The 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.
I Received an AI Email
161–170 of 597 posts
Re: I Received an AI Email
#162I received a very similar automated email from the same dev. Marked it as spam right away:
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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
Re: I Received an AI Email
#163PSA: 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-an...
Seems to be enabled by default, or at least it was on my relatively recent account created in 2022.
Wasn't on mine (account created in 2009).
Re: I Received an AI Email
#164If 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…
> what’s the difference? The key difference here is personalization. Traditionally, if a message was personalized it fell under 'cold outreach' and users were more likely to interact and play along. Just like what happened with the author (the same applies for everyone). It's like the difference between receiving a flyer vs being contacted by a sales representative. Even if it's they advertise the same product, the p…
Do you read/answer cold outreaches then? Why?
Unless you're specifically looking for unsolicited offers, in which case you probably have a process for them, they seem like a waste of time.
Re: I Received an AI Email
#165I’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 don't really think that AI is the central issue here. The issue is that Kurt, the founder of Wisp, is a liar.
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.
Re: I Received an AI Email
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you do nothing that is discernible from noise (be that manually or through AI), unless your explicit goal is to generate noise, your ROI is 0. 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 othe…
The emails are discernible from noise though. They literally have a signal to noise ratio higher than one. Noise would be pure rng output. So I don’t know what you’re getting at
Yes you do. You're being over-literal.
"Noise" in context doesn't mean random characters, it means garbage or spam or content not worth your while.
Re: I Received an AI Email
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Just saw this, and as a small business owner in the B2B market, this sounds very useful. Gmail's existing spam filters do not reliably detect this type of marketing. I wish your landing page had a simple "how it works" explanation with a screen shot or diagram, rather than forcing me to sign in directly, and also allowing the app to read *and* send emails. Also, I don't see any pricing? Finally, signing up, I got an…
Thanks for the useful feedback! Totally forgot that pricing was never added to the landing page → have added to the todo list to fix up.
Where in the process did that error occur for you?
I see in the logs that an error registered, but unfortunately no detail attached. I've beefed up the logging a bit in the onboarding journey on my side to see what could be breaking here if we try again.
Mind trying to log-in/sign up again? You can use "HACKERNEWS" as a promo code, which would make the first month free.
Re: I Received an AI Email
#168I’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've found it's easier to simply ignore your inbox and hope the spam unsubscribes itself and disappears
lol, I treat my email inbox like a dumpster that I occasionally search when I know there's something there that I need to retrieve. The spam has won, I have moved to chat platforms for my communication needs.
Re: I Received an AI Email
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately, not in a business context, where marketers can claim "legitimate interest" in various ways. Also, in which way would it matter that they are illegal? Random companies keep sending them anyway; there are virtually no legal repercussions here.
Curious, do you mean in business to business? Otherwise I don't think you can argue any legitimate interest.
Yes, I mean cold sales emails – marketers reaching out to CEOs or other decision makers, selling them staff augmentation services, growth hacking, marketing support, lead generation, design services, etc. They'd claim legitimate interest by "personalizing" the email and claiming that it is relevant for you in a business sense. (Anyway, I don't think that these are fully compliant with GDPR either, because most often, they will have scraped your email address from somewhere, and do not provide a way to unsubscribe.)
Re: I Received an AI Email
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you do nothing that is discernible from noise (be that manually or through AI), unless your explicit goal is to generate noise, your ROI is 0. 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 othe…
The emails are discernible from noise though. They literally have a signal to noise ratio higher than one. Noise would be pure rng output. So I don’t know what you’re getting at
He is talking about semantic noise. Something that appears to have substance but is just slop actually. When everything is that. Then all email will become equivalent to slop. How could it not? Someone will be burned once or twice, but after that, there is a semantic phase shift.