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I Received an AI Email

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Re: I Received an AI Email

#191

Post by cpach »

_xivi wrote: post #156
cpach wrote: post #114

If 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…

a) If someone manages to generate a letter that I actually find useful and interesting then I’m not sure I would mind if it was unsolicited. I don’t believe that the likeliness for that is super-high, though. And if a crappy message would get past the spam filter I would just flag it.

b) If you want to read more, feel free to check the link I posted. Paul Graham has thought/written a lot about this. I think one reason people has forgotten about those articles is that today, a huge number of us use Gmail, so we don’t actually need to think so much about how spam filtering is implemented.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#192

Post by [deleted] »

sph wrote: post #180
taylorius wrote: post #161

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.

People 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]

Re: I Received an AI Email

#193

Post by throwaway0665 »

sph wrote: post #180
taylorius wrote: post #161

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.

People 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.

Bitcoin 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.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#194

Post by drdrek »

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…

But this is already the situation in the last 15 years, your gmail spam filter is already a machine learning algorithm that filters out automatically generated content. Mail as a vetted technology is way ahead of other forms of communications in the department of filtering unwanted content.

Anyone that tried to set up a new email domain will tell you its quite a serious task. Email spammers are constantly on the run, setting up new domains, changing up the content to evade spam filters. Its very time consuming, hard and unpredictable. It time for social media to close the gap with email and make spamming effectively as hard.

I postulate that if we applied similar techniques to social media after a couple of years online discourse is going to improve. Or we are not going to do this and the death of the open internet will continue.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#196

Post by stavros »

sph wrote: post #180
taylorius wrote: post #161

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.

People 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.

This is what spam always did, why is it different now?

Re: I Received an AI Email

#197

Post by bowsamic »

ImHereToVote wrote: post #170
bowsamic wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What is "just slop" though? A spam advert for a product is still an advert for a product. Therefore it's not just semantic noise, it is still an advert for a product, and therefore his point is invalid: there is an ROI and people will continue to be employed to do it

Re: I Received an AI Email

#198

Post by youssefabdelm »

nostromo wrote: post #63
themanmaran wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'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 emai…

1% is also about how well this worked, according to the sender's blog post. 10 signups / 970 emails sent

Kinda makes you wonder... why don't they just advertise with those odds?

Re: I Received an AI Email

#199

Post by bowsamic »

Wolfenstein98k wrote: post #166
bowsamic wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, I'm not being over-literal. Here's why:

Yes, it could be that for you a given advert is irrelevant or not worth your while, but the point he was making is that it won't even be worth it for the advertiser to put out the advertisement because it will be noise for everyone.

However, there is only one kind of noise that is noise for everyone: literal noise.

So long as the spam is about something, it is relevant to someone, and therefore it does not necessarily have zero ROI.

EDIT: The only kind of noise that has no semantic is actual "mathematically pure noise" as the person below commented (/u/dang banned my account so I can't reply)

Re: I Received an AI Email

#200

Post by _xivi »

nottorp wrote: post #164
_xivi wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Do you read/answer cold outreaches then? Why?

Do you only read emails from recognized addresses? No new communication whatsoever unless it's initiated by you?

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