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I Received an AI Email

timharek.no

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Re: I Received an AI Email

#81

Post by karmarepellent »

kvdveer wrote: post #38
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…

Like 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.

I 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.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#82

Post by bryanrasmussen »

eru wrote: post #58
tivert wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’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. > ... > At least with AI sending this crap nobody can use these emails to justify their sales bonus. What weird, misplaced animus. You're…

> [...] while his boss sends even more spam and possibly makes even more money due to automation? Wouldn't the exact argument apply to that boss as well?

unless this is a big multinational spam organization probably the boss of the person sending the email is the highest up, but no matter what there will be someone on the top who does not get fired and will be able to reap all the rewards of the AI automation, at least until the AI revolution puts them up against the wall.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#83

Post by xarope »

ChilledTonic wrote: post #6

I’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…

some of the marketing spam is so low effort, I get addressed as "Dear {{prospect}}". It does make deleting the email easy though, since the preview of the first line allows me to filter pretty fast!

Re: I Received an AI Email

#84

Post by lucianbr »

ronsor wrote: post #31
crabmusket wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI is getting paid to do it.

Yes, but a lot less than if a person were getting paid to do it, so still less money is changing hands.

I don't know which of "5 randos getting a living wage by spamming me" and "Altman getting filty rich by spamming me" is worse. I'm inclined to say the latter, though of course it's quite close.

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.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#85

Post by blitzar »

castigatio wrote: post #17

It'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 exploit…

I 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.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#86

Post by crvdgc »

>> 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.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#87

Post by portaouflop »

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.

I would treat it like I do with phone calls/messages - if it comes from a number/address I don’t know it goes into the trash.

I have no need of messages by random strangers

Re: I Received an AI Email

#88

Post by drsim »

castigatio wrote: post #17

It'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 exploit…

I 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.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#89

Post by bryanrasmussen »

Joker_vD wrote: post #35
jeauxlb wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you happy that people are out of a job here? You still suffer the ills of the product, now infinitely more incessant, at a marginal cost of $0.

Because maybe, just maybe — those people will find some other jobs, and those jobs will be more socially beneficial this time? One can dream.

They can maybe get jobs for Microsoft and call people up to tell them they've noticed something is wrong with their computer!!

Re: I Received an AI Email

#90

Post by doesnt_know »

I 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.

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