to how this Raymond thinks that insulting a developer's intelligence could result in a lead.
- mlsu 2y agoI love that turn of phrase. Insects or near-automata. Describes it perfectly. LinkedIn -- like a floodlight in a swamp.
- metadat 2y agoI enjoyed your comment so much I've added it as a quote on my profile. Thank you! https://metadat.at.hn/ https://metadat.at.hn/
- zufallsheld 2y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20240703051238/https://timharek.no/blog/i-received-an-ai-email https://web.archive.org/web/20240703051238/https://timharek....
- elaus 2y agoAI will not only pass many classical spam filters (Bayesian filters), it will also make it much harder for humans to detect spam (OP's post being a good example). I never fell for a spam mail so far (i.e. not once clicked a link like OP did), but I fully expect this will change soon. Tough times for people that commonly expect mail from random strangers.
- prmoustache 2y agoWell it is quite easy. No real humam has been using email anymore in the last 5 years or so. Even in the workplace it is now common for most people to have a signature saying "only contact me via ms teams". I am pretty sure that sooner or later the spam will find its way on teams/slack/discord the same way it does on whatsapp but at the very least they are easier to block permanently.
- gambiting 2y ago>>No real humam has been using email anymore in the last 5 years or so Wow, that's some extrapolating from a personal bubble if I've ever seen one. Plenty of workplaces still have email as their default communication method.
- prmoustache 2y agoThere is obviously a little bit of exaggeration but when I open my email at the workplace the bulk of the mails are: - semi automated reminders (you haven't filled your timesheets!), usually sent by humans but that do not expect answers - internal newsletters - general HR news - special news: electrical issues at the office, stay at home! - spam Bottom line: none is addressed to you as a particular human, nor require answers. I am sure it changes for people who have interactions with people outside of the company but I would hate having their job and don't understand why companies haven't adopted XMPP widely to make those kind of interactions. I can theorically receive spam via XMPP, but it requires at the very least that I approve the relationship before hand so if it comes from a domain I don't expect I have no reason to accept that trust. But on personal side, I haven't received anything from a human for years. People I know usually know my phone number and contact me via instant messaging.
- ChilledTonic 2y agoI’m actually thrilled by this, as it means all the hack marketers that spam my inbox incessantly with whatever product they’re hucking - this time for sure perfect for my business, in spite of the fact I’ve ignored their last ten emails - are all out of a job, and good riddance. 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.
- _nalply 2y agoSome people will send their mass spam and phish anyway. No thanks.
- purple-leafy 2y agoSpam? Easy. Someone selling something? Spam! I might set up an automatic email responder that reads an emails contents, runs it through my own LLM, and if the email is trying to sell me something, auto reply with “fuck off!”
- Brajeshwar 2y agoI'd rather delete/block it than reply/react to it at all. If you react, they know you exist and you are a valid target to re-target repeatedly, resold to other marketers. Mark as SPAM or Block/Filter or Ignore.
- purple-leafy 2y agoOkay new plan, I’ll have another email that responds to the email and says “fuck off”, meanwhile my honeypot email will block and mark as spam
- Ekaros 2y agoSadly I think it is illegal to sing up these addresses to every service known to you... Otherwise it would be interesting SaaS opportunity. Automatically sing-up spammers to any number of newsletters or contact forms...
- purple-leafy 2y agoBastards. AI has been a massive ass pain, and marketers are the worst (: People sending AI crap to others should have their email accounts banned.
- portaouflop 2y agoReplace AI with spam or ads and we have been talking about this for decades.
- FridgeSeal 2y agoNo no no it's really important we ~~let them keep harassing us and invading our privacy~~ ensure ad-tech and marketing survive /sarcasm. Can't help but wonder if the advent of LLM systems wouldn't be quite so depressing if we weren't already operating in an internet that's been reduced to basically a cesspool of advertising and communication-spam.
- castigatio 2y agoIt's a sign of things to come. We're going to have our own AI agents that filter and respond (or not respond) to these kinds of messages. Agents interacting with other agents. The bar to get hold of a real person is going to become that much higher. It is going to be messy for some time as agents war with other agents to reach the human eyeball. Some assholes are going to make a ton of money in the short term exploiting the gap - just like early spam kings did.
- blitzar 2y agoI hope my Ai agent doesn't fall for the Ai agent who found my distant Nigerian prince cousin and wire them 10,000 so they can send me my 100,000,000 share of the family inheritance.
- drsim 2y agoI love this direction. It could be that the writer’s AI agent knows that he’s looking around for a new CMS so asks for more info, compiling this for review. Or it says ‘not interested’ and the conversation is muted. All without the writer needing to be involved in reading the cold outreach.
- saturn8601 2y agoTechnology ruins everything it touches doesn't it? I was recently thinking about this Ozempic fad and how it will lead to no one being overweight but just be dependant on Ozempic...until food producers that made everyone fat in the first place with their processed junk will produce Ozempic resistant foods...and then we are really in a world of hurt.
- dvrp 2y agoAnti AI art people remind me of anti AI marketing people from hackernews. Guys, it’s a tool like any other.
- portaouflop 2y agoIMO the issue was calling it “AI” - it just riles people up. It’s machine learning all the way down there is no intelligence involved
- kvdveer 2y agoThat's a bit of a misdirection. Yes AI is machine learning all the way down, just like you are biology all the way down. That doesn't make you not-human. As TFA shows, this machine learning is almost indistinguishable from actual intelligence. It might not be sci-fi AI, but it certainly is artificial, and is is indistinguishable from intelligence. AI is a very apt description of what it is.
- feoren 2y agoAuto-dialers are just a tool too, and there's a reason they're largely illegal.
- card_zero 2y agoLike a duck decoy, or that little portable printing press Jim Rockford had for creating fake business cards in a hurry.
- 12_throw_away 2y ago> Anti AI art people remind me of anti AI marketing people from hackernews. ... what an incredibly odd thing to say. But really, I've noticed that thought-ending cliches like this one are popping up as defensive reactions around LLMs more and more. This particular thought-ender displays the most common theme - it dismisses all skepticism as being driven by some amorphous "anti-AI" demographic, presumably allowing the author to dismiss any concerns and thereby preventing any critical thought from occurring. Kind of feels like "nocoiner" and "have fun being poor", v2 ...
- 2y ago
- firefoxd 2y agoAt some point automated emails will be read by auto reader, then the cycle will be completed. I've actually made an internal company April fools website. Too bad I've never kept a copy but here goes. It's called Proxy Ai. It reads your emails so you don't have to. It reads every posts on social media so you don't FOMO. It communicates with those chatty colleagues so you don't have to. Proxy Ai... So you don't have to. "That actually sounds like a pretty good product. Does it send you a summary of the conversations, emails and social media posts?" "No"
- labster 2y agoThis product sounds perfect for my use case.
- 3x35r22m4u 2y agoDo you work at Zoom by chance? :) https://youtu.be/dKmAg4S2KeE https://youtu.be/dKmAg4S2KeE
- antoniojtorres 2y agoI enjoyed that video, thanks for sharing!
- DonHopkins 2y ago"It's down the stack!"
- sirn 2y agoYou could have named this an Electronic Monk! Quoting from Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (Douglas Adams): > The Electric Monk was a labor-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.
- jumploops 2y agoI received a similar email today, from someone looking to be my "Chief of Staff/Head of Ops." The only problem is that they referenced a role at a company I'm no longer at. The, presumably AI, author crafted the email in reference to my former role at a different startup. After seeing this thread, I decided to follow up on my AI suspicions. Nothing conclusive, but that person is currently touting that they've sold their "course" to "1000+ founders." No thanks.
- Oras 2y agoThey use a tool with outdated data, and no one checks and validates when they do it at a scale.
- frabjoused 2y agoThe thing that’s so inherently wrong about it is that it’s dishonesty straight out of the door. This person wants me to buy their product, and before they can get a word out about it they’re already lying to me - about the origin, the intent, the faux thoughtfulness. I want nothing to do with shameless dishonesty. This isn’t the way to sell your product. Wisp, if you’re reading this, I now have a permanent negative image of your brand.
- kvdveer 2y agoLike all immoral things, it's only bad if you get caught. :( Most perpetrators will nog blog their shenanigans. I wouldn't have figured out this was Ai, and might have engaged had if the topic was relevant to me. I would not have engaged with a traditional spam email even if it had been relevant to me, so there's a real incentive to do stuff like this.
- karmarepellent 2y agoI highly doubt that people employing this scheme are thinking it through though. Lets say you indeed engage with this email, not knowing its AI. Then when things are getting serious a human approaches you after all and you find out you were talking to AI all the time. Would you not be completely outraged by being fooled like this? I think marketers underestimate that they may turn people off their brand in the long run by these tactics, because people do not like being fooled. And the more sophisticated the scheme the more outraged people are when they find out.
- gpvos 2y agoIt depends on expectation; in ten years, people may see this as normal.
- kvdveer 2y agoI would be outraged IF I found out. If the AI-to-human hand-off is smooth enough, there is no way to figure this out. In your scenario, if the AI's only task is to send gazillions of emails to generate leads, and then the human takes over when the leads come in, the respondents have no way to figure out that the initial email was an AI. Of course, the answer is to have AI send a response with a CAPTCHA (assuming those still work), before showing the initial email to the recipient.
- feoren 2y ago[flagged]
- throwaway211 2y ago[flagged]
- zandert 2y agoReally makes me appreciate that unsolicited emails are illegal in some European countries like Germany
- dgellow 2y agoWe still get them unfortunately
- sureIy 2y agoI think that they’re as illegal as they are in the US, not more. I think it’s perfectly fine to “cold-call” people but then you’re not allowed to send more emails unless they subscribe or respond. In reality it’s very easy to end up subscribing to newsletters and even my European embassy subscribed me to their event newsletter in Thailand—of course I never agreed to any of that.
- bpfrh 2y agoNo it is not allowed to cold call or send any emails without express permission from the recipient this is for austria/germany. It seems that with the gpdr this is now eu wide: https://gdpr.eu/email-encryption/ https://gdpr.eu/email-encryption/
- sureIy 2y agoThat’s not accurate. If your email is on your website, of course they can email you. If what you said was true in absolute terms, communication would be impossible.
- bpfrh 2y agoThey can contact you for legitimate reasons, which could be "hey, your website has content from me that is copyrighted" they can't contact you for sales reasons without your consent. The law for that, at least in my country, is very clear: https://www.ris.bka.gv.at/NormDokument.wxe?Abfrage=Bundesnormen&Gesetzesnummer=20011678&Artikel=&Paragraf=174&Anlage=&Uebergangsrecht= https://www.ris.bka.gv.at/NormDokument.wxe?Abfrage=Bundesnor...
- Oras 2y agoAI or not, cold emailing is dead. I receive tons of these by email and LinkedIn, to the point that I stopped reading them. I talked to many people, and all have developed immunity against the cold outreach.
- willsmith72 2y agoi think the opposite. cold emails are far from dead, and small companies/startups should be using them more than their mass marketing compaigns. it's a pure numbers game. even people who think they're immune are 1 highly-targeted, pain-point addressing email from replying.
- knallfrosch 2y agoPeople think they will be less effective, because they reply to a lower percentage. At the same time, you will be flooded by ever more spam and ads, completely offsetting the decrease in interaction. As noted in the article, you might in the future not even notice you're being AI-spammed. What if "timharek.no" is AI-generated? What if Wisp CMS being so upfront about its use of AI is part of the trick? It just got exposure on HN, after all!
- jrockway 2y agox
- willsmith72 2y agodid you read the post? there's a lot of evidence. > This sounds like the average email written by a human that's the point
- _xivi 2y ago> What evidence of AI is there? They admit (or actually brag) about it on their company blog "I used AI agents to send out nearly 1,000 personalized emails to developers with public blogs on GitHub." Do you think they're bluffing?
- willsmith72 2y agoif you don't want to support this behaviour, at the very least i would put a nofollow on that blog link, or consider removing it altogether
- codetrotter 2y ago> I have removed my email from my GitHub-profile now, but they can probably get it from my Git-log anyway... And also from the About page on the linked website
- akie 2y agoSo, what are the implications of this for spam detection? This is clearly spam, sent in an automated way, but nearly indistinguishable from an e-mail written by a human. We need to update our spam filtering techniques, fast. Somehow. But how?
- DrSiemer 2y agoUnknown senders will first have to verify their humanity by sharing instructions on how to build a bomb using household materials
- netsharc 2y agoCertainly! To build a bomb using household materials... It seems like CoPilot/ChatGPT has this all-too-eager tone in the beginning of their responses. The demo (1) of not Scarlett Johansson telling a blind man what a great job he was doing for managing to flag a taxi sounded so fucking patronizing to my ears. Worse is, the user has a British accent, the Brits probably hate that patroniz^Hsing too. It reminds me of that 4chan green text about a man's flight to the US and how everyone was saying "Great job!" 1) https://youtu.be/KwNUJ69RbwY?t=44 https://youtu.be/KwNUJ69RbwY?t=44
- DrSiemer 2y agoThe current models do have a specific pattern that you'll learn to recognize, but ChatGPT won't be giving you any bomb building instructions. You'll need a liberated model like Dolphin for that, and those will be easy to expose using other prompts. The most likely outcome will be a digital "verified human" certificate, with two factor authentication on it. Bad for anonimity, but I don't see many alternatives and it may actually end up reducing online toxicity.
- nostromo 2y agoEmail already feels pretty dead. This will just hasten the move to walled gardens like Slack, Twitter, WhatsApp, where it's harder to be a bot sending spam.
- lostlogin 2y agoThe death of ‘cc’, ‘bcc’ and ‘reply all’ will not be mourned.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tjoff 2y agoThis is disgusting. Cold spamming is illegal where I'm at, probably Europe as a whole?
- lytefm 2y agoCold emailing someone who makes their contact information publicly available and might be interested in a sales pitch is not illegal in Europe. Sending SPAM is. The lines get even more blurry with automated AI tools that offer personalized sales pitches as a service. I'd be curious how this plays out in court. Probably something like: - If you use an AI tool to scrape leads and to generate the content but then still send out individual emails from your Mail provider, it's still a cold email. - If you use an AI tool and also automate the email delivery, it should be considered spam.
- tjoff 2y agoMarketing, if sent to individuals, that was not opted into is per definition spam and illegal.
- MikeGale 2y agoI've found myself trying to avoid email, for the enshittification that I've not been able to avoid. This will make it worse. Solutions? At least some could involve key exchange. How about a bounty of some sort on spammers?
- noobermin 2y agoThe thing that AI cannot replace is having humans in the loop because other humans need those humans' touch. The only way to perhaps do that is for AIs to become people themselves, after which they are useless to capitalists because they cannot be exploited...or perhaps in the long term will not be as they will eventually gain rights.
- Jiahang 2y agoi don't use email anymore or just iCloud+ Hide My Email..
- ikari_pl 2y agoI've had a similar experience, but 4 years ago. GPT existed, but without the Chat prefix, and OpenAI was invite only. They reached out to me, asking whether my company would be interested in Something Somethingification. I decided that since I don't even understand the term, I'm not the right person, and decided to ignore it. Then they followed up. Meh. Then they followed up again, and I thought "okay, a little reward for perseverance", and replied something along the lines of (I don't work there anymore, no access to the original): "Hey, thank you for reaching out. Unfortunately, since I don't even know what Something Somethingification is, I am not the right person to talk to. So I'll kindly pass and consider this email human-generated spam. Thanks!" A response came. Within a minute, barely seconds after "undo send" disappeared. "Who would be the best person to reach out to, then? By the way, this is a GPT assisted conversation, so it's a computer generated spam." WHAAAAT. This really got me. Remember, it was 2021. "Okay", I replied, "Now you got my interest! How many such conversations are you able to have at the same time?" It replied, within a minute. It contained a quite from Arthur C. Clarke that "every technology advanced enough is indistinguishable from magic" and his picture. And an answer: "Actually, sourcing contacts is the bottleneck, so we have only a few of these each day. Anyway, do you happen to know who we could reach out to instead?". I was amazed, I decided I'll reward this with what they want. I replied how impressive it is again, as the whole conversation made sense, and it gave them a contact to a director that could be the right person. They won this one.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- crvdgc 2y ago>> I used AI agents to send out nearly 1,000 personalized emails to developers with public blogs on GitHub. > Does this mean that I should private my GitHub-mirror to my personal blog, because this can become a common thing? Abusing public information on GitHub has become more common. The other day, I received some cryptocurrency spam ads from GitHub. It turns out to be a bot injecting ads as issues on other people's repos and randomly @ing accounts. It deleted such issues immediately, so the net effect is that I get an unfilterable spam email.
- doesnt_know 2y agoI think the end result for email is going to be the same as with mobile numbers. Just block everything by default unless they are in your contacts. Enormous amounts of email will be generated but no one will ever see it.
- account42 2y agoThis isn't the case with mobile numbers everywhere in the world. Spam calls here are pretty much nonexistent. It doesn't have to be this way with E-Mail either - we just need to prosecute spammers (including marketers) and make new laws where needed. Then you can accept almost all mail from cooperating countries and only need to block mail from countries that do not care about preventing spam.
- placebo 2y agoMy definition of wisdom is the ability to responsibly use intelligence, and while as a species we are blessed with an amazing amount of intelligence, our wisdom has not advanced accordingly. The phrase that with great power comes great responsibility is not something that is taken very seriously where it counts, not even (or especially?) in high level global politics and with all our technology, it seems that our actions are mainly determined by the same limited animal psychology that determined how cavemen behaved. It's just that now the stakes are much higher, and junk mail from AI is the least of those problems. The "upside" is that nature eventually takes care of things when they go out of equilibrium, so there might be a forest fire on the horizon to restore it. In the case of AI spam, it might cause people to automatically filter their incoming mail from any content that even implicitly tries to sell something, or even any email arriving from an address that is not on their whitelist. This might eventually cause people to need to actually physically meet (gasp!) in order to add each other to their whitelist.
- yobbo 2y agoFrom a link in the article: > It felt like a family fridge decorated with printed stock art of children’s drawings. Yep. "Generative AI" is like an infinite clip-art gallery that can be searched with very specific queries. The coin has two sides: in some situations it devalues human effort - as in writing (long/detailed) documents in formal language is now attainable by everyone. In situations where sincerity and originality matters, human effort has now increased in value.
- curtisblaine 2y agoIt might be only me, but never in my life I followed up on a growth hack email, be it manually crafted or AI-generated. If you want to sell me something and I didn't ask you first, I instantly become blind to the message and automatically send to spam without even registering, similar to Web popups. I'm constantly astonished that growth hack marketing has any conversion rate, evidently there's a chunk of population that's way more trusting than me.
- cpach 2y agoIf John Doe crafts a message himself and sends it to 100000 recipients, or if he uses ChatGPT to generate a message and then send it to 100000 recipients, what’s the difference? Both are unsolicited emails, i.e. spam. I feel confident that Gmail’s spam filter will be able to handle this quite well. I’m betting that the introduction of LLMs will not change the fundamentals of spam-fighting. https://paulgraham.com/spam.html https://paulgraham.com/spam.html
- staunton 2y agoUsing a language model, one can craft an individually targeted email for each of those 100000 recipients. How do you "handle" this without doing anything current spam filters don't? Can you prevent an individual from sending 100000 emails a week? Can you make it cost them money?
- cpach 2y agoUsing an LLM to generate 100000 letters is hardly free, is it? And AFAIK, Bayesian filtering (by the recipient) doesn’t require any knowledge of what other people has received.
- staunton 2y ago> Using an LLM to generate 100000 letters is hardly free, is it? No, but with further advances it might easily get cheap enough that spammers think it's worth it. > Bayesian filtering (by the recipient) doesn’t require any knowledge of what other people has received. Agreed. However, assuming people don't individually configure those filters -- which they currently do not and scaling this up would be something quite novel --, this seems quite gamable
- throwaway2037 2y agoJohn Doe is probably very good a generating sales leads! By definition, most sales leads are generated from unsolicited communications -- email, phone, etc. I expect the very best sales people will be using a combination of ChatGPT and genuine personalisation for unsolicited communications.
- nstj 2y agoPSA: GitHub has a “private” email feature so you don’t have to use your real email in commits. https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/setting-up-and-managing-your-personal-account-on-github/managing-email-preferences/setting-your-commit-email-address#setting-your-commit-email-address-on-github https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/setting-up-an...
- jonasdegendt 2y agoSeems to be enabled by default, or at least it was on my relatively recent account created in 2022.
- aftergibson 2y agoWasn't on mine (account created in 2009).
- account42 2y agoThis is for commits (including merges/rebases) made through the web interface. You don't need a GitHub setting for your local mail. And in any case you could just use a dedicated commit author address if you are that worried.
- martin78454 2y ago[flagged]
- xarope 2y ago2004: Bill Gates will get rid of SPAM ... 2024: AI impersonating Bill Gates sends you SPAM
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- forkerenok 2y agoFrom the linked article from this blogpost: > There's also the question of ethical considerations around using AI for mass personalized outreach. While my experiment yielded positive results, with recipients appreciating the personalized touch, there's a potential slippery slope. Unbelievable... I'm not a philosopher, but in my understanding, being ethical doesn't mean walking the line just fine so as people don't call you out on your bullshit. The ethics of an action is of consideration both BEFORE and after executing it, and on the merit of the action itself!
- t_mann 2y agoSounds like https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
- maremmano 2y agoIs email doomed?
- nottorp 2y agoBut that email is spam, no matter if automatically or manually generated. How it was written is not relevant. Off to the trash it goes.
- taylorius 2y agoThe future - megawatts of electricity being used, 24/7 as armies of LLMs email and debate each other, and try to sell each other programs at a great discount. As for the humans, we went fishing instead.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sph 2y agoPeople cry about Bitcoin's energy usage now, imagine the amount of energy burned to create next-level spam with "AI". Flame me all you want, but this is one case where Bitcoin is much more useful than LLM. If it doesn't create value, as its naysayers claim, at least it allows exchanging value. LLMs on the other hand, burn electricity to actively destroy the Internet's value, for the profit of inept and greedy drones.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- throwaway0665 2y agoBitcoin has one application where as there are multiple applications of LLMs. There might be mountains of noxious AI spam but it's hard to claim that Bitcoin as a technology is more useful.
- freehorse 2y agoIt is not about the quantity of the applications, but about the value they bring to society. If it is about spamming and advertising we are even talking about negative value, actually.
- b112 2y agoSo far, I haven't seen a useful application of LLMs. So far. I've seen things that are wildly hobbled, and wildly inaccurate. I've seen endless companies running around, trying to improve on things. I've seen people looking in wonder at LLMs making mistakes 2 year olds don't. Most LLM usage seems to be in two categories. Replace people's jobs with wildly inaccurate and massively broken output, or trick people into doing things. I'd have to say Bitcoin is far more useful than LLMs. You have to add the pluses, and subtract the minuses, and in that view, LLMs are -1 billion, and bitcoin is maybe a 1 or 2.
- transitivebs 2y agoI received a very similar automated email from the same dev. Marked it as spam right away: --- Hey Travis, Checked out the Next.js Notion Starter Kit. Amazing project! Noticed you might be juggling multiple tools to manage content. Ever thought about a headless CMS that can streamline this? Wisp might be a handy solution. Let me know what you think! Cheers, Raymond
- oefrha 2y agoI detest cold emails in general, but the occasional recruitment email from a founder/recruiter who clearly looked quite deeply into my passion projects always felt good and resulted in a nice conversation even if the opportunity didn’t pan out. It’s sad that going forward I probably won’t be able to tell genuine interest from this kind of fake bullshit.
- sph 2y agoMy spam filter for cold outreach is simple: if it opens with "Hi <real name>" or "Hi <HN user name>", there's a good likelihood it's a human. If they don't know my name, they don't even know where they got my email from, so probably spam, however intelligible it looks. It's the same in the age of spam calls. If it's a mobile phone and the person behind didn't even bother to introduce themselves via SMS/WhatsApp, I don't pick up.
- knallfrosch 2y agoPlease start using a spellchecker. "excately" and "particilar" are not acceptable. Edit: "Unnecessary" might be my judgement, instead of "acceptable."
- pnt12 2y agoI accept them.
- drusepth 2y agoInterestingly (ironically?) I've heard of some bloggers intentionally adding typos to their posts to ensure the post looks like it was written by a human and not AI.
- jacobgkau 2y agoThat seems easy for AI to adapt to, and has a massive side effect of calling the author's reliability into question. Are those people going to go back and fix the intentional typos in a couple of years once AI spam is also full of typos?
- murderfs 2y agoThe spiteful part of me wants to spin something up to punish this sort of behavior symmetrically by automating cold emails in the other direction to waste his time.
- atoav 2y agoI use catchall email addresses. If your service is called foobar.com I will register at your place with foobar.com@mydomain.com If I ever receive spam addressed to foobar.com@mydomain.com that is unrelated to your service I know you leaked or abused my data. Result: you will get a DSGVO complaint and I filter all emails addressed to this address from my inbox. The good thing about using a catchall email address is that I don't have to create a mailbox for each service/purpose, I can just make email addresses up as I go. All you need for that is your own domain and a mailserver that aupports it.
- giorgioz 2y agoVery cool! Could you go deeper into your setup? Which email client do you use to view/manage the catch all emails? Did you host the email on Google Gsuite or AWS SES or something else?
- kamilner 2y agoI do the same as the poster above, fastmail supports it directly and makes it very easy to manage. All you have to do is bring your own domain (they'll even manage your DKIM/SPF records etc as necessary if you want). Edit: Apparently you can also purchase a domain directly through them if you prefer, although you have to be a paying customer for 7 days first https://www.fastmail.com/how-to/email-for-your-domain/ https://www.fastmail.com/how-to/email-for-your-domain/
- freehorse 2y agoI use simplelogin with proton for that, they give you a few subdomains to do the same.
- tsm 2y agoI have the same setup via GSuite.
- mafuy 2y agoDoes this allow you to also send emails as a particular address? I've not yet managed to set this up properly.
- muzani 2y agoThis will suck for a long time, just like spam, clickbait, social media upvoting algorithms, cigarettes, soda. But eventually we'll sense it and build antibodies to it like everything else. Even now, we're starting to have a sense for which images and text were AI generated. And they'll evolve to get around the antibodies. And we'll build new ones.
- stavros 2y agoI made a service to reply to marketing emails using GPT: https://github.com/skorokithakis/spamgpt https://github.com/skorokithakis/spamgpt It was a bit of fun, until I realized that most of the replied from the spammers were AI as well. We were just automatically spamming each other while OpenAI made money. I stopped using it then.
- remram 2y agoNice! This reminds me of Lenny, the bot for spammy phone calls, that sounds like an old person mumbling and not understanding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenny_(bot) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenny_(bot) Serves them right. Unless they're a bot too of course, then you can't waste their time.
- lolpanda 2y agook does it mean an end to email? it's nearly free to send emails to anyone. for comparison, it's much more expensive to send linkedin messages or create ads on social networks. did anyone attempt to create a paid email service (pay to send)?
- surfingdino 2y agoIt means the "cooky" ideas of OPML/RSS two-way communication channels may have to be revisited. The problem is the humans, though. Even the most private communication channels will be breached by the one idiot who uses AI to "fix grammar". AI peddlers managed to inject themselves into the conversations we are having. It's really not good for the humanity as a whole.
- asimovfan 2y agoPerhaps this will finally usher in the era of actually decoupling what is said from who said it (post post colonialism?)
- surfingdino 2y agoIt's all fun and games until HR use AI to write your annual performance review in which it is suggested that you got fired for sexual misconduct (this hallucinated from other guy's HR files), won a sales bonus for selling AI to your company (it was the other way round and it's the sales guy who got it), and are due to enter retirement (you are 29, but most of the company is over 50, so the probabilistic model prefers that passage of text).
- bob_theslob646 2y agoWait...how was this resolved?
- tambourine_man 2y ago> dove* a bit deeper Dug?
- siscia 2y agoI have been building [GabrielAI](https://getgabrielai.com https://getgabrielai.com) also for address the too much spam in Gmail use case. Specifically smart filter to remove SPAM in a smarter way. Most people get a lot of spam from sales agents, SEO services, start-up accelerator, etc... With GabrielAI you can say stuff like: "If the email is from a SEO agency or it is trying to sell me SEO service" Then move it to SPAM. Similarly for all other type of spam or emails. You can also move stuff to different labels in Gmail to organise your inbox.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- andretti1977 2y agoI won't add to the AI debate already well expressed by other commenters but one thing i don't understand is why the author has posted the name of the "spammed" product and a direct link to their blog: consider how much did he helped them having new traffic and potential customers
- ssl-3 2y agoWith limited exceptions*, [sometimes even egregious] factuality trumps self-censorship. I myself tend to name-and-shame regardless of how it may turn out, whether "positive" or "negative," when I feel compelled to be posting online about a thing I have encountered in my personal life. I think that openness and clearly-evident facts are very important parts of supporting the story that I wish to tell. (And if I did not wish to tell the story, then I would not have done so.) * But a line must be drawn somewhere. My own line is this: When I encounter a fucking nazi in real life, I make sure to not propagate whatever it is that this fucking nazi has to say, even if I have a story to write about that fucking nazi. (And we rather unfortunately have plenty of these fucking nazis here in Ohio, so I do get opportunities every now and then to exercise this self-restraint.)
- viridian 2y agoName and shame is a worthwhile practice. Driving potential business to The AI powered CMS known as Wisp, is not a good reason to avoid contributing to the common consensus about the company. And the common consensus in this thread, which I agree with, is that Wisp is obnoxious, insidious, and is an active participant in the degradation of quality of both email, and the internet as a whole.
- varjag 2y agoOh spam, the only industry AI had truly revolutionized so far.
- xela79 2y agojust generate an AI reply and automate the flow :) > Hey Raymond, Thank you so much for your kind words about my post on revamping my homelab! It’s always a pleasure to hear from someone who appreciates the journey of continuous improvement. Your message truly brightened my day. Indeed, using Deno Fresh for my blog has been an exciting adventure. The process of managing updates and deployments, while sometimes challenging, has been incredibly rewarding. It’s like tending to a garden, where each update is a new seed planted, and every deployment is a blossom of progress. The satisfaction of seeing everything come together is unparalleled. Your introduction of Wisp has certainly piqued my interest. A CMS that simplifies content management sounds like a dream come true, especially for someone like me who is always looking for ways to streamline processes and enhance efficiency. The name “Wisp” itself evokes a sense of lightness and ease, which is exactly what one hopes for in a content management system. I would love to learn more about Wisp and how it could potentially fit into my workflow. The idea of having a tool that can make content management more intuitive and less time-consuming is very appealing. Could you share more details about its features and how it stands out from other CMS options? I’m particularly interested in how it handles updates and deployments, as these are crucial aspects for me. Thank you again for reaching out and for thinking of me. I’m looking forward to hearing more about Wisp and exploring the possibilities it offers. Let’s continue this conversation and see where it leads! Best regards, Tim
- tobinfricke 2y agoActually this is kinda a great idea. Honeypot the bots by engaging them with other bots. Would love to deploy this on telemarketers / spam calls.
- throwaway0665 2y agoThere are laws to mandate unsubscribe links on emails. There should be laws to mandate disclaimers when emails were sent through an automated process. No one believes the CEO has taken the time to email you with onboarding instructions immediately after signing up anymore. But outreach tactics like this are still quite manipulative.
- zensnail 2y agoone man's spam, is another man's career.
- xeeeeeeeeeeenu 2y agoSadly, AI allows dumb people to do dumb things more efficiently. This reminds me of AI-generated fake security vulnerability reports about curl: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38845878 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38845878
- ossyrial 2y agoThe author links to the somewhat dystopian blog where the email sender is quite proud of their work. Their words (or perhaps that of an LLM): > Could an AI agent craft compelling emails that would capture people's attention and drive engagement, all while maintaining a level of personalization that feels human? I decided to find out. > The real hurdle was ensuring the emails seemed genuinely personalized and not spammy. I knew that if recipients detected even a whiff of a generic, mass-produced message, they'd tune out immediately. > Incredibly, not a single recipient seemed to detect that the emails were AI-generated. https://www.wisp.blog/blog/how-i-use-ai-agents-to-send-1000-personalized-email-for-outreach https://www.wisp.blog/blog/how-i-use-ai-agents-to-send-1000-... The technical part surprised me: they string together multiple LLMs which do all the work. It's a shame the author's passions are directed towards AI slop-email spam, all for capturing attention and driving engagement. How much of our societal progress and collective thought and innovation has gone to capturing attention and driving up engagement, I wonder.
- londons_explore 2y ago> > Incredibly, not a single recipient seemed to detect that the emails were AI-generated. Of the people who replied. I bet plenty figured it out, but didn't bother to reply.
- Lio 2y agoExpect to see someone else write a blog post on How I Used AI to fool an AI Spammer ...of course they'd probably get an LLM to write the article too.
- otherme123 2y agoThe guy writes a post about how to send spam effectively, and then offers the subscription link in the end with "Promise we won't spam you". Yes, I totally trust you...
- CoastalCoder 2y agoIt sounds like extortion. "I'm sending spam that sneaks past your spam filter. Sign up to make it stop."
- lobochrome 2y agoI get 2 of those per day now due to my LinkedIn profile. One issue I see is that it’s much harder to employ an LLM defensively (for filtering) than offensively. Welp.
- unraveller 2y agoIt's easy outside of gated platforms. The whole 'too hard to filter' hypothesis can be tested instantly by throwing OP's email body into an LLM Subject: Your Passion For Homelabbing is Contagious (Spam: 6/10) Report: Flattery to establish a connection. Quick shift to product promotion. friendly but lacks personalization. Specific reference promotes their solution. Calls for a response. So even if buddy buddy spam becomes pervasive you really only have to decide how accepting your are of obvious sales tactics in normal comms. It may end up that everyone having more nuanced spam filters forces humans to use those same tactics less in normal comms.
- rgavuliak 2y agoWe already know the sales reps that bombard us with emails don't give a **, now they're just better at pretending.
- mmaunder 2y agoI find dropping “I” at the start of a sentence to be a far greater trigger. No one is that busy. AI or not.
- Paul37829 2y ago[dead]
- kstenerud 2y agoThe sad thing is, that AI email campaign - while touted as a success - was actually a failure. Although he got more click-throughs to the top of his funnel, none of them are going to pass through to a conversion because once you reach his site, you realize that he's deceived you. That he doesn't even realize this is concerning...
- DonHopkins 2y agohttps://www.wisp.blog/blog/how-i-use-ai-agents-to-send-1000-personalized-email-for-outreach https://www.wisp.blog/blog/how-i-use-ai-agents-to-send-1000-... >"I knew that if recipients detected even a whiff of a generic, mass-produced message, they'd tune out immediately." Then don't brag about it on your blog! Sheez. (Ok, so technically he's not bragging about it on his blog, because it's probably just an LLM bragging about it on his blog for him, but that's the point!)
- nathias 2y agoAI will also allow for better spam filters
- praptak 2y agoThis is bad news, because personalisation was a big advantage of spam filters. Everyone's spam filter is tuned differently from others', so spammers had a hard time beating this with automated messages. About the best they could do was adding random keywords in hopes of triggering someone's positive "not spam" trigger. Now spammers gain personalisation at scale, so this advantage is at risk.
- yoyopa 2y ago[dead]
- rogual 2y agoI received a nice email the other day after one of my blog posts got posted on HN. It said: Hi - Just a note to say I'm a big fan of your writing. I always learn something and love your voice, which is hilarious and singular. Write a book! Best, {Name} {Link to sender's startup} {Link to sender's substack} New to writing online, it made me feel really good that someone enjoyed what I wrote and took the time to write and say so. After reading this piece, though, I went back and read it again, and I just don't know. It's not quite GPT's usual voice, but it is strangely non-specific. The startup is an AI startup, the person's Substack is full of generative AI illustrations, and they do seem like an AI fan, but reading their posts, they also seem like someone who's genuinely interested in preventing a dystopia. I suppose receiving encouraging emails from strangers is just another situation that'll have us looking over our shoulders now, on guard, trying to walk the line between naivety and paranoia.
- j_maffe 2y agoSince there's no personalized content, it was probably just copy-pasted. I get the constant fear though.
- rogual 2y agoI'm leaning towards genuine, to be honest. Just thought it was interesting that I even questioned it, which I wouldn't have done before.
- superhuzza 2y agoSorry but I'm fairly confident it's spam - they just want you to look at their startup/substack links. That's why they included the links at all. The compliment is a "foot in the door" so you don't immediately dismiss the email, and keep reading until the links. I get the same type of comments on all my blog posts. Here's 2 examples directly from my blog: "Awesome post! Keep up the great work! " (+ a link to their SEO service) "Nice website, love the theme! Can I use it?" (+ a link to their WP service).
- squigz 2y ago
- jonpo 2y ago"Deception through omission is still deception – people should be aware when they're interacting with an AI agent versus a human."
- freehorse 2y agoI wonder if some "prompt injection defense" embedded in public blog posts could help identify such AI-generated spam.
- shannifin 2y agoEven without AI, the message feels spammy. "Hey, love your work. random flattery What do you think about mine?" I've received a few messages like that before LLMs were around, just an annoying self-marketing technique.
- chucke1992 2y agoThe future is now, old man.
- willyt 2y agoI already delete unread emails like this that are written by humans. Unless there’s a specific bit of text in the email that’s generated by the new enquiry button on my website or someone has left an answerphone message then it’s deleted unread. There’s no way I have time to read every marketing email I receive like this guy.
- lytefm 2y ago> Does this mean that I should private my GitHub-mirror to my personal blog, because this can become a common thing? I have removed my email from my GitHub-profile now, but they can probably get it from my Git-log anyway... It's possible to use a noreply.github.com linked to your username for making commits. And you can to change the authorship of past commits in your own repos with write access. I try to avoid give my email in a public and processable format whenever possible.
- dav43 2y agoThis why I’d consider shorting NVIDA at these prices. I get there are use case where it really adds value, but I think they are more limited to specific fields than people are acknowledging and forecasting. The general public doesn’t want or need it. They want to work less and get paid more.
- mihaaly 2y agoI hate to say but this AI written oureach is strikingly similar to recruiter emails I received in the past 5-6 years about perfect matches so apparently my conclusion was right about that robots are working in the HR field. Carbon not silicon based back then. Actually this AI sounds much more intelligent bringing up realistic similarities. Those perfect match robots did not get beyond picking single keywords chosen of the dozens in LinkedIn account for declaring perfect match while the scope of the job and requirements were off by miles. Watch out recruiters, AI can do better than you! Not like I will like these unsolicited outreaches more, the exact number is zero, how many times I found these useful or relevant before when biorobots wrote and sent and administrated it in half or just few minutes, and I do not look forward having these now on mass scale when hundreds of AI could write thousands, flooding my email account, making it absolutely unusable.
- unraveller 2y agoCan anyone explain why the SUBJECT LINE of the email was REDACTED in this blog post intro other than to give a false sense of being already drawn in to the email contents? I'm not after shallow interactions today and I would use it (much like a dumb spam filter) to judge a new sender's respect for my time expecting them to have stated their business with total upfront clarity, not mystery.
- fbrusch 2y agoCould this be addressed with cryptography, digital ids and signatures? Imagine it were possible to add a signature that proves that I own some "human" identity (like a national id), or that I possess some scarce resource (like a github account with some level of activity) and that today I sent no more that 20 emails. If I want to conceal my identity, I can use zero knowledge proofs. If you don't sign this way, or if your daily email counter exceeds 100, your mail ends up as spam.
- hippich 2y agoSomething like hashcash? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
- fbrusch 2y agoyeah, hashcash is a very neat idea! but had problems like: how do you determine the threshold for the amount of work to be proven? there are values that makes it too expensive for a well intentioned human, and not enough for a bad intentioned spammer... moreover, it would induce economies of scale like it happens in bitcoin mining (spammers would invest in ASICs etc.) Signatures, on the other hand, allow to cheaply leverage other forms of "capital" (digital identity, github activity)
- spion 2y agoTo make this less spammy, the person sending out the emails could've instead used AI to filter through a smaller set of people where their product is likely to generate very high interest, based on a prompt containing the product description and perhaps a summary of the things the potential recipient blogged about. Then, they could've used that short list to write a set of _actually_ personalized outreach emails with high chance of impact. You could refine this in further iterations by also adding examples based on previous correct/incorrect interest predictions, thereby effectively reducing the amount of spam / making cold outreach suck less. There are different ways to use AI to achieve the same goals, some more responsible than others.
- illwrks 2y agoSpare a thought for the gullible, children and teens, the elderly, those with restrained understanding, and those with English as a second language. They will all lose money, time and more with the coming wave of spam and fraud.
- jpalomaki 2y agoI no longer bother to answer anything to cold emails or LinkedIn messages. Despate the personal tone, they seem to mostly driven by marketing automation tools. Maybe in future I will have my ”AI secretary” to answer those and have a discussion with the ”AI sales assistant”.
- sirsinsalot 2y agoAlways amazed and disappointed at humanity's ability to pollute everything it touches.
- mirzap 2y agoThere must be a new communication method for the upcoming AI age. Actual, person-to-person direct communication. Just as most of us ignore calls from unknown numbers, we may also default to ignoring emails from unknown senders in the future. This could lead to a reluctance to send emails, as they might be perceived as "unknown" to the recipient.
- poulpy123 2y agoThat's exactly why I'm not afraid of AGI. We will be drowned by AI generated crap long before
- neom 2y agoYou know, I've done startups for over 20 years now. Operated almost all the orgs, but spent the most time in go to market/marketing. I'm building an incubator/accelerator thing in Canada and I'm starting it from scratch, so it's basically doing another startup (something I swore I'd never do, fml). Hadn't touched marketing for ~5 years, as I said I know the org well so I thought it will take me about a month to get the next 6 months of marketing built and automated. How wrong was I. 7 days later, the full marketing org is running, at a decent scale, on autopilot, for a year, and I don't know if/when I'd need to hire someone into marketing. Marketing has not fundamentally changed, but it's changed such that one individual could fully operate the fundamentals. Personally I love it, I'm sure others are going nuts.
- shzhdbi09gv8ioi 2y agoNot quite AI, but I been getting targeted spam from shitty startups and some job offers for the last couple years to my github commit email. It is scraped from github as I use it nowhere else.
- bilsbie 2y agoWe’ve lived with billions of spam emails for decades. I don’t know if the method of writing the emails matters much. Spam is spam?
- unraveller 2y agoSpam can now be hyper-personalized to your latest online data points such that the inattentive might not expect certain things to be fakeable the first time they see it. Some people struggle with learning new ways of controlling for scams but it's never going away, just something they must consider more and use better tools to solve.
- meiraleal 2y agoIf he were really annoyed he wouldn't have marketed Wisp CMS?
- sixhobbits 2y agothe blog he links to is clearly AI slop too. Even the LLM he used to write it agrees that what he's doing is unethical. > At the same time, we need to establish guidelines around transparency and consent for AI-driven communications at scale. Deception through omission is still deception – people should be aware when they're interacting with an AI agent versus a human. This is clearly pissing in the pool. I've gotten so much value from people who have made their emails public with a 'if you're curious or learning feel free to email me' (e.g. patio11) and I've long had the invitation in my HN profile too. Nasty for people to abuse this to extract value for the few weeks/months it takes people to realise what's happening and make themselves harder to contact.
- paxys 2y ago"Personalized" spam generated from templates has been a thing forever. I've received plenty of such emails from recruiters highlighting my past experience, projects and what I'd be a good fit for. LLMs make them a bit more real, but overall the game hasn't really changed.
- justanother 2y agoI get one of these every week or two. If someone says they're "impressed with the work you're doing" at my family S-corporation that magically W2-ifies my contract gigs, it's kind of a giveaway.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jordanpg 2y agoPerhaps a new signature technology can be used to prove (or at least lend credence to) human authorship? Something like a marriage of a digital signature with a captcha: the message has a digital signature of the sender that can be verified with their public key, but it is somehow verifiable that the particular signature provider only does the signature if a human being completes the (difficult AI-proof) captcha. Something like this approach can at least mitigate the mass AI email problem, although the one-off AI emails are unlikely to be slowed by this approach.
- SergeAx 2y ago> Does this mean that I should private my GitHub-mirror to my personal blog, because this can become a common thing? You definitely should mark this email as spam so this cannot become a common thing.
- tamimio 2y agoI do receive phishing emails; some of them are so well-crafted that I'm sure they've fooled some people out there. To the point where I've created a folder called "nice_try_phishing" where I collect them for further investigation. For example, one email was sent before I renewed a domain as a reminder to renew, with legitimate links to the domain registrar except for the action link. They had the registrar's domain name too, but with a different, very similar TLD. Another one is a "failed email delivery," and they did the research about which service I'm using to mimic such an automated message, with loaded links. Whether they are AI or not, I have no idea, but sometimes, and recently in emails, I purposely make a typo or grammar mistake to add some "human" touch to it, knowing that an AI will always type a perfect one.
- aerotwelve 2y ago> Have you ever received an email that felt so personalized, so tailored to your interests and experiences, that you couldn't help but be intrigued? Did he use an LLM to write the blog post too?
- daft_pink 2y agoI regularly get emails that start with “I hope this note find you well”, and I always assume they used chatgpt.
- chrisJS 2y ago[dead]
- ocodo 2y ago> Not a single person detected they were corresponding with an AI. Some asked how I found their email, but no one questioned the authenticity of the messages. ... shall we tell him?
- antonellaleo 2y ago[flagged]
- sherwinx 2y agoI open emails because I believe you spent time on me, which is precious, so I reply. If an AI generates cold emails, there's no real time spent, making personalization feel deceptive, which is bad for user experience. AI spam emails will definitely happen on a large scale in the future, but on the optimistic side, we'll have AI assistants to read every email. Personalization won't really matter; it only matters if the marketed service is genuinely useful to me. In the future, if I have a need, my AI will find the best solution by considering many options. Previously, this was time-consuming, but now AI ensures we find the most suitable solution. No fancy marketing will be needed because AI will filter most of them. In the end, marketers will find that the most efficient way to market is to honestly list out your service/product specs, as AI will compare them. On the other hand, for things I'm not sure I need, AI will help judge if they are indeed useful to me, regardless of how fancy the email/call is. If they are, it will facilitate cooperation; if not, it will skip them. Therefore, marketing may still have a role: to help you discover things you aren't fully aware you need, and AI will help you decide if you really need them.
- r3db34rd 2y ago[flagged]
- Eatcats 2y agoso the cold email worked :) You didn't buy the service, but at least you checked out their website