Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I Received an AI Email

timharek.no

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 597 posts

Re: I Received an AI Email

#71

Post by karmarepellent »

frabjoused wrote: post #27

The 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 i…

At my place of work there is an internal project ongoing whose goal is to determine which tasks could immediately be improved by leveraging AI. Its a desperate try to get into AI in general even though the company does not employ any people that would actually be able to dive deeper and have subject matter expertise.

Knowing the people (mostly marketers) leading the project I can 100% guarantee that they would call these Emails shenanigans a great idea and would immediately start (to tell someone) to implement it without taking a step back and thinking it through.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#72

Post by TeMPOraL »

davedx wrote: post #60
ronsor wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's reasonable to be happy that someone is not getting paid to do something you hate. In fact, if you're suffering unwillingly, you probably want as few people as possible to benefit.

[flagged]

Getting peed at a couple times a day isn't a problem if the pee-ees miss 99% od the time, right?

Small acts of malice are still acts of malice. Not everyone wants to live in a caveat emptor, dog-eats-dog society.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#73

Post by nosbo »

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #9
namanyayg wrote: post #2

This 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.

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.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#74

Post by FridgeSeal »

portaouflop wrote: post #32
purple-leafy wrote: post #10

Bastards. AI has been a massive ass pain, and marketers are the worst (: People sending AI crap to others should have their email accounts banned.

Replace AI with spam or ads and we have been talking about this for decades.

No 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.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#75

Post by noobermin »

The 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.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#77

Post by ikari_pl »

I'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.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#78

Post by prmoustache »

elaus wrote: post #5

AI 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.

Well 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.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#80

Post by portaouflop »

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #9
namanyayg wrote: post #2

This 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.

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.

It is already like this in my experience.

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

Post reply on HN