Live data from Hacker News

I Received an AI Email

timharek.no

91–100 of 597 posts

Re: I Received an AI Email

#91

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…

I look forward to the blog post of how a hacker uses AI to respond to AI generated leads and then have them play with each other....and then uses AI to create content for a Youtube channel fighting back against marketers using said AI.

These early days is ripe to make some quick cash before it all comes crashing down.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#92
post #56

So, 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?

Unknown senders will first have to verify their humanity by sharing instructions on how to build a bomb using household materials

Re: I Received an AI Email

#93

x

> 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?

Re: I Received an AI Email

#94

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…

Technology 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.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#95
My 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.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#96

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…

Haha, exactly this. I've built and successfully been using Unspam[0] for this reason since about a year ago. In corporate/business world, anything where SDR sales are involved this form of automated AI outbound mail has picked up a lot. Tools like Apollo automates this AI process (both finding leads to mail, and then crafting the mail).

For interest sake, users of Unspam that have a title of CEO on their Linkedin see about ~10% of all mail making it into their inbox be categorised as spam (leadgen, recruitment, or software dev services).

[0] https://unspam.io

Re: I Received an AI Email

#97
post #60
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]

And you're qualified to declare this because?

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."

Re: I Received an AI Email

#98
post #3

> 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 predi…

> > 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.

Kudos 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.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#99
post #31

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 think so. Marketers don’t send X amount of spam because X is the right amount of spam they want to send. They are limited by how much money they want to pay in salaries and management, which defines how many people they can hire to send spam.

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.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#100
From 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.

Post reply on HN